I get asked to weigh up channels against each other more than almost anything else on a discovery call. Should the budget go into Facebook ads, Google Ads, email, or local SEO?
It’s a genuinely important question, because for a small boiler, solar, heat pump, air conditioning or EV charger installation business, every pound matters far more than it does for a national brand with money to burn.
I’ve managed marketing budgets that included PPC spend above £125,000 a month at a business that scaled past £65 million in turnover, and I’ve also had to justify every single pound to a board that wanted to see the return.
So I’m not going to give you the answer that sounds nicest in a pitch deck. I’m going to walk you through the actual numbers, channel by channel, and explain why one comes out on top for most small businesses in this sector, and why it isn’t always the flashiest option.
Which Marketing Channel Actually Delivers The Best Return?
When you line up the return on investment data across channels, the picture is remarkably consistent. Local SEO delivers an average return of around 748%, working out to roughly £7.48 to £8.48 back for every £1 spent depending on which industry benchmark you use.
That places it ahead of most paid channels once you measure over a proper time horizon rather than a single month.
How Does This Compare Against Paid Advertising?
Paid advertising, PPC specifically, typically returns closer to 36%, often taking around four months just to break even before any genuine profit starts. Cost per lead across paid search generally sits between £70 and £95 in competitive UK markets, and that cost resets every single month, there’s no accumulated equity in a paid campaign the way there is with a page that keeps ranking.
Local SEO, by contrast, sits at a considerably lower £8 to £25 cost per lead once a campaign is established, according to recent UK benchmark data.
Where Does Email Marketing Fit Into This Comparison?
Email consistently posts the highest raw ROI figure of any channel, often cited at £35 to £42 back for every £1 spent. It’s a genuinely strong channel, but it comes with an important caveat that gets glossed over in most comparisons.
Email only works once you already have a list of engaged contacts, and for most small installation businesses, building that list in the first place depends heavily on having decent organic visibility to capture those contacts to begin with. Email is an excellent second channel. It’s rarely a viable first one for a business trying to generate new demand from scratch.
What About Social Media?
Social media, particularly organic Facebook and Instagram activity, tends to return a more modest 2.5:1 to 2.8:1, and paid social for local trades typically runs £10 to £30 per lead. It genuinely works for certain trades, roughly 62% of UK trades businesses use Facebook to generate enquiries, particularly visually driven work like solar installations or striking heat pump setups.
But it requires consistent content output and rarely produces the sustained, compounding traffic growth that a properly built local SEO strategy delivers over the same period.
Why Does SEO Cost Less Per Lead Over Time?
This is the part that genuinely separates SEO from every other channel on this list, and it’s worth explaining properly because it’s easy to misunderstand from a single month’s figures. Paid channels charge you every time someone clicks, every month, indefinitely. SEO charges you for the work of building and maintaining a page, and that page then keeps generating enquiries without a fresh invoice attached to every click.
What Does The Cost Curve Actually Look Like?
In the first three to six months, local SEO usually costs more per lead than paid channels, because you’re paying for foundational work before the results have fully materialised. Somewhere between month six and month twelve, the lines typically cross, and SEO’s cost per lead starts dropping while paid channels stay flat or rise.
By eighteen to twenty four months, a well maintained SEO programme frequently produces leads at a fraction of the ongoing cost of an equivalent paid campaign, because the accumulated pages, links and authority keep working in the background.
Why Does This Matter More For Home Improvement And Renewables Specifically?
Average job values for boiler, solar, heat pump and EV charger installations often run into the thousands of pounds. Against a typical UK SEO retainer of £750 to £2,500 a month for a small to mid-sized installer, you generally only need a small number of additional booked jobs to justify the investment several times over, and that return keeps compounding rather than resetting every month the way paid channels do.
How Should A Small Business Actually Split Its Marketing Budget?
Most UK marketing budgeting guidance suggests small businesses under £5 million in revenue should allocate somewhere between 7% and 17% of revenue to marketing overall, with businesses under five years old often sitting at the higher end of that range while they build awareness.
Within that total budget, SEO and organic search typically warrant 10% to 15% of the marketing allocation for most sectors, though for a genuinely competitive niche like installations, where you’re up against national comparison sites, that figure often needs to sit higher.
What Does A Sensible Channel Mix Actually Look Like For An Installer?
Rather than treating this as a single-channel decision, most successful small installation businesses run a layered approach. Google Business Profile management sits at the foundation, since it’s largely free and delivers the highest intent local leads available. SEO builds the compounding organic layer on top of that.
Paid search or social ads then fill short-term gaps or support seasonal demand spikes, boiler breakdowns in winter, for example, without becoming the sole engine the business depends on. Email, once a genuine list exists from those organic and paid channels, adds a low-cost layer for repeat business and referrals.
Does Channel Effectiveness Change Once AI Search Enters The Picture?
This is a genuinely important shift, and it strengthens the case for SEO rather than weakening it. A meaningful share of Google searches now end without a click through to any website, and AI Overviews appear on somewhere between a quarter and half of tracked queries depending on the study.
Paid advertising’s effectiveness has been affected by this shift too, since fewer people scroll past an AI-generated answer to reach the ads underneath it.
Why Does This Actually Favour SEO Over Paid Channels?
Being cited as a trusted source inside an AI Overview or a ChatGPT answer builds visibility even when no click happens at all, something a paid ad simply cannot replicate, since ads by definition don’t get cited as trusted, independent answers.
This is exactly why we built Essheo around Search Everywhere Optimisation, treating visibility across Google, AI platforms, YouTube and social channels as one connected system rather than separate budgets competing against each other, because the businesses winning this new layer of discovery are the ones whose organic content is genuinely structured to be trusted and referenced, not the ones simply bidding the highest for a click.
Why Does Sector Expertise Change Which Channel Wins?
Generic small business marketing advice tends to treat all channels as roughly interchangeable, and for a lot of businesses that’s a reasonable starting point.
It’s less true for boiler, solar, heat pump, air conditioning and EV charger installers specifically, because you’re competing for visibility against national comparison giants like MoneySuperMarket, GoCompare and uSwitch, businesses with enormous existing domain authority that make paid channels expensive and organic ranking genuinely difficult without proper sector-specific expertise behind it.
Every senior person on our team at Essheo has spent eight or more years working specifically in hard to rank sectors like this one, and the strategies we’ve designed and implemented have contributed to over £45 million in combined client revenue across the last two years alone.
We know which channel genuinely delivers the best return for this specific sector because we’ve built and run those channels ourselves, not just advised on them from the outside.
Ready To Find The Right Channel Mix For Your Business?
Every business is slightly different, and the right answer depends on your current customer value, your competitive landscape, and how much runway you have before you need results.
But for the overwhelming majority of small boiler, solar, heat pump, air conditioning and EV charger installation businesses I’ve worked with, a properly built SEO strategy consistently outperforms every other channel once you measure it over a realistic twelve to eighteen month horizon.
I set Essheo up to help business owners and marketing decision makers work through exactly this decision properly, with real numbers specific to your market rather than generic advice that treats every sector the same. We’ll look honestly at your current spend, your competitive position, and show you where SEO genuinely fits within your wider marketing mix.
Book a strategy call with me today and let’s work out the most cost effective channel mix for your business.