The start: a market where every click costs a fortune
Warm Homes Funding helps homeowners access government energy-efficiency grants.
It’s a high-volume, fast-moving, genuinely crowded sector — and paid traffic in it is both expensive and unpredictable. Bid against national installers and lead aggregators and you can spend a serious amount of money before a single application completes.
That leaves a business with an uncomfortable choice: pay ever-increasing prices for clicks, or find another way to be found.
There’s a second problem underneath it. A business whose enquiries stop the day the ad budget stops doesn’t really own anything. It’s renting its customers, month to month, at whatever the auction decides.
The middle: what we actually built
1. A website built to convert, not just to exist
Built from scratch, aimed squarely at the homeowner trying to work out whether they qualify for anything.
2. Be the local answer, everywhere you actually work
Rather than one national page competing with everyone, the site covers the areas the business genuinely serves, each written properly for that place.
This only works if it’s real. Pages that are one template with the town name swapped get spotted and discarded. Pages about places you actually deliver to, with genuine local content, earn their rankings and keep them.
3. Answer the honest questions
Am I eligible? What does it actually cover? Is it really free? What’s the catch?
Grants attract chancers, and homeowners know it. Answering the sceptical questions plainly does two jobs at once: it earns the ranking, and it earns the trust that makes someone willing to hand over their details.
4. Qualify before it reaches the team
Eligibility questions are asked as part of the journey rather than on a phone call afterwards.
In this sector an unqualified enquiry is worse than no enquiry, because someone still has to spend twenty minutes discovering it was never going to work.
5. Build the same thing twice, deliberately
We built this alongside its sister company, DVC Group, on the same principles.
Between them they became two of the most search-dominant firms in their space — found first, and trusted, by the people looking for help.
The end: what it left them with
- Over 2,000 enquiries in two years across the two builds.
- £0 of ad spend behind any of them.
- Enquiries that kept arriving month after month, without a meter running.
- Acquisition interest. The business grew successful enough that competitors came asking to buy it.
That last point is the one worth dwelling on. A business whose leads stop when the spending stops is renting its customers. One that’s genuinely found for free owns something — and buyers can tell the difference.
If you’re paying too much for clicks in a competitive market, tell us what you need and Harry will come back to you personally with an honest view of what a search presence would be worth to you. It’s the same approach we bring across the renewables and grants sector.