One keyword, 50 languages: how the world searches for "solar panels"

English accounts for roughly 25% of all internet content. That means three out of every four web users are searching in a language that most keyword research tools never check.

We wanted to know what that actually looks like for one specific keyword. So we took "solar panels" and ran it through every country in our database, in every local language. The question was simple: what are people actually typing when they want to buy solar panels in France, Japan, Thailand, Ukraine, or Brazil?

The answer exposes a massive flaw in how multinational companies size their total addressable markets (TAM).

The linguistic fragmentation of intent

Before we get to the numbers, look at how "solar panels" translates across the world. Each card shows what people actually type into search engines in that country. Some are phonetic borrowings. Others are entirely different words built from local roots.

Data set 1: "Solar panels" translated into 12 languages. Actual monthly search volume via Google Ads data, April 2026.

Notice the range. Dutch speakers search "zonnepanelen" 90,500 times per month. Japanese speakers type the katakana loanword. Thai uses a completely different script.

None of these show up when you type "solar panels" into an English-only keyword tool. That's 12 major economies with real commercial demand that you'd never know existed.

Top 15 Global Markets (Local vs English)

Here are the top 15 countries ranked by how often people search for "solar panels" in their own language. The visual bars contrast the true local demand against what an English-only query would report.

The invisible 452,700

Across our dataset, we identified 16 countries where the local-language volume exceeds 5,000 searches per month but the English volume is virtually non-existent. In other words: real, significant markets that return near-zero in standard keyword tools.

The combined volume of these invisible markets: 452,700 monthly searches.

France is the most striking example. "Panneaux solaires" gets 135,000 searches per month. The English keyword "solar panels" in France? 2,900. If you were building a solar panel company's international SEO strategy using only English keyword data, you would conclude that France is a minor market. In reality, it's the second-largest after the United States.

Same intent, 55x cheaper

A click on "solar panels" in the United States costs $2.79 on average. That same click, carrying the exact same commercial intent, costs a fraction in other markets. The cheapest countries with volume above 5,000 searches per month highlight extreme global arbitrage opportunities:

Nigeria stands out: $0.05 per click for a keyword with 12,100 monthly searches. That's 55.8x cheaper than the US. For a solar panel company with an international supply chain, these are not marginal markets. These are markets where customer acquisition costs are an order of magnitude lower than in competitive English-speaking countries.

The pattern holds across Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe. A $1,000/month ad budget in Thailand buys approximately 16,600 clicks. The same budget in the US buys 358.

The markets that surprised us

What to do with this data

If you sell, install, or market products internationally, the single most valuable thing you can do is check your primary keywords in every target country's local language simultaneously.

The data in this article is specific to "solar panels," but the pattern holds for most product keywords. You can run this exact analysis for your own industry, automatically translating and pulling API data across 234 countries, using our tool.