Your prospects are searching for roofers on Google right now.
If you don’t appear in the top search results, it doesn’t matter how great your roofing services are—they’ll hire someone else.
Why?
Because they’ll be able to find other roofing companies. But not you.
Search engine optimization (SEO) can fix this.
SEO has the power to rank your business on top of the search results. Meaning potential customers will see you first, instead of your competitors.
Take Washington-based Home Care Contractors as an example.
They saw significant organic (unpaid) traffic gains after implementing an SEO campaign and ranking for important keywords related to their services.
In addition to keyword rankings, the company received more leads and calls from potential clients.
This is just one example of the countless ways that the right SEO strategies have helped businesses grow.
In this guide, you’ll learn how you can use SEO to turn your own prospects into paying customers.
How to Start Doing SEO for Your Roofing Business
Follow these steps to start doing SEO for your roofing business and grow your online presence:
Step 1: Optimize for Local Visibility
You want people who are physically near you to discover your services and choose to hire you over the competition.
Local SEO is a branch of SEO that focuses on increasing your business’s local search visibility so you can attract more customers in your area.
One sign that you’re doing great in local SEO is if your business appears in the Google Map Pack (sometimes called the local pack). This contains the top three companies that appear in a location-based search.
So how does a roofing business show up in the Map Pack?
First, claim and optimize your Google Business Profile (GBP).
You’ll need to enter all your business details, like your business name, address, and phone number (NAP).
Next, check and make sure your NAP details are correct and consistent with other listings.
This ensures search engines like Google have the right details about your business.
If one listing has a slightly different address from another, it can confuse search engines (and users) about where exactly your business is. Which could affect your chances of showing up in relevant local packs and search results.
(And if users see incorrect information, they may not be able to reach your business.)
Another aspect of optimizing for local search results is getting positive reviews. Google uses reviews as a ranking factor in local search.
T&S Roofing Systems is a great example of a roofing company with lots of positive reviews, having a 4.8-star rating (from 838 reviews).
And they rank as the organic result in the map pack for a super competitive term:
So, encourage your past customers to leave a review. For more on that, check out this guide to getting more Google reviews.
Finally, you also want to build local citations. These are mentions of your business details online (sometimes with a backlink). Such as in local directories like Yellow Pages and on social media platforms like Facebook.
These mentions can improve your online visibility and may affect your rankings in local search results too. But, as we mentioned above, just make sure your business information is consistent across all of them.
Step 2: Provide a Great User Experience
Your website is one of the many ways that potential customers can find you. But you shouldn’t just optimize it to rank in search results.
Because once you get people to visit the site, you also want them to take action.
Here are some tips to make that happen:
Communicate Your Unique Selling Proposition (USP)
What does your roofing business offer that your competitors don’t?
It could be:
- Years of experience
- Flexible payment plans
- 24/7 service
Or anything else that sets you apart.
Pick your USPs and make these the main points on your homepage.
For example, Alpha Roofing Group highlights its expertise as its USP.
Share Social Proof
Make an effort to integrate social proof across your pages.
This could include certificates, awards, customer reviews, and other elements that show visitors that you have a trusted business.
Cloud Roofing uses a prominent section of its site to highlight its social proof. Including how many customers they’ve had, how many jobs they’ve completed, and how long they’ve been in business.
For a high-cost service like roofing, quality matters. This can be a great way to build trust with potential customers.
Showcase Your Roofing Projects
A “show, don’t tell” approach can work well when attracting roofing clients.
Take advantage of this by using high-quality photos to showcase your past projects.
Like this:
This makes it super easy for your website’s visitors to see what you can do for them. Rather than just reading about it.
Improve Your Site Speed
Your website shouldn’t take more than a few seconds to load. If it does, you risk your visitors leaving before you even have a chance to convert them.
Use Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool to check your site speed and discover what issues you need to fix to improve it.
Make Your Website Elements User-Friendly
Getting visitors to your site is one thing. Making them stay long enough to convert them into a customer is another thing entirely.
To keep visitors engaged, your website should be easy to use for everyone.
This means that:
- Users can navigate to other pages within 3-4 clicks
- People viewing your site on mobile devices should find it easy to use
- Fonts and colors shouldn’t affect readability
- Call to action buttons should be prominent and easy to click or tap
- Forms shouldn’t have too many fields
Voyager Exteriors ticks all the boxes with a site that looks great and is easy to navigate.
For example, the lead form is directly below the hero image. Which helps make the site’s layout look seamless and less cluttered. (And it encourages conversions immediately.)
Another example is Philadelphia Quality Roofing.
Thanks to straightforward interactive buttons, it’s super easy to learn about their service areas.
Finally, Findlay Roofing’s site looks great on mobile. It has accessible menu buttons and thumb-friendly CTA buttons.
Ensure Your Company Information Is Clearly Visible
Your phone number or a link to your contact form should be easy to find on ANY of your website’s pages.
Many businesses put their phone number in the website’s header or navigation bar:
It should also be easy to find a button to get in touch or get a quote/estimate. No matter where your visitor is on the site.
Step 3: Do Keyword Research
Keyword research is the process of finding out what words or phrases people use to search for a business online.
To identify relevant keywords, you need to know:
- Your audience
- Their roofing issues
- What kind of services they might need from you
The fastest way to discover relevant keywords for your business is to use a keyword research tool. Like the Keyword Magic Tool from Semrush.
It lets you enter one or more seed keywords (broad terms related to your business) and gives you keyword suggestions based on them.
Below is a keyword research result for the seed keyword “roofer in Atlanta”:
The tool shows you keyword details like:
- Search volume: The number of people typing this keyword into search engines every month
- Keyword difficulty: A rating that indicates how difficult it is to rank for a keyword
- Search intent: Search intent refers to why people are searching for a particular keyword
Search intent is particularly important, and there are four main types to be aware of:
- Navigational: Searching for a specific website (e.g., Dallasroofers.com)
- Informational: Searching for specific information (e.g., how to fix a leaky roof)
- Commercial: Looking for features, offers, or options of products or services, or to compare specific products or services (e.g., 24/7 roofers in Dallas)
- Transactional: Looking to buy a product or hire a company for a service (e.g., hire a Dallas roofer)
With this data, you can determine what keywords to use for different sections of your website. You’ll likely spend a lot of time targeting commercial and transactional keywords.
Why?
Because these keywords are lower down in the sales funnel. In other words: people searching for these terms are closer to making a purchase.
How do you find these specific keywords?
By using intent filters to only show commercial and transactional terms:
This makes it easy to narrow down your research to only show keywords that are likely to result in leads or conversions.
Step 4: Implement On-Page SEO Best Practices
On-page SEO involves optimizing elements on your website to improve its ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs).
One of the main aspects of on-page SEO involves adding the keywords you just found in the previous step to corresponding pages on your site.
Add Keywords to Your Pages
The first places to add your keywords are your title tags and meta descriptions.
Title tags are what often appear in your browser’s title bar and in search results. While meta descriptions are the descriptions that often appear below the title tags.
Your title tag is a Google ranking factor. Meaning it can influence where the search engine ranks your content.
Your meta description is not a ranking factor. But it can influence your click-through rate. A compelling meta description is more likely to get a click, and you need clicks to convert searchers into leads and customers.
You can also add your keywords to your URLs. These should be descriptive rather than a random combination of letters and numbers, which Google does not recommend:
Similarly, when adding images to your content, avoid naming them “photo1.jpg” or something generic.
Name your images in a descriptive way, like “roof_repair.jpg.” Keep your image names short and only use one main keyword per image (and only if it’s natural).
Make Dedicated Landing Pages for Each Roofing Service
If you offer various roofing services, make separate pages for each one and write content to describe each service in detail.
This strategy gives you more opportunities to target keywords specific to the type of roofing service you provide.
A high-quality, optimized page devoted to roof replacement is more likely to rank for terms like “roof replacement service” than a generic “roofing services” page.
Just like what My Town Roofing did for their site:
Link Within Your Site
Internal links are important for SEO as well.
Linking relevant pages within your website makes it easier for search engines to index your pages. And it helps users navigate your site.
(It can even improve your rankings.)
For example, My Town Roofing maximizes its footer to add links to important pages within the site:
When you link to other pages, you’re also helping your visitors navigate the site and find what they need.
Some key pages you should have and link between on your website include:
- Home
- About
- Contact
- Locations/service areas
- Services
- Testimonials
- Projects
Make it a habit to link these pages together, but only when it’s relevant.
For example, service pages usually link to a contact page or lead form for visitors who want to reach out.
Like this:
Step 5: Publish Valuable, High-Quality Content
You can create content for your roofing website in many ways. But you’ll need to focus on those that offer value to your audience and help you win over new clients.
Here are a few tips to do just that:
Address Pain Points
Talk about a specific roofing problem your customer might have and offer your advice on how to resolve it.
Use this as an opportunity to show potential customers that you know what you’re talking about. Making it easier for them to trust your services.
The article below from My Town Roofing is a good example of teaching people how to fix a roofing issue, which they can learn (for free) by simply visiting their site.
Answer Common Questions
Gather questions from your previous client interactions and note down the most frequent ones.
Take these questions and turn them into content for your blog or an FAQs page, like the one here from Quantum Roofing.
Teach a **** or Pro Tip
Sometimes, people don’t have a problem with their roofs right now, but want to know how to prevent them in the future. This is where educating your audience about roof maintenance provides added value.
Show Your Happy Customers
Customer testimonials and case studies of projects are examples of how you can present proof that your roofing services are the best in your area.
If you want to know what type of content works well, you can use Semrush’s Topic Research Tool to get content suggestions.
Here, we used “roofing problems” as our main topic.
For the search above, Semrush provides many content ideas and categorizes them into subtopics:
Clicking on each subtopic gives you more details (including the volume and difficulty level). It even shows headlines and questions related to that subtopic.
No matter how you research your content, the key is to provide value to readers while optimizing the content for search engines. (Head back to Step 4 for more on that.)
Step 6: Get High-Quality Backlinks
Backlinks are links from other sites pointing back to your site. These can improve your search rankings, especially when you’ve acquired many quality links from reputable sites.
Here are a few ways to get backlinks to your site:
Local Directories
Listing your business in local directories like Yellow Pages and Angi can boost your chances of ranking in search engines.
These directories let you list details about your business, including your website, making it a free and easy way to build backlinks.
(It’s worth noting that, given how easy these are to acquire, each individual link isn’t likely to hold much weight from a ranking perspective.)
Media Mentions
Getting mentions on news websites can be a great source of high-quality backlinks.
For example, this article from USA Today (a high-authority website) features several roofing companies, all with a link back to their websites.
Influencer Outreach
If you know of influencers in your industry, such as a home improvement expert, consider collaborating with them for their podcast or YouTube channel (or your own, if you have them).
One example is Arrington Roofing being featured in the YouTube channel Texas Home Improvement.
Don’t know how to find these influencers?
They’re mostly in industries or niches that are related to owning or fixing homes.
Think home improvement experts, house flippers, remodelers, and even real estate agents.
A simple search on social media platforms like YouTube, Instagram, or TikTok should point you to the right kinds of influencers for your brand.
Guest Blogging
Guest blogging is a great way to reach a wider audience and get more traffic to your site.
Reach out to websites and publications that would benefit from your expertise.
These can be blogs about:
- Home improvement
- Home maintenance
- Home insurance
- Real estate
- Disaster readiness
- Money management
Here’s a great example of contributing your roofing expertise to a popular website. This wikiHow article was co-authored by David Bitan, who owns Bumble Roofing.
Keep a list of your prospect websites, your suggested topics, and whether or not they’ve agreed to publish your content and provide a backlink.
Discover Backlink Gaps
You can use Semrush’s Backlink Gap tool to compare your backlink profile to your competitors.
In other words: find websites that link to them but not you.
These are often strong link building candidates. Because if they link to your competitors, they might link to you as well.
How to Track Your Roofing SEO Performance
SEO is not a one-time task. You need to continually test, experiment, iterate, and adapt.
But to know what to test and adapt, you need to track your performance.
The first step is to set up a tool like Google Analytics.
This will provide data on your site traffic, engagement, and conversions.
For detailed reports on your keyword rankings, use a tool like Semrush.
This project overview for Able Roof shows not just organic traffic but also organic keywords, authority score, and top keywords.
Here are the main KPIs (key performance indicators) to track for your roofing website:
- Organic visitors: The number of people visiting your website from Google organic search, typically measured every month or week
- Keyword rankings: Where you rank in organic or local search for the important keywords you’re targeting
- Leads: Generally measured by a tool like CallRail, it could mean phone calls and form submissions for your roofing business
How to Calculate Your ROI from SEO
Ultimately, you want to know how much revenue your SEO efforts make back for your roofing business.
Here’s how to calculate your return on investment (ROI) from SEO.
So, you want to track the revenue from the leads you get via SEO and subtract the cost of running your SEO campaign.
Depending on the SEO route you take, expenses can include:
- The cost of SEO tools and software (if you’re going the DIY route)
- Salaries of SEO team members (if you hire a team)
- Fees for your SEO agency or freelancer (if you’re outsourcing the SEO services)
SEO often takes anywhere between 3-6 months to start delivering leads. (But it can take longer.)
So while the benefits of a sound roofing SEO strategy (such as a regular influx of leads) may kick in within a month, sustainable ROI is more likely in a year.
How Much Does Roofing SEO Cost?
Roofing SEO costs can vary anywhere between $500 to $5,000 a month, which depends on a mix of the following factors:
- Who does your SEO for you: Is it just you, a hired in-house team, a freelancer, or an SEO agency?
- Local market: Roofing in big cities may be a competitive market, so to compete, you may have to spend more (time and/or money) to keep up with your rivals
- Business goals: Do you want to aggressively rank for the most valuable keyword in your locality in three months? Or do you have a longer-term goal that relies less on fast results?
- Site authority: If you’re starting a new roofing website or have a low level of website authority, you may need to allocate a chunk of your budget toward link building
Doing SEO yourself is usually the cheapest route. You just put in sweat equity, and perhaps a few hundred dollars a month on relevant SEO software.
But SEO can cost just under $500/month on average if you want to hire freelancers or agencies.
Or, if you want to build an in-house team, one full-time SEO specialist can cost around $60,000 per year in the United States.
If you hire for multiple roles (content creator, developer, and SEO manager), you could easily be looking at over $150,000 a year.
The last option is hiring a dedicated roofing SEO agency to deliver fully managed SEO projects.
Depending on your needs, an experienced agency can cost anywhere between $2,000 to $5,000 a month. Typically, they include a full-stack team of specialists who work on SEO strategy, content creation, link building, and technical SEO.
Should Roofers Hire an SEO Agency?
Hiring an SEO agency only makes sense if you’ve grown your roofing business to the point that you’re always on the move.
In other words:
You don’t have time to spend on marketing yourself. Or you want someone else to do this work.
If you hire an agency, it comes with the added benefit of delivering end-to-end digital marketing campaigns that include PPC, social media advertising, and website design.
This means reaching your prospects on all channels and getting faster results.
Start Getting Leads with Roofing SEO
No matter how you choose to do SEO, understanding the basics and learning successful strategies can help you attract more clients.
Check out this complete SEO checklist to make sure you’ve covered all the necessary steps to get more leads.
It covers all aspects of SEO, from keyword research to link building. So you can learn what it takes to build a successful strategy.
Source link : Backlinko.com
