SEO for Roofing Companies: A Complete Guide

If you want your roofing business to dominate the first page of Google, you need to focus on creating a better customer experience. At the end of the day, that’s what Google is trying to offer the searcher – the best results.

In order to get to the top, you need to have the same motivation as Google. Focus on helping your customer and truly empathizing with them. We’ve found that by offering more information, answering more questions, and generally having a better user experience on roofing websites gets our roofing company clients to the top of Google and leads to more customers.

Although search engine optimization includes hundreds of different factors, it comes down to two major factors:

• Relevancy – Is your site content relevant to the searcher’s keyword or query?
• Trust – Is that content trusted throughout the internet?

How to build relevancy

If you want to build relevancy, you need to make sure you are as helpful as possible.

What is your customer really looking for when they search for something like “roofing companies in [YOUR CITY]”?

We know that when two people search for something like “roofing companies in grand rapids mi” they are more often than not looking for slightly different information. Here are some things that a person could really be looking for:

• what is the cheapest roofing company in my area?
• who is the fastest roofing company in my area?
• how long will it take the roofing company to complete the job?
• how do you quote a roofing job?
• how do I know I’m getting a good deal?
• what’s the best kind of roof for my house or my building?

You get the idea. There are a lot of questions that are going to come to mind for that person searching for roofing companies. You know that they are going to have many questions. Make sure to answer them all and answer them well.

The best way to build relevancy is to make sure you have a page on your website dedicated to each keyword. In our example keyword, “roofing companies near me”, you need to make sure that you list all of the neighborhoods and municipalities you serve. Ideally, put this on your home page and mention that it’s your service area. You can also use Google My Business to set your service area to show up better for local search.

When Google sees the term “near me” they are going to get the searchers location by their device (laptop or mobile phone) and then apply that city or neighborhood. If you have that city or neighborhood listed, you’re one step closer to showing up on Google.

To continue to maximize your site as a relevant authority and increase the chances that you show up high in Google’s search results, make sure you do your keyword research to determine what content and pages you’ll need on your site.

For roofers, you’ll want to include helpful content about repairs, maintenance, and so on.

How to build trust

Once you have created really helpful content for your potential client, you need to do everything you can to make sure that your roofing business is a trusted source of information and that your customers and other local entities trust you and view you as an authority.

There are several ways to do this:

• Citations – Make sure your business information is accurate and listed across the web. Google and other search engines like to see consistency in your business information. Specifically in your “NAP” or Name, Address, Phone Number.
• Reviews – Do good work and if ethical, ask your clients for reviews on Google or Facebook.
• Backlinks – Backlinks are links back to your site. You can get these in all kinds of ways, but it’s especially helpful to get them from high-quality sites that might relate to roofing. Think about the local “friendly” competitors you might have. This could be home builders and other home repair service companies.

Additional Resources

Use Google My Business to control your business information as it appears in Google.

Use Moz Local to strengthen your local SEO by monitoring and controlling your business citations.

An effective SEO strategy that leads to more roofing jobs hinges on really good keyword research and then careful content planning.

It’s important to know exactly what potential clients are searching for in your city when they need a roofing contractor, company, or business (see, three different ways to search for your business right there).

We always start by building a big list of keywords and look at the national keyword volume. By looking at how people search for roofing companies nationally we can determine the best keywords to focus on locally.

Below is a screenshot of some roofing keywords and their monthly search volume.

Working with local roofing companies, we’ve identified the exact list of what keywords are the most powerful and how to rank for them.

Quality keyword research is an art and science. You need to put yourself in the shoes of the buyer and then do it, again and again, to continue to gain empathy for them.

We use a tool that allows us to put in a broad term like “roofing companies” to start getting ideas for how people search for roofing contractors:

You can see there are some irrelevant keywords right away, but we can drill down and see that people are also looking for financing options when it comes to getting a new roof. This is an opportunity. You need to have some incredibly helpful information on your site about financing options for new roofs in order to attract your customer.

Tracking Keyword Rank and What it Means

If you’re a little lost at this point, that’s okay. We’ll try to break it down for you:

1. Do keyword research to see how people search for roofing companies.
2. Pick and remove keywords (for example, maybe you don’t do metal roofs, so that shouldn’t be a focus).
3. Track where you show up currently in your city for these keywords (we use a tool called SEMRush to do that).
4. Identify which keywords you aren’t showing up for that you want to or which ones you want to increase your rank for.
5. Go keyword by keyword and look at your rank position in the search engines compared to your competitors. Find where you aren’t ranking and your competitors are. Do you have a page dedicated to your keyword? Are you lacking content? Again, we use SEMRush to create a content template based on the target keyword. This will provide some insight into what our page needs in order to be more relevant to the keyword.

Roofing Company On-Page SEO Checklist

Included in our customized guide for SEO for Roofing Companies we have an SEO Audit Report. This audit assumes that you already know your target keyword(s) and the page they should be optimized for.

If you do not already have a page created for your target keyword, create one.

For all of the questions below, for each target keyword, you will need to record your answer in the SEO Audit Worksheet:

1. 1. Make a copy of the spreadsheet by going to “File → Make a copy”.
   2. Fill out the information at the top of the spreadsheet.
   3. This SOP includes a number of questions. For each of those questions, there is a matching row with the same question in the spreadsheet. You will need to go through each question and select the right item from the “Score” column.
   4. If the answer to the question is “Yes”, then select the answer “Passed” from the “Score” column
   5. If the answer to the question is “No”, then select the answer “Needs work” from the “Score” column
   6. If, for some reason, the question does not apply to the page being audited, select the answer “N/A” from the “Score” column

Notes:

• Each question in this SOP includes a detailed description of how to test and answer.
• The audit will be complete when all the questions in the spreadsheet are answered.
• Create a new sheet in the SEO Audit Worksheet for each target keyword and repeat the SOP

Measure ROI

If you have the correct available data (traffic and conversion rate) from your site. It’s relatively easy to make an educated estimate on the potential return on investment SEO can bring your roofing business. Though our calculator does not address all factors, it can help you see the potential value.

We know from experience that you cannot improve what you don’t first measure.

For all SEO service we provide roofers, we make sure that you are set up to track results before we ever begin helping you increase your ranking.

SEO is creative and scientific, but we can help you accept the challenge of determining the true value of SEO to your business. We do it because we like to share in the success of our clients. We need to measure our own effectiveness to know who we can help.

Example

A quick way to measure ROI is with some simple math.

• Let’s say you get 500 organic (from SEO) visitors to your site per month on average.
• Let’s say you convert (they call or fill out a form, etc) at 5% (25 inquiries per month).
• Let’s say of those 25, 20% or 5 become new clients.
• Let’s say your average customer value is $8,000 (based loosely off of this data)

Within that example, you’re looking at $40,000 (based on $8,000 x 5 new customers) per month added to your pipeline.

Now let’s say you hire an expert who can execute premium quality SEO for your roofing company.

They believe they can get you an increase of 25% more traffic year over year and a conversion rate of 8%. The new numbers:

• Now you’ll get 625 organic (from SEO) visitors to your site per month on average.
• Now you’ll get an 8%  conversion rate (50 inquiries per month).
• With 20% of 50 conversions becoming new clients, you now have 10.

Within that example, you’re looking at $80,000 (based on a roof value of $8,000 x 10 new customers) per month added to your pipeline.

Is SEO worth it to you? Do the math. We can help you find out what your true numbers are.