SEO for Roofing Companies: 9 Beginner Roofer SEO Tips
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Everybody deserves a roof over their heads for protection from extreme weather conditions. The same can be said about your roofing business. You need something to help facilitate your lead generation and client acquisition efforts.
Search engine optimization (SEO) can help you get new prospects and generate even more customers to help your business reach greater heights.
And that “something” you need? .
This post discusses everything you need to know about roofing SEO and the tactics you (or your hired marketing agency) must implement to help grow and scale your roofing business.
What is Roofing SEO?
Roofing SEO refers to optimizing a roofing company’s website to rank it on top of organic search, notably Google’s, for their target keywords. This is achieved by performing the best SEO practices specific to the industry.
Implementing effective roofing SEO strategies allows roofing contractors and companies to enhance their online reputation, attract more potential customers, and grow their business in the competitive digital space.
How Can Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Help Your Roofing Company
SEO plays a significant role in enhancing the online presence of your roofing company and improving your bottom line.
Lots of case studies show the effectiveness of SEO when done right. For instance, Giron Roofing Inc. enjoyed an increase in monthly traffic, resulting in an increase of 20 highly qualified leads every month.
Also, compared to other digital marketing strategies (in particular, pay-per-click or PPC ads), SEO is one of the more cost-effective ones. Once your roofing business’s website ranks on the first page of Google, it stays up there for a long time. This inbound approach to marketing means your site can generate steady traffic even without doing anything.
And if you want to further improve your website’s search engine rankings and traffic, simply launch more campaigns. Doing so consistently enables you to scale its performance and generate more leads and customers for your business.
Should Roofers Hire a Roofing SEO Company?
Now that you know the benefits SEO can do for your business, you must decide between doing the SEO yourself or enlisting help from a roofing SEO agency. You can succeed in taking either route. But to choose the best one for your situation, you must know the pros and cons of each.
Hiring a roofing SEO company gives you access to experts who know how to rank roofing businesses on Google. Professionals can use industry-specific knowledge and experience to yield better results than a generalist approach.
More importantly, you have more time to focus on other aspects of your business while the agency takes SEO off your hands.
However, outsourcing SEO to an agency might not be the best option for smaller businesses with limited budgets due to its costs.
Additionally, you are giving control over the SEO process to an external company, which is a big no-no to some. On the flip side, proper communication with the agency should help quell roofers’ fears regarding this.
With DIY SEO, you can save more money since you’ll be doing most of the heavy lifting. Moreover, it enables roofing contractors complete control over their SEO strategy. Learning these techniques can increase understanding of online marketing and provide valuable skills for business growth.
Nonetheless, the time-consuming nature of learning and implementing SEO strategies may turn off most business owners.
Also, the transient nature of SEO means they must keep up with the ever-changing SEO landscape without expert guidance. Furthermore, DIY SEO might not yield optimal results as quickly as working with a specialized agency.
Use the information above to help you decide which of the two you should go with your roofing marketing efforts.
How to Kick off SEO for Your Roofing Business: 9 Tips
Increasing organic traffic to your roofing business website using SEO can be a game-changer. The following tips will help you kick off your roofing SEO campaign effectively and enjoy better rankings and online visibility.
Optimize Your Google Business Profile
Formerly Google My Business, Google Business Profile (GBP) helps local businesses create their listings so people can learn more about their services online. But the primary reason for setting up a GBP is to rank on Google’s Map Pack.
This section appears on top of local search results and features the three most relevant local companies for the query with their name, phone number, and star rating from customers. Clicking on any of the companies here brings you to Google Maps, where you can see additional listings.
Appearing on the Map Pack helps more of your target audience find you on Google, thus enabling you to grow your roofing leads.
After signing up and verifying your GBP, you can optimize the page by providing an accurate and detailed overview of your roofing services in the business description. Include relevant keywords in the description that your potential customers might search for to increase your page’s Map Pack ranking.
Below is an example of a descriptive and optimized business description of a roofing company as it appears on Google Maps called “Lionheart Roofing”:
Also, enter your business hours (including any special hours for holidays or events), so people know the best times to reach out to you.
Next, enter your latest NAP (name, address, and phone number) on the page. Expect to attract more store visits and phone calls if you enter your details here. This is also important once you start building citations later on.
Instead of talking about your business, you can also show it off. Upload high-quality photos of yourself and your team to humanize your company to your target audience.
If your prospects are interested in what they see from your GBP, they’d want to contact you for more information. In this case, enabling messaging on your GBP allows them to reach out to you directly through the platform.
Get More Online Reviews
Positive reviews play a significant role in improving your local rankings. Encourage satisfied customers to leave reviews on your GMB listing by asking them via email days after they tried out your service. You can do this on other social media and review platforms like Yelp or Facebook.
You then want to showcase your reviews so prospects can see how much your customers enjoyed your roofing services. Doing so convinces people to give your roofing business a chance.
Assuming that you have reviews across different review sites, you can consolidate all of them using a tool like Yotpo and feature them on your website.
Finally, reply to all reviews—good or bad. Express how gracious you are with their positive reviews. For negative reviews, determine the cause and find ways to address the issue. The goal here is to try and make things right with customers, hoping they’ll change their reviews to a more positive one.
Here’s a perfect example of how to address a negative review:
How you respond to the reviews can also positively affect your sales. Your helpfulness to all customers can convince potential customers to try out your services for themselves.
Conduct Keyword Research
Identifying the right keywords is the foundation of any successful SEO strategy. By strategically using keywords your ideal clients search for, your website can rank higher in Google search results for those terms. This will lead to more targeted traffic and more clients for your roofing business.
For starters, utilize Google Keyword Planner to find relevant, high-traffic keywords for your roofing business.
On the tool, type in the name of the roofing services you offer and find keyword ideas with the highest search volume. You want to maximize the visibility of your website by optimizing it for search terms that lots of people type in on Google and are most relevant to your industry.
To supercharge your keyword research, use premium tools like KWFinder to find each term’s keyword difficulty (KD), among other metrics.
First, enter your topic on the search bar.
On the next page, you will see keyword ideas and search volume, similar to Google Keyword Planner. However, KWFinder also shows you the Keyword Difficulty (KD) of each.
The lower the KD, the less authoritative the sites ranking on top of search results are, the easier it is to rank for that keyword. Using this metric helps you find terms that’ll give you the highest chance of ranking at the top of search engine results pages (SERPs).
Craft a Compelling Roofing Website
Even if you already have a website, you must review it to ensure that visitors want to navigate and search engines would want to show it on search results.
The most important thing to check with your roofing website is how fast it loads. The probability of visitors bouncing away from your pages increases by 32% if they load longer than three seconds.
To help you understand how to speed up your site’s loading time, enter its URL on Google PageSpeed Insights and click “Analyze.”
The tool will compute the site’s Performance score based on its Core Web Vitals, Speed Index, and Total Blocking Time. The higher the score, the more efficient your site loads, the higher its chance of ranking on top of Google.
Scroll down the results page to see opportunities and diagnostics detailing how you can improve your site’s Performance score.
Click on each one to show the details about the opportunity and diagnosis and how you can resolve the issue.
Most of the issues have to do with your web host. Check out web hosting providers that offer fast loading times and excellent customer support. After deciding which suits your roofing business, migrate your site to their servers. Most of them will even migrate your site for you at no extra cost.
Other factors in creating a compelling website include implementing a clean and well-coded website design and using caching plugins and apps.
Related: Best Roofing Websites
Create High-Quality Content
Consistently produce informative and engaging content that addresses your target audience’s needs and questions. This will help you establish authority, build trust, and attract more organic traffic.
One of the marks for high-quality content is alignment with search intent.
Not all content is written the same—some provide useful information to readers (informational), while others aim to convert visitors into leads or customers (commercial or transactional).
Knowing which intent the keyword you’re optimizing for allows you to create content that readers want to see from your website, thus creating a seamless user experience.
Also, include visuals in your content. They help visitors process information 60,000 times faster than just text. Just as important, infographics, videos, and custom images help diversify your content and mix things up for your readers. This could lead to higher retention and conversion rates on your service pages.
Take Care of On-Page SEO
When creating content for your roofing business, observe the best on-page optimization practices as well. Most of the tactics here involve mentioning your target keyword in different page elements of your website.
Aside from the content, you must include the keyword in the SEO title, URL, meta descriptions, and the page’s H1. Optimizing these elements help search spiders understand what the page is about. Once crawled, the spiders will index it on search results for the appropriate keyword.
Also, consider finding natural language processing (NLP) keywords, which are words and phrases related to the page’s target keyword.
Mentioning them in your content helps improve its topic relevance to the keyword you’re optimizing for, resulting in higher search rankings. Using tools like Surfer SEO and Clearscope lists the NLP keywords to include on the page.
Upon logging in to your account, create a Content Editor by entering the keyword/s you want to optimize for your content.
From the Content Editor, you will see the words and phrases to include in your content when optimizing for the keywords you entered.
To help optimize your content even further, you can see the number of words, paragraphs, and images your content needs to have.
By structuring your content according to the number of elements you must include, you can increase its Content Score. The higher the score, the more optimized the content is for its target keyword/s, the higher its chances of ranking on Google search.
Off-Page SEO: Build Backlinks and Citations
As two of the more relevant ranking factors, backlinks and citations can boost your website’s credibility and help it rank higher on search engines.
Think of them as recommendations—getting links or citations from popular and industry-related websites is akin to receiving glowing reviews from well-renowned and respected critics.
Google uses both as signals to decide whether to increase your search rankings, depending on their quantity and quality.
To get started with your link building initiatives, find websites that accept guest posts.
Read through their editorial guidelines and ensure they allow you to include a backlink to your site in the content or author bio. Finally, submit an article they would love to publish on their blogs.
Guest blogging is just one of the many ways to get backlinks from various websites. To help you find more tactics to implement in your campaign, spy on your competitor’s link profile using Ahrefs.
First, identify who your competitors are. Go to Site Explorer and enter your URL.
On the results page, click on Organic search > Organic competition.
From there, you will see a complete list of competitor websites that share the most ranking keywords with you. The higher the share, the bigger the threat they are in your SEO efforts.
Once you have a list of top competitors, you can spy on their backlinks. To do this effectively, click on Link intersect under Backlink profile on the left sidebar. On the next page, enter the competitors whose link profile you want to spy on.
What this feature does is show you the backlinks that your competitor websites have but yours don’t. In the example below, you can start building links from the 44 sites where your competitors have.
Click on the links from each site, see how they were able to secure the backlink there, and do the same.
To get the most out of your link building efforts, acquire links from websites with a high Domain Rating (DR). The higher the DR, the more authoritative the site is, the more powerful the backlinks you can get from them.
When building citations, find local directories you can sign up for to create your business listings. Then include the same NAP you entered in your Google Business Profile.
The goal is to establish NAP consistency to help strengthen your GBP and improve its local SEO rankings.
You can do this on your own or use marketing services like BrightLocal to build and clean up your citations across various online directories.
Roofing Content Marketing: Start Answering Customer Questions on Your Blog
Running a blog on your roofing website is an excellent way to address customer questions and concerns.
It can showcase your expertise and provide valuable content that can rank well on search engines. More importantly, your content can help convert readers into customers.
From your keyword research, you will stumble upon long-tail keywords, most of which have an informational intent.
Most keyword tools give you the list of long-tail keywords to optimize for your website in the form of questions. Using KWFinder again, click on the Questions button to show your long-tail keyword suggestions for the topic.
The keyword list will populate with question keywords you can choose from.
Some, if not most, of the keywords in the list don’t have their KD scores. In this case, click on each one for the tool to compute for the score in real-time.
Aside from the KD, you will also see a SERP overview of the top pages ranking for the term and metrics that compute for their authoritativeness. The more important to look at here is the Link Profile Strength (LPS). The lower the LPS, the weaker the site is, the easier it’ll be for you to overtake them on SERPs.
Optimize for these keywords on your blog posts to provide website visitors with answers to their roofing questions. From here, they can decide whether to follow the advice in the blog or hire your services for complex roofing problems and issues.
Monitor the Results of Your Roofing SEO Strategy
To make sense of your roofing SEO strategy, you must consistently monitor its results to identify areas of improvement.
The best indicator of your SEO efforts is keyword rankings. The goal is to achieve high search positions for keywords you’re optimizing for. From the results, you want to tweak your SEO strategy to further push your rankings to the very top of SERPs.
The best free tool here is Google Search Console (GSC). It shows the search queries users entered on Google to find their web pages. GSC also shows how many clicks and impressions the pages get for a query based on its average search position.
To do this, login to your GSC and click on Performance on the left sidebar.
Next, scroll down the page to see the queries used where your website pages appeared on SERPs (impressions) and how many visitors clicked on each (clicks), both of which you can find at the right part of the screenshot below.
From here, you can see which queries your site is getting the most organic traffic from.
The tool also raises technical SEO issues on your website, preventing it from ranking higher on Google searches. It informs you of its indexing status, discovers any crawl errors, and identifies slow-loading pages. Address the issues GSC raises about your site to ensure that Google can properly crawl and index all your site pages.
For a more granular approach to monitoring your keyword rankings, use rank tracking tools like Accuranker to check your site’s organic and local rankings on demand. This is crucial, especially in the roofing business, where the competition is cutthroat, and rankings can fluctuate at a moment’s notice.
Our Roofing SEO Services Can Blow Your Leads Through the Roof!
As you can see, your roofer SEO strategy involves many moving parts to help get your website traffic up to speed. While you can do it yourself, expect to encounter roadblocks and pitfalls in getting your site to rank on Google, especially if you’re not knowledgeable and experienced about the best SEO practices.
In this case, it’s best to get the services of a marketing company with the know-how and savvy of ranking websites in the roofing industry.
On the Map Marketing can rank your roofing business website at the top of search results. You can get busy serving clients, while we’ll send you some of those warm leads from prospective clients using Google search. Contact us for a custom marketing audit of your roofing website.