Roofing SEO-A Complete Guide for Roofers

As a roofing contractor company are you looking to grow your client base? If yes, well ROI minds have a complete guide for Roofing SEO campaigns first time for your business. But why do you need a powerful organic marketing strategy for your roofing company, here are the reasons why:-

• $12 billion is spent by the U.S. house owners for reroofing or repairing every year.
• On average roofs lasts only half of their designated lifetime.
• 70% of roofs develop leakage within 2 years of installation.

1. SEO

SEO is an acronym for search engine optimization. It can be determined as the methodology of various techniques and tactics used to improve the search engine ranking of any website.

3 different types of SEO

On the work front, it can be categorized into 3 categories:-

1. On-Page SEO
2. Technical SEO
3. Off-Page SEO

All three tactics are must to do on a website, especially when you need permanent organic traffic. On-page SEO deals with the structure, readability and user experience of a website while off-page SEO deals with the credibility and popularity of a website.

On-Page SEO

As the name suggests On-page SEO means the improvements done on the web page in terms of Structure, Title, Content, Header Tags and inter-linking.

Title

You should optimize your title with the focused keyword. Ideally, it should be 60 characters long or fits in 600px container.

If your title is longer than this width than search engine will omit the last characters with “..” in search results. To optimize your title right, insert the focused keywords to the front.

Meta Description

The meta description is 155-160 characters description about the webpage that appears below the URL in search engine results. It gives a hint about the content of the page.

Keywords

Keywords are still the Cornerstone of SEO tactics. Many experts have different opinions on the importance of keywords in search engine ranking. There are various free tools available in the market for keyword research. You can use these tools to find related keywords according to your niche.

Analyze from which keywords search engine is sending traffic to your website, optimize your site around those focused keywords. For Ex:-

If you are receiving hits for the keyword ‘roofing marketing in Houston’. Now you can find more keywords ideas from free keyword suggestion tools like Neil Patel’s Ubersuggest and Keywords Everywhere on roofing marketing. Try to optimize your site and write fresh content about ‘roofing marketing’.

Don’t use focused keywords too many times. Stuff keywords nicely, just 2-3 times in the article.

Header Tags

A well-looking webpage not only increases the engagement rate but it’s even more important for good user experience.

Search algorithms always give weightage to the H1 tag, try to put the focused keywords in the ]H1 tag on your webpage.

Content

It is very hard to rank your site on the first page of search results without valuable content. In the roofing business, you will never run out of fresh content.

Giving tips regarding roofing and publishing updates of new products will help you to craft a good roofing site.

Great content will help potential customers to decide whether they want to try new products or not.

Content is all about educating people or sharing the experience. This can be done in the form of blog posts, content on pages, having a website forum and a Faq page.

Your potential customers might have many questions you can answer their questions, you can tell them how your product can solve their problems. You can even share the wonderful experience of your previous customers.

Content in SEO is as essential as fuel for your vehicle. Adding value to the content will boost your SEO success.

Interlinking

A good interlinked website not only provides better navigation but is also important in terms of user experience. Interlinking one article to another increase your engagement rate.

Interlinking has no direct impact on search engine ranking. But they increase the page authority, every new page or post created has no page authority. Linking new pages from the Home page or your cornerstone content passes the page authority to the newborn page instantly.

Technical SEO

SEO techniques that deal with the non-content elements of your site come under this category. Site security, Speed, Mobile-friendliness, indexing, crawlability, structured data and site architecture falls under this category.

Site Security (SSL/HTTPS)

Secure Socket Layer or Hypertext transfer protocol secure is a very important factor for search engine ranking at the present time. It gives people the idea that no one is between you and the website you are visiting. It increases trustworthiness from a customer point of view & they are more likely to visit your site again.

There are two types of SSL certificate available ‘Shared SSL’ and ‘Dedicated SSL’.

Shared SSL is free of cost from the hosting provider company, but all the other users on the same server will use this certificate as well. It is as secure as dedicated SSL.

Dedicated SSL is ideal for your website if you are running an online store or a dropshipping site. Dedicated SSL is issued only to your organization. Godaddy and Bluehost provide a dedicated or private SSL from $90-110 per year.

Page Speed

All the above factors are related to the content quality and structure of the webpage, the speed of your website or page is also a crucial factor in search engine rankings.

Everyone likes a fast loading website. Nobody wants to visit a site that takes a longer time to load or having rendering problems on smartphones.

Server performance, Server location, Outdated CMS, Heavy Scripts & images are some of the common reasons that reduce the page speed. You can use the GTmetrix or Pingdom speed test tool to check your website speed.

Compressing images, loading less important scripts in the last boost your website’s speed spontaneously.

Mobile Friendliness

According to Statista (A German portal for online statistics) 265.9 million people are using a smartphone in the U.S. in 2019. While the number of smartphone users is increasing at a rapid pace. So it’s time to optimize your website for mobile, your site should be responsive and mobile-friendly.

A mobile-optimized site is great for the best user experience. This kind of design automatically adapts to all kinds of screen sizes.

Just give a look at the loading time of the site on mobile devices. If there are undesired scripts or images remove them. This will help you to increase the page load speed.

If you are wondering what is the ideal time for the site, let me clear it for you, 40% of the visitors will close the tab if your site does not load within the first 3 seconds. While the other 14% will not wait for more than 5 seconds.

Do you know 80% of the first time visitor will never visit your site if it is loading slowly? Moreover, they will also share their poor experience with family members, relatives, and friends.

Crawlability & Indexability

Do you know crawlability and indexability are the most significant factors in technical SEO?

Google and other search engines use crawlers (Automatic bots) who visit every site on the web and saves the HTML version of the site to its huge database which they called index.

This index is updated every time the crawler visits your site and find new content. But do you know your site allows the crawlers? Or you have blocked the Google bots. If the robots.txt doesn’t allow the Google bots, Google will not be able to index your site. Follow the following steps to make sure that search engine can index and crawl your site :

Generate a sitemap of all your pages and put them in the root folder of your site. Sitemap is an XML file displaying the list of all pages or posts on site. This helps crawlers to index un-crawled pages.

Speed up your site as the crawlers have a limited time to index your site. This time is called a crawl budget. If your site will not load in this time crawlers will leave your site.

Publish fresh and unique content on your site. Frequency of update matters a lot in indexing time. If you post continuous articles then the crawlers will determine your updation frequency and your new pages will get indexed very quickly.

Off-page SEO

While On-Page SEO deals with the improvement in structure, content, and speed of the website. Off-page SEO is more into developing the credibility and trustworthiness of the website. Backlinks, Social media presence, and strength of your website (Domain Authority)

Backlinks

Backlinks are hyperlinks from another website to your site as a reference or source of information. Having a single backlink from a high DA site is worth more than 100 backlinks from lower DA sites.

Undoubtedly quality backlinks are still an important factor in search engine rankings. Try to produce fresh and unique content so people backlink to your site as a source of information.

Frequency of getting backlinks should not be very fast if your content is not going viral. Also, the backlink you are getting should be from a relevant site otherwise Google can penalize you.

A 9th-10th positioned website in search results has an average 30,000 links. Craft content that is worth to link.
Create Infographics in posts so people can link back to you.
Build relationships with your audiences. Until people don’t know who you are they won’t link back to you.
Don’t ever try free backlink building tools they are just in vain.

Social Media Presence

Your social media presence is a crucial and deciding factor for the success of your digital marketing campaign.

Although It is free but you can also make use of paid Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads & Twitter Ads for instant leads & website traffic.

Do interactions with your media followers. Take a look at engagement stats for your posts. Try to communicate with your audience. Post pictures with your team while on work.

Try to showcase your pictures before work and after work. Ask your customers to rate your work on social media.

Social media can be used to increase your brand loyalty and no one can deny that social media is still a ranking factor for best SEO results.

Strength of Site (Domain Authority)

Domain authority is just a number given to your site on a scale of 1-100. Higher the number the greater the strength of the website.

The factors that affect the domain authority are the number of backlinks, 404 pages, History of a domain name, the longer it registered higher the chances of authority.

“If you are just planning to launch a site for your roofing company start with an easy to remember domain name. It’s a good choice that you include words like ‘roofing’ or ‘roofers’ in your domain name.”

Google Search Console for Data Mining

Initially, the Google search console was released by Google Inc. back in 2006 as Google Webmaster tools. The primary goal behind this service was helping the webmaster and SEO enthusiasts to know how Google is interacting with the sites and what needs to be improved.

The best thing with the search console is that you can ask Google to index your site immediately if you have made any changes. Indexing of a new website takes 24-72 hours but if you don’t want to wait for that long you can request Google to index your site now.

The second best thing about the search console is the ability to add your sitemap to index. Adding sitemap to Google Search Console saves the crawl budget.

Follow these steps to add your site to Google Search Console:-

Sign in to your Google account.
Go to Google Search Console. Click on start now.

Now enter your website address. If you want to analyze some other subdomains add it to the URL prefix.

Domain name verification can be done by DNS verification while the Specific URL has multiple ways to verify the property.

Now copy the TXT record displayed and paste in your DNS providers TXT records.

After this click on verify property.

After Successful verification your search console account is all set up. Now submit your index link to Google search console and request for indexing.

You can even use the ‘Fetch and render’ option to see how Google bot is viewing your page and how users will see.

It might take a few weeks to display the search results.

If you are watching some data in Search Console its time to examine data to improve your SEO. There are various reports available that can be examined to understand how well your site is performing.

Index Report: Indexing report displays how well your site is being indexed.

Link Report: Use this report to see your Inbound and Outbound link performance.

Overview Report: Overview report display the overall performance of your site. CTR, Impression, Search Queries & your Average search position can be examined through overview report.

GSC is just a tool that can be used to examine the site status and index errors. One should often use this tool to check any kind of indexing and crawling issues.

Get listed locally

Do you know? 50% of local searches turn into a store visit within 24 hours. People generally search for services locally on Google or ask their digital voice assistant for the same. For example, a person living in Houston will search like this:-

“ Roof repairing companies in Houston”

“Top roof repairing companies near me”

“Roof repair service”

“Houston roofers”

“Best roofers in Houston”

For these search inquiries, Google will display a snippet from various local listing directories. So it’s important to list your NAP ( Name, Address, Phone number) first on local directories.

• Local listing of business will improve your search engine rank.
• It will increase natural traffic to your business site.
• Increased brand trustworthiness.

Here is a list of most popular & trusted local listing directories:-

Google My Business

Google My business is the first thing to go with when starting local SEO. It should be on priority while doing SEO.

Listing your business on Google has numerous benefits. Google is a search leader with 88.37% market share in the USA. But Google is an infant, It will display the results from the information you provided.

If you are a well-established roofer then there are 70% chances that your business is already listed on Google. If not here is how you can list your business on Google:-

Go to Google My Business and click on ‘Manage my Business Profile’ or ‘Manage Now’ on the top left corner.
google my business for roofers

Enter your business name and address in the search box. If your business is not displayed in the search results, click on add your business.

Now provide all the necessary details and click on continue.

After you have entered all the details Google will verify your business whether it exists physically or not.

Google will send you a postcard containing Pin Number for the verification process.

 After you enter the Pin your business will be listed on Google My Business.

Listing your business on Google is the first and most important step in Local Search Optimization.

Yahoo Local

Yahoo Local listing has free as well as premium plan for listing, with the free version you will be able to add NAP to the listing. Here’s how you can list your Business on Yahoo:-

Yahoo for small roofing business

Go to Yahoo Small Business and enter your business name and click on search.
If your business is listed on Google then Yahoo will automatically fetch the details of your business from Google My Business.
After adding your business email and other information the final step is to verify this business.
Verification can be done over the phone.
After successful verification, your business listing will be active on Yahoo.
If you want to see insights of your listing and more pictures to your business page you can go with the paid plan, Yahoo’s local listing paid plan starts from $23.25.

Bing Places for Business

Bing is the default search option for Windows OS, It’s as important to list on Bing as to list your business on Google. On bing local listing page you can even import your business details from Google Business Page.

Use the following steps to list your business on Bing places for business :

Go to bing places and click on New user.
Now if your business is listed on Google my Business you can import your details otherwise you have to claim or add your business details manually.
If you’re listing manually then Sign up using Google or Facebook account.
After Successful confirmation of account you will be directed to your Bing profile page add your country, mobile number and click continue.
Now add Business/Professional name and Location and click on continue.
Your business has been listed on Bings Places for business. Now you can verify your business with your E-mail or your call.
After you enter the Pin code you received your business details will be listed.

Local

Local is a comprehensive database for businesses in the United States. Presently there are more than 16 million active listings on local.com. You can check for existing listing on local than claim it for free.

1. Go to local.com and enter your business name and search for your business.
2. If your business is displayed in the results click on the claim this listing else add your business now.
3. Now you have to create an account with local. Add all the necessary information and confirm the listing.
4. After the successful confirmation of the mail, your business will get listed on local.com.

Hotfrog

Hotfrog has a very huge database in terms of business listings. There are approximately 70 million active listings on Hotfrog. Hotfrog even allows adding pictures and social media profiles to your listing.

Some other popular business listing directories are MerchantCircle, Yellowpages, Whitepages, Foursquare & InsiderPages.

Use Paid Campaigns

Paid campaigns or PPC means giving search engines a little amount of money so that they send relevant traffic to your website. As compared to the business you generate, the expenditure incurred on these campaigns is very less.

You might have seen some of the ads in search results relevant to your query. Every time you click on these ads, advertisers pay a very small amount to the search engine.

Search Engines like Google display these ads in search results. As a roofer, you can set up a campaign on Google Ads to generate relevant leads for your roofing company.

How to Set Up First PPC Campaign on Google Ads?

The very first move before launching your first PPC or paid campaign on Google is having a Google Ads account. The process of setting up an ad account starts with email verification and then adding time zone, currency preference and ends with billing information.

After you have created an ad account it is time to do the keyword research for which you are going to run your first campaign. You can use free tools or Google keyword planner for the ideas.

Before moving further, prepare a list of PPC keywords and refine this list if you want your first campaign to be successful. If you are ready then follow the steps :

Navigate to the menu on the left and click on campaigns.
Click on the + button and add a new campaign.
Select your Goals (Sales, Leads, Website Traffic or App promotion) for the campaign. As a roofer, you should go with the leads.
Click continue. You can learn about more settings here.
Click on save and continue.
Conventional wisdom says that more brand awareness campaigns on Facebook lead to 34% more searches on Google. If you are trying to improve brand visibility then Facebook is the answer. Google Ads performs well if your firm has a great brand image. You can even use Facebook PPC for your very first campaign.

Cold Outreach

Cold outreach is a term used for sending messages to potential customers who have never used your product or service.

In cold outreach, personalized Emails are sent to the people who had no interaction or prior relationship with your firm.

According to Neil Patel, 75% of the emails are actually never seen by people. The average CTR is around 2-3% in email outreach. So is it hard to generate leads from email outreach?

No, it is not very difficult to generate leads. Consistency is the key factor in generating leads from cold emails. Sending Personalized messages, putting yourself in their shoes & keeping the message short can drive better results.

Run Seasonal Campaigns

Roofing is a seasonal business so why waste money for a full-year ad campaign. Bid for the localized keywords. Offer a discount for the new house owners. Statistics tell that new house owners spend $10,000 when they move-in the first time.

You can make use of Social media for free seasonal campaigns like you can post pictures of damaged roof before winter season, this will entice people to get prepared for the upcoming season.

If you are unaware of this kind of strategy you can hire a White label digital marketing agency, which will do the work for you.

You can also choose traditional methods of advertising like TV ads, radio, flyers, and pamphlets distribution. This method is still effective for leads but only if you have a very large budget for the ad campaign.

Have a FAQs Page

Most of your rivals may not have a FAQ’s page, but having one will drive more traffic to your website.

People ask too many times about roof repair like:

“Can I repair the roof myself ?“

“Tools required for roof repairing?”

“How much does a brand-new roof cost?”

“When should I replace my roof?”

“ Which material can I use for my new roof?”

Try to answer these questions on your FAQ page as well you should write fresh content in the blog section of your firm’s website.

Answering people’s questions about roofing in one place will increase the opportunity to drive more visitors to your site and thus building trust that you know how roofing works.

Having answers for generally asked questions tells people you ken about the complications and limits in roofing work.