Tag Archives: Local SEO

Skin in the Game with Roofer Marketing Dollars (Podcast)

Monthly billing helps businesses save valuable time and effort, not to mention thousands of dollars. That’s because this type of accounting pushes your local search marketing team much harder to produce results. Jason and Nolen talk about the roofing industry, roofing marketing, and some glaring red flags to look out for as you reassess your online investments.

Key Lessons for Roofing Professionals

Transparent pricing and reporting are key in accountable PPC advertising.
Flat fee, lump-sum pricing can trap you in a low-performance search marketing plan.
More expensive doesn’t always mean better in PPC or SEO.

Winners and Losers (in Search)

In local SEO for roofers, there are clear winners and losers. Most people gauge success by rank position, whether their business makes the Google Search Engine Results Page (SERP). However, the more experienced marketing professionals know that their clients (and their agency, by extension) truly win when those keyword rankings turn into site visits and roofing leads. That’s what separates the search marketing champions from the rest of the industry.

Winners continually strive to produce higher volume, higher quality, and lower cost leads.

Losers look for surface-level results, the kind that makes them look good on a monthly report. So much effort goes into producing just enough results to maintain their clients, but not a lot into creating long-term success. That’s the unhappy truth for many roofing companies and their marketing agencies.

So what kind of qualities can a roofing professional look for as they hunt for a winning team?

Marketing Quality #1: Expertise

A little obvious, right? Unfortunately, most contractors don’t understand what expertise looks like in the search marketing industry. After all, they (probably) didn’t go to school for digital marketing and advertising! That’s why knowing the critical signs of fundamental expertise is so crucial.

Signs of a Winning Search Marketing Team

Excellent Keyword Rankings (For Their Company)
Great Keyword Rankings (For Their Clients)
Impeccable Communication Skills
Clear, Measurable Service Deliverables
Basic Understanding of Your Industry

Search Marketing Result Assessment Through Search Console

Keyword rankings serve as a resume for companies that work in local search marketing. If they enjoy page one rankings for their primary industry keywords (such as “roofing seo services” or “seo for roofing”), that’s a good sign! Should their clients enjoy excellent keyword rankings in organic search, that’s even better.

Your marketing company should know their craft well enough to explain it to anyone in your staff effectively. Winning search marketers also learn how to communicate their services and deliverables so that you can accurately set your expectations for the coming months. But, of course, all that expertise is specifically adapted to help your business, which in turn demands a basic understanding of the roofing industry. If they can’t understand the lead development cycle for a homeowner or commercial organization looking for roofing services, how can they market those services?

Marketing Quality #2: Accountability

Have you ever received a shady service bill? It’s not a pleasant feeling, especially when you see fees that you didn’t anticipate. Unfortunately, when there’s little to keep a service provider accountable, these sort of shady practices can creep up in any industry. As a relatively new sector, however, digital marketing still lacks many of the safety mechanisms consumers rely on to ensure quality service.

Sly businesses often use sketchy reporting and costing measures to skim money out of your marketing budget without investing it in your local SEO or PPC campaigns. Unfortunately, this practice is prevalent among lump-sum, flat fee service packages where money can easily be distributed wherever the agency desires. At the Roofing Webmasters, we’ve heard this story a lot more often than we’d like.

How can you make sure that your search marketing team is held accountable?

Examine their reporting process ahead of time.
Make sure PPC spend is provided directly through Google (or Facebook, etc.).
Pay month to month instead of an annual or long-term contract.
Keep your PPC and SEO services charged separately.
Talk with their current clients and ask about the process for implementing changes.

Reporting is a fickle thing. On the one hand, industry giants like Google make it their goal to provide thorough, detailed accounts of your spending and results. But, on the other hand, agency reporting and even third-party services tend to blur where your money is going. That’s why it’s always prudent to arrange your PPC billing to go directly through your advertising platforms (Google, Facebook, etc.). Transparent billing prevents marketing agencies from up charging ad costs per click.

Understand your search marketing company’s process for implementing website changes (for SEO) and ad campaign updates (for PPC). If you discover it’s almost impossible to receive updates once your services go live, then it’s wiser to look for another provider. Consider talking with a handful of your prospective marketing agency and see what they have to say about their service.

Marketing Quality #3: Adaptive

When it comes to local search marketing, a successful business must know how to adapt to industry changes. Google regularly shakes up its algorithm so that one type of content buoys to the top while the other sinks to the back pages of search results. For instance, how-to guides and Q&A-styled articles tend to rank very well for consumer searches.

Potential Challenges to Overcome in Local Search

Rank drops
Traffic slumps
Surges in poor quality leads
Technical errors
Industry shifts

September Search Marketing Results in Analytics

When your website traffic takes a dip for a month, how does your local search marketing team respond? There are many potential reasons for the lower volume. If your company quickly works to understand the problem and present a solution, you know you have a winner on your hand. On the flip side, a sluggish (or nonexistent) response could indicate your company doesn’t care.

Ready for Results?

Local search marketing takes time and effort, but an experienced and dedicated team makes all the difference! If you’ve struggled to make headway with your current agency, our team at Roofing Webmasters would love to talk with you. In addition, we offer free consultations for anyone looking to understand their recent search marketing performance.

How Do I Beat Other Roofers Online With SEO? (Podcast)

Does earning front-page rankings for your roofing business seem impossible? You might be closer to breakaway success than you think. In our latest podcast, Jason and Nolen discuss how to set your brand apart from the rest with SEO services for roofers. So if you’ve struggled to make headway with your business online, be sure to listen in!

Helpful Lessons on SEO for Roofers:

Just completing the SEO basics puts you miles ahead of other roofing contractors.
New companies should focus on GMB, optimized website design, and collecting reviews!
It’s almost impossible to rank well without using your free Google My Business listing.
Organic search efforts should only take a few months to start producing results.

Before You Can Compete

Anybody can jump into the online marketing fray without laying the proper groundwork. The backend pages of Google Search results are lined with roofing contractors that thought their SEO preparations were “good enough.” These companies earn little to no website traffic, and they shake their fists wondering why their haphazard efforts have failed.

There’s a bare minimum that every company must perform to rank for their desired services.

SEO Basics to Start Ranking

Step #1: Claim Your Google My Business Listing
Step #2: Establish Your Company Website
Step #3: Build Citation Sources and Collect Reviews

GMB

Open a GMB Profile

So what does a dedicated roofing company need to do to start earning business online? First, they need to claim and fill out their Google My Business (GMB) profile. A GMB listing allows the search engine to better understand the location and function of your company. Whatever address you use for the GMB account, make sure all your other citation sources match it!

The profile will request many other details of your business. Fill out as much of the information as you can, and check back yearly to make sure your data is still accurate. GMB also allows you to post photos and videos of your business and personnel. Try taking some pictures of your finished roofing projects to post on your account! You can even use existing materials from your Facebook Business to get started.

Website Optimization

Create Your Optimized Website

We can’t stress enough just how important it is to nail your company website! So many businesses put up a cookie-cutter, terribly written website and earn inferior leads as a result. If you want your website to do well, make sure you have it crafted by a professional team that knows what they’re doing. A healthy site relies on an organized collection of service pages, keyword optimization, quality content, simplified navigation, lots of schema coding, and review integration.

No single marketing professional can provide all of these aspects, which is why it’s best to rely on a well-rated team. Few other factors of your online marketing so heavily impact your online lead success! Once you’ve established a well-optimized website, you’ll have the foundation necessary to spring into the rest of the SEO basics.

Citations & Reviews

Create More Listings and Earn Reviews

There’s no greater mark of authenticity than a host of glowing customer recommendations. Client feedback shows trustworthiness, one of the three E-A-T factors that Google analyses when ranking a roofing company brand. But, of course, the only way to pull in reviews is to establish listings for your business. As we’ve already mentioned, your GMB account is a great place to start. In addition, Google Reviews naturally integrate well with local search results, making your business much more visible.

However, the search engine provides better results when reviews come from a variety of sources.

That’s where citation sources come into play. These companies offer additional venues to list your company address and services, not to mention a convenient way to collect reviews. While some shady companies might push you to list dozens of obscure websites, it’s best to start with more established brands. The Better Business Bureau, Yelp, and Angie’s List are a few intelligent places.

Overcoming the Online Competition

We have a saying at the Webmasters, “You don’t have to be perfect. You have to be better than everyone else.” So far, we’ve covered online activities that will keep you in pace with the rest of the successful roofing companies. Now we come to the SEO basics that make your brand stand out as a clear winner.

SEO Strategies for Winners

Ask for reviews all the time.
Regularly blog on the company website.
Create and manage a Facebook Business page.
Take advantage of customer complaints.

We’ve already talked about how critical reviews are for your business. So why not ask for them consistently, especially after a job is well-done? Our team at Roofing Webmasters gets even more SEO power out of client feedback through a tool called DataPins. It adds geotagged data that shows Google the approximate locations of all job sites and showcases our clients’ roofing projects. While that level of review enhancement is pretty rare, a few other tools out on the market can provide added benefits for all your reviews.

Few roofing companies faithfully add to their company blog, which is why those that do consistently add well-written content are certain to stand out. The best part? You can take the informative material and share them on your social media pages for some added oomph! That’s just one reason to create a Facebook Business page, by the way. The social media platform offers a beautiful place to share information about your business, showcase your latest work, and tactfully address negative customer feedback.

Looking for More Online Leads?

Follow these winning strategies and SEO basics, and you’ll undoubtedly start earning higher rankings for your website. If you’ve been frustrated with organic or paid search, however, our team at Roofing Webmasters would love to help. Check out some resources throughout our website.

Clients Who Don’t Think The Internet Produces That Many Leads (Podcast)

Do you ever feel like roofer leads are just slipping through your fingers? Has your business suffered from the industry shift towards online marketing? It might be time for a new approach to advertising your services! In today’s blog, Nolen and Jason discuss the consequences of clinging too tightly to traditional marketing practices. If your business has avoided working through the internet until now, be sure to listen in closely.

Important Tips to Listen For:

Investment produces a reward. SEO doesn’t work without trying it.
Door knocking is unlikely to provide heavy lead volume in the future.
Start laying your SEO foundation now and reap the rewards soon.

Classic Marketing is Fading Out

We’re living at the end of an era. The end of the period came about ten years ago. The only thing changing today is the number of roofing contractors accepting that industry marketing is dominated by online search. Even so, we still receive several calls from companies firmly planted in the past of traditional advertising, Yellowpage-type listings, and door knocking.

This attitude is damaging their business, and it hurts to watch the consequences.

It’s not even the fault of digital marketing companies. In truth, consumers have widely adopted a habit of researching everything online. They aren’t watching television ads to find their contractors. They aren’t scrolling through local newspaper ads. They rarely pay attention to radio salespeople, and they most certainly aren’t answering the door (unless it can’t be helped).

The “New” Prominent Lead Source

Marketing changes, and so should help businesses. While Google is certainly a more complicated channel than radio (for instance), it also provides dramatically more leads for local roofers. Your most successful competitors probably rank very well in local search results. Again, people look online for their essential home services these days.

Even if you’ve had a terrible year (or five), it’s not too late to get started on local roofing SEO. Even if you have an incredibly outdated or nonexistent website, it’s entirely possible to begin developing a productive online marketing strategy now. But it’s going to take consistent work. Your high-ranking competitors didn’t climb the Google ranks by accident. Instead, they invested time and money into making their organic (unpaid) online marketing work.

Enough preaching. Now, let’s create a plan to get your business earning more substantial leads again!

Local Roofers Ranking Well in Online Marketing

Starting Up Your Online Marketing

There are three key pillars that every online marketing strategy depends on:

A complete Google My Business listing
An optimized, functional website
Quality, numerous client reviews

Without these elements, your marketing strategy won’t take off like you want it to. We’ll briefly talk about each element and how to ensure maximum results (leads) for your roofing company.

GMB Listing

Your Free Google My Business Listing

Let’s start with the easiest step: completing your GMB listing. If you haven’t already, go to the Google My Business starting page and fill out as much information as possible. You will need a physical address for your business. Most startups use their home address, but you’ll have to use only official company offices if you have two or more locations.

Why claim a Google My Business listing?

If you want to show up in Google Search – you most certainly want to show up in Google Search! – this listing provides the search engine with crucial information about your business. It’s as simple as that. Want to show up when potential clients look up “roofing companies in Fort Worth, TX”? Fill out that listing. Just make sure that you use the same GMB address for all future Facebook, Better Business Bureau, and other citation profiles. Even differences in abbreviations make a difference!

Optimized Website

Use a Website Designed for Google Search

Our guide, “What Does Google Want For Roofers to Optimize Online?” (link at the bottom), goes into detail on the critical parts of search engine optimization. Just because a website looks nice, that doesn’t mean it performs well in local search. An optimized website has:

Schema Coding
Quality Content
Easy Navigation
Professional Design

We highly recommend you read our guide. A quick word of advice: Even if you have to ultimately throw away your website design, hold onto the domain name. Too many roofing companies make the mistake of throwing away their URL (web addresses). Trashing your URL is tantamount to erasing all your online marketing progress and starting from square one. It takes months to recover, so hold onto that domain!

Client Reviews

Actively Ask for Client Reviews

One of the easiest but underperformed tasks for online marketing is simply asking for reviews at the end of every successful job. Client reviews make a huge impact on any business’ success! That’s because it shows dependability, trustworthiness, and accountability for your brand. Roofing companies that don’t ask for reviews inevitably rank poorly because only angry clients take the time to go online and rate them.

There’s no other way to say it. Ask for reviews!

One of the easiest ways to ensure a higher response rate is to text clients a link to your Google My Business and Facebook Business pages. Try and collect reviews from both sites if possible, as Google respects feedback from multiple sources. If you prefer the old-fashioned method, provide your business card with the links printed at the bottom.

Team Up With Roofing Webmasters

Those are the three simple steps to starting your online marketing presence. Whether you like Google or not, your clients love it! It may take some time to adapt to this new advertising channel, but leads are worth pursuing. Of course, our team at Roofing Webmasters would love to make the transition process as easy as possible for you.

How Many Roofs Would a Roofer Roof? (Podcast)

Setting your expectations for the future, finding a fruitful city to operate in, and optimizing your online efforts all represent significant challenges for a roofing contractor. With such a heavily fluctuating market, it’s easy to panic when your service area hasn’t seen a business-driving storm in many years. Nolen and Jason discuss strategy in the latest podcast, whether there’s a storm on the horizon. So if you’ve struggled with earning the long-term growth, your roofing company craves, be sure to listen in.

Key Points in Our Podcast:

Most roofing contractors (and family members) don’t know how to optimize.
Changing locations impacts SEO results.
There are multiple ways to earn business after major storms.
Don’t let peak storm years affect your expectations for non-storm years.

Roofing SEO and Strategic Planning

A tiny segment of roofing professionals can effectively chase after hail storms and hurricanes and turn them into profit. While every eager contractor indeed longs for the year they earn 750 roofing clients a single storm year, that’s not the norm for most businesses. It simply makes more sense for the vast majority of roofers to put down roots and work for steady growth. Not only is it more pleasant for your family and staff, but it’s also better for your roofing SEO.

How Location Shifting Effects Online Performance

Believe it or not, Google works extremely hard to develop lists of the most dependable industry professionals within a geographical area. Search engines evaluate E-A-T factors (expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness) when choosing top rankings. So what kind of businesses capture these coveted front page listings?

Common Factors Among Top-Ranked Companies

They earn high reviews from a variety of platforms.
They optimize their websites, PPC, and social for Google.
They continually feed content back into their website.
They’ve filled out all applicable business listings.
They stay in place and gradually expand.

All the factors listed above drive traffic towards your roofing company’s website. The last two likely affect your results the most. Nothing impacts local search rankings more than a location change. Even changing addresses within the same city can change your rankings, for better or for worse. Google’s search algorithm gets very picky when it comes to changes in address. Even a minor difference in how you abbreviate the same address between multiple online listings may lower your chances of seeing front-page listings.

So don’t go changing your address without doing significant research prior!

Below, you’ll find a few critical rules of thumb regarding changing location and how changes affect your roofing SEO. If you make any of these mistakes, it’s not the end of the world. However, you will likely need to partner with an experienced online marketing professional to get your team back on track for search.

Switching Cities

Mistake #1: Switching Cities & Expecting Immediate Results

It takes roofing contractors years to develop an established reputation in a city. Google’s vetting process is a never-ending cycle of evaluation and re-evaluation. That’s why it’s so frustrating to see a successful business jump ship and move to a new city, then expect the same level of success from the get-go.

Any business that moves to a different location, especially out of state, can anticipate the old challenge of earning credibility in their comparative market. In our podcast, Jason and Nolen speak of a former client who opened up two new locations within the same state and couldn’t understand why they didn’t see immediate results. The situation was made more heated when the prolific storm damage market dried up in its original location.

Our Lesson: SEO results take time to grow in each new location.

Virtual Offices

Mistake #2: Setting Up Virtual Offices With Friends/Families

Just don’t do it. Google’s grace for virtual offices seems to have run out for the time being. It may seem like a lucrative method to expand the reach of your service area, but business listings can get suspended (and delisted from search results) for this sort of behavior. In reality, you’ll be shooting your business in the foot and slowing down lead generation.

Our Lesson: If you need to expand, do it the natural way. Create new physical locations for your company and let your friends and family avoid the hassle.

Home Business

Mistake #3: Moving Business Out of Your Home Too Early

Like many famous bands, roofing contractors typically start working out of a garage. You’ve probably used your home address for Google My Business and other listings. That’s perfectly fine! Our word of caution applies to businesses that are looking to take on a second location.

When you take the plunge and open up an official company office, your home address can no longer serve as a company location. One good office deserves another, so Google seems to believe. Your rankings could suffer if you ignore this crucial rule.

Our Lesson: If you can’t afford to move business entirely out of the house, don’t open up that new office just yet. However, if you’re ready to move, you’ll need to either close your home (as a company location) or open up a second office.

How Many Lead Calls is Normal?

Before finishing our discussion, we need to touch on many roofing contractors who seem to struggle with lead volume. Your average lead generation rate depends on multiple factors, such as:

Local climate and storm frequency
Service area populations
Economy
Marketing practices
Management & staff capabilities
Competition
Category of roofing

Some commercial roofers feel happy with just three projects a month, considering their larger scope and higher value. Residential companies may need a minimum of 8 to 12 to earn their target monthly revenue. While your market may produce a higher volume of leads, it’s crucial to establish a baseline average.

Why Storm Seasons Make for Poor Baselines

Suppose a business operates near the Florida coast or a Texas coastal city like Corpus Christi. In one average year, the company might see an average of 200 projects completed. However, after a particularly destructive hurricane season, the yearly amount may rise to three times as many projects. While that may provide opportunities to expand the business (or buy that dream home), owners need to remember that business eventually returns to the baseline. Forgetting that could lead to undue financial stress and overstaffing.

Contact the Roofing Webmasters

At the Roofing Webmasters, we support numerous roofing contractors across the nation. Whether you depend on storm seasons or normal wear and tear for the bulk of your projects, our team can help you optimize your online presence to earn more substantial results from Google Search. As a result, clients dominate their local search rankings, enjoying better traffic and faster lead generation.