Tag Archives: Organic SEO

Roofing, Marketing, and the Truth About Leads (Podcast)

Are you fed up with your roofing lead generation? It’s a story we hear so many times at Roofing Webmasters: “I need leads, but I hate paying my company for them.” In our latest podcast, Jason and Nolen discuss the truth behind leads and where they ultimately originate. So if you’ve never considered how your lead-selling company works, be sure to listen in.

Helpful Tips for Lead Generation:

Don’t forget: lead-selling services make local businesses compete for the same pool of leads.
PPC campaigns offer better results than lead vendors, especially in tandem with local SEO!
Organic SEO makes lead generation much more affordable for many roofing contractors.
Always start your roofing SEO efforts by completing your Google My Business profile!

Lead Generation: Feeding Business

Have you ever met someone who only eats at fast-food restaurants? When they complain about the soaring costs of eating out, you want to point to the nearest grocery store and say, “Make it yourself!” While the process may take a bit of work, preparing your meals is ultimately much cheaper than dining out. That’s just a fact of life!

When it comes to online marketing, learning to feed yourself is just as important. Even so, thousands of roofing companies are stuck waiting for a third-party lead generation vendor to spoon-feed their business. All the while, those same vendors gather leads from the same sources that roofers should target independently.

How Roofing Leads are Born

Picture this: A laborer and a smooth-talking salesman walk next to an enormous freshwater river. On the bank of the water, the hard-working laborer notes the extreme heat and moans about how thirsty they’ve become on the walk. Then, as the two near the clean water supply, they happen upon a bucket set on the shoreline. The salesman walks up to the buck, dips it deep in the river, turns around to the laborer, and says, “For $20,000, I will give you a sip of this water.”

This story sounds ridiculous, but it amply describes many roofing contractors and lead generation.

Google delivers the most significant volume of roofing leads than any other digital source in the United States. The search engine craves trustworthy businesses to direct consumers and even provides free tools to simplify the process. In addition, because Google matches consumers with companies in their local community, the resulting lead quality is generally much better than other sources.

Lead generation companies step in and create a gap between consumers browsing through Google Search and roofing companies hunting for customers. Instead of connecting interested homeowners and businesses directly to a single local contractor, they offer the same leads to multiple roofing companies within the same community. This “lead” may be a person who’s simply looking for prices or bids, not a ready-to-buy individual to complicate matters further.

Alternative Lead Sources

Maybe you don’t buy leads from another company. Perhaps you buy them from PPC campaigns off Google Ads or Facebook. These advertising venues aren’t as cheap as they used to be, but they provide a dependable lead source. You also only pay for clicks, a very actionable source of business.

While PPC offers plenty of opportunities to grow your business, it represents an equally dangerous source of lead generation addiction.

After all, these campaigns are relatively easy to manage and remarkably simple to track results. Moreover, even if a roofing company owner is too busy to run the campaigns themselves, dozens of digital marketing experts are willing to handle the load. That, of course, makes the endeavor even more expensive.

What’s the Solution?

Generate the leads yourself! You know all those businesses sitting at the top of your local search results are there for a reason. Self-sustaining lead generation doesn’t happen spontaneously. For example, those successful roofing contractors exercised the meager time, money, and effort necessary to win. Now they reap in the outstanding traffic and leads.

You don’t have to give up on purchasing leads or running campaigns all at once. Instead, simply start putting a little money each month into developing a long-term supply of clients.

Your brand starts to earn greater recognition.
Only your company enjoys each lead.
The average lead is so much cheaper.
The average lead is of much higher quality.

If you’re tired of paying out the nose for leads, or if you’re curious about creating more growth for your roofing business, we’d love to help.

Why Flat Fee Pricing Is Bad For You (Podcast)

Do you ever feel like things would be easier if digital marketing companies just lumped roofing SEO and PPC together? Unfortunately, they do, and it’s a colossal disaster! Find out about subtle pricing scams, conflicts of interest, and shocking markups that will have you rethinking the idea of bundling. Jason and Nolen reveal all this, plus how to make sure you get your money’s worth with digital marketing!

Helpful Insights Into Roofing SEO:

Make sure you get itemized billing for your marketing company’s PPC spending!
Bundling PPC and SEO for roofers could be a big mistake.
Organic SEO leads tend to be much cheaper than those won with advertising.

Enough Success to Get By

How does your online marketing company make money? It’s a simple but provocative question that we don’t think about very often. Marketing firms make money by retaining clients. To do so, agencies must consistently provide evidence that their efforts produce a return for those businesses.

That all changes when a company introduces the upfront, flat fee contract.

In a way, a flat fee contract is the ultimate judge of a marketing firm’s character. When they already have your money, will they continue working hard to produce results? Or will they coast along with just enough effort to get by? While some companies try their best no matter what pricing they offer, others practically abandon their projects until they have to show progress.

The Familiar Marketing Lines

So how can a roofing business wade through the crowd of dishonest marketing claims? It all starts with recognizing the red flags! So if you hear any of the following lines from a digital advertising firm, it’s probably time to look elsewhere.

“Noticeable results in organic SEO may take up to a year.”
“You only need [insert service], and you’ll start getting leads!”
“For a couple of hundred bucks a month, we’ll dramatically improve your website performance!”
“SEO is just too complicated to explain. Trust us!”
“SEO isn’t worth the money. Only paid search works.”
“Unfortunately, we can’t show performance reports for our advertising campaigns.”
“You’ll share these leads with a small pool of roofers in your area.”

The best digital marketing firms will always be happy to explain their process in a way you can understand. They don’t claim unbelievable capabilities, nor do they trade their service for pennies. After all, you wouldn’t trust a brand new roof that only costs you a hundred bucks! If you want a trustworthy marketing service that offers SEO for roofers, look for teams that provide measurable goals, believable time commitments, and justified costing reports.

One Huge Conflict of Interests

What happens when your marketing company bundles all of its services into one convenient package? You quickly lose sight of where the money goes! We’ve heard it countless times: a firm promises PPC and SEO for roofers in a bundle, but they only end up spending 50-70% of their budget! Here’s another hard-hitting truth:

A company that bundles organic & paid search has zero incentive to improve your SEO.

PPC services offer a dependable stream of income for marketing companies. They can easily create primary campaigns in a short period and choose what keywords your business targets. Thanks to Google Ads and similar platforms, digital marketing teams can access reports that show campaign results without revealing how much they spent. That’s how they get away with unbelievable budget markups. Your advertising company can then provide just enough leads to keep you hooked.

A company that provides success in SEO, however, produces more sustainable growth for your business. For example, if an advertising company creates a highly optimized website that gives you cheap yet quality leads, why would you keep spending money on PPC? Unfortunately, that’s why firms that bundle PPC and SEO for roofers almost always spend all their time on paid search and neglect the company website.

We Break the Mold

At Roofing Webmasters, we always keep our organic and paid services separate from each other. Our clients also pay month to month; no flat fee pricing! Different packages encourage accountability and drive us to continue providing measurable success in both categories. Not only do we provide highly effective paid search campaigns (which you receive full cost-reporting for), we produce unique custom websites that make sustained growth.

Our roofing SEO customers continually rank phenomenally well in local search results, all while paying less than average for great leads.

Don’t let a dishonest marketing firm string you along without providing real growth for your business! Our team at Roofing Webmasters offers reliable, measurable results for your company.

The Impending Recession for Roofers (Podcast)

In a healthy roofing industry, it may seem wise to drop all of your low-dollar services in favor of more extensive profit services. Don’t throw away that roof repair page just yet, though! Nolen and Jason discuss the current market and how contractors can protect their business during the recession with SEO for roofers. So if you’ve got concerns about the future of your roofing company, be sure to listen in carefully!

Key Points to Listen For:

Economic indicators point towards a potential recession in the next few years.
Lower dollar services offer invaluable revenue during a recession.
Few marketing activities will provide as dependable results as SEO for roofers.

SEO For Roofers: Recession Preparations

While there’s no exact timeline predicted for the next recession (we’re hoping for never), it pays to prepare your business against potential economic downturns. That’s especially true for roofing contractors, who live and die by the whims of the housing market. We can easily predict what would happen for the average roofing professional in the event of a recession.

The Traditional Slowing of the Roofing Industry:

Phase #1: Home sales start to decline.
Phase #2: The average homeowner grows stricter with their budget.
Phase #3: Non-essential projects (i.e., roofing upgrades) slow dramatically.
Phase #4: As budgets tighten, even more, homeowners wait longer for repairs.
Phase #5: Underprepared contracting companies go out of business.
Phase #6: The market starts to recover.

It’s a sad but recurring process that many roofing companies don’t survive. Companies go into the stricter economic period unprepared for the surge in competition. While storm seasons and the odd hail market may provide relief, a company can’t count on random storms.

So what should your business do to prepare for the next recession? Start diving into SEO for roofers, and establish your presence online now! A year or two years from now could be too late to start preparing. Below, we’ll explain why developing your organic search program currently could save you in the next few years.

Reason #1: Saving a Lot of Money

So business is booming, and for the first time in a while, you have some company cash saved up. That’s where you come to a fork in the road. Do you spend the money on traditional marketing, paid search campaigns, or organic development? We’ll explain in a bit why the typical advertising (including door knocking) might not work so well shortly. For now, we’ll focus on PPC vs. Organic SEO!

Pay-per-click campaigns offer more control and customization than ever before. For one, you can target the precise geographic radius that you want your ads to appear in. You can also refine your target audience on platforms like Google Ads and Facebook Ads. These solutions work so effectively that many roofing contractors forgo continued website development and double down on PPC.

Focussing exclusively on PPC is generally a bad idea, but it could hurt your business even more during a recession.

Why? Because ads cost money. Thanks to a healthy housing market, most roofers do well enough to avoid using paid ads (even when they shouldn’t). However, when the housing market starts to dry up, businesses without an established organic presence flock to Google Ads and other ad platforms in desperation. The surge in competition leads to incredible spikes in costs-per-click (CPCs), which could quickly eat up your marketing budget!

You could try to buy these leads from a lead selling company. If the numerous complaints we hear from roofing contractors are any indication, however, that’s a sticky and expensive situation you’d be better off avoiding. So that leaves SEO for roofers.

SEO for Roofers in a Paid Google Ads Platform

How Organic SEO Saves Money

Ranking #1 in Google Search is a dream many contractors share, but it’s not one many know how to pursue. The most effective SEO strategies begin with website optimization because most curious readers turn into actual leads. Once your roofing company website is up, running, and ranking up in Google local map results, however, you’ll notice something unique:

Organic search generates higher quality leads than PPC and is cheaper!

While search engine optimization certainly takes a concentrated effort during website development and content marketing, you won’t have to spend all your time managing the site. A well-crafted company portal will naturally generate leads with only moderate updates required every so often. Cheap, high-quality, and relatively easy leads. What’s not to like?

Reason #2: Maintaining a Broader Spectrum of Services

In healthy roofing industries, homeowners call in for a variety of services. Unfortunately, with so much business to choose from, many contractors turn down low-dollar jobs to favor high-profit installations and replacements. At the Roofing Webmasters, we even have clients who think about taking off their “Roof Repair” pages so they can focus exclusively on installs. We strongly advise against that strategy, however, especially when it comes to recession markets.

During recessions, installation numbers plummet to the point that mostly repair jobs remain.

If only roof repair projects remain in the market, will contractors compete for those leads? You better believe it! Unfortunately, too many ride the wave of healthy-market projects without ever investing in their long-term online performance. Even a little effort here and there can reap huge dividends once your brand earns more experience online.

What sort of activities can you complete now to become an established contractor?

Complete your Google My Business listing.
Optimize your company website pages with a diverse keyword strategy.
Create profiles in BBB and other helpful citation sources.
Ask for reviews consistently! Please.

Even if you don’t have the resources to create a fully optimized website, you can efficiently perform these actions without breaking the bank. If you complete the work now, you can reap the rewards down the road when other unprepared contractors (who neglected their SEO for roofers) are struggling for business. Make it easier to earn leads and reinforce your business against a likely recession; that’s two birds hit with one stone.

An SEO Company for Roofers

At Roofing Webmasters, we support contractors from all around the United States. Our dedicated team of web designers, content writers, social media analysts, and strategists work together to deliver outstanding SEO for roofers. As a result, clients regularly enjoy front-page rankings, higher site traffic, and better quality leads.