Drive more leads with our relentless process

Roofing SEO Systems That Can Double or Triple Your Leads

Search Engine Optimization or SEO for short is the practice of optimizing and marketing your website to encourage search engines to rank your website higher in their results. This means that sites with better SEO will bring in more traffic each month.

But the most critical part of SEO is the keywords that you’re trying to rank for. As a roofing company, you are only interested in bringing in traffic that is interested in a new roof, so, you must market your website to rank highly for roofing related queries.

We have been doing roofing SEO for years, and we know the websites that we can build links from and the ones that we can’t.

This gives us a unique ability to rank your site for competitive keywords that will bring in targeted traffic each month, the kinds of people who have their credit cards in their hands and are already ready to purchase.

Check it out – we recently got out and roofed a house with one of our clients!

Building Your Brand and Getting Serious Results

If you do any marketing at all for your roofing company, digital marketing should be it.

As the most cost-effective marketing strategy for small and medium-sized businesses, digital marketing can help propel you ahead of the competition without breaking the bank.

We’ll work with you to discuss your business goals and which digital marketing strategies to implement to meet them. We love helping small businesses thrive with Roofing SEO and we’re looking forward to teaming up with you!

What is Roofing SEO? (What is it, and how do you do it?)

Roofing SEO is just a method for getting your website higher on Google:

• Creating content that gets indexed on Google.
• Optimizing your service pages ‘meta titles’ and ‘meta descriptions’ to attract high ranking and clicks from Google.
• Ensuring your website pages are well-ordered, and load quickly (and other technical SEO tasks)
• You can do it yourself – or have a company do it!
• Tons more tips and getting started ideas below.

Roofing SEO: Do it yourself? vs. Hiring an Agency vs. Hiring Internally

You need 3 basic things if you want to rank CURRENTLY in Google (Especially for competitive keywords.)

• A Rhythm for putting out content on your website.
• A Network of sites, or a system for getting more links from other sites back to yours.
• Good website ‘hygiene’, continually improving the site technically so its well-ordered.

We have 15+ roofing SEO clients (60+ five-star reviews), I’ve helped people go from 50 to 1500 leads each year, these methods once got a client 1200 leads in 3 weeks after a storm (no shit) – we are constantly leveling up our strategies, we collab with people like Dmitry Lipinskiy of Roofing Insights, JobNimbus the CRM an their people, SumoQuote… I’m always picking these peoples brains about how we can make what we’re doing better. Not to mention – every single roofing clients PROBLEMS with our service sharpen us, and I’m obsessed with getting better, and our team is too…

In this section we’re going to break down how to do each of these things. Either YOURSELF (if your 100k-1M you should be doing some of your own marketing, cheap SEO companies are dog shit,) I’ll explain exactly what we do to rank our clients consistently on first page, and WHO to hire if you wanted to do this internally and how to equip them to win. (I believe that can be a good option if you have more than 2-3 marketers on your team – so bigger companies.)

FIRST OF ALL – THE RHYTHM FOR PUTTING OUT CONTENT ON YOUR WEBSITE:

Yourself: Read ‘They Ask, You Answer’, listen for common questions in the sales process, read some articles on ‘Keyword Research’, try out Ahrefs for the $7 trial for 7 days, make a list of topics, and make pages on your website for your top 10 cities you target.

What we do: We create a year content calendar and use our tools to find keywords with higher volume but lower competition, We have a separate Roofing SEO writer crank out those landing pages and blog posts focused on persuasion (the title + first paragraph should grab peoples attention) and they focus on getting the keyword and synonyms in there. We double back every 3-6 months and improve things that ranked. We’re always trying to challenge the audience and emotionally Hook them on what the company does better than competitors and why they choose you, from what’s been working in the sales process too.

If you Hire an internal person: Find someone who can write! Buy them courses on keyword research and competitive analysis, and persuasive writing – have them complete a course a month, and create an aggressive monthly goal for blog posts and landing pages to finish.

SECOND – YOU’LL NEED A STRATEGY FOR GETTING LINKS BACK TO YOUR WEBSITE:

If it’s just you – Great! You can use your entrepreneur vibes and do outreach to sites that might let you write for them, you can pitch HARO – Help a Reporter Out, and you’ll land 1 out of every 5. You can do local directory listings, and press release distribution. SEO is a long-game though, so consider doing a few days push (doing all of the above) and then coming back to it every couple of months trying to do another push, otherwise you can burn yourself out. But it does become fun as you start your first few keywords.

If you hire us – we do all of the same things. Local directory listings, press release, guest post outreach, anything really where we see opportunities to get more links at scale. We’ve got a network of sites that we can tap that are home services related or about construction.

If you hire an internal person: The real deal here is you’re probably going to want to have a BUDGET + have someone internally working on this (can be the writer/marketer – just find someone that is vigorous.) Even if you just email 100 websites and ask to write for their website (a great way to get backlinks), 90 won’t answer you and 6 or 7 out of 10 that do answer you will ask for some $ to publish a ‘guest post’ on your site. If you mention you’d pay in the subject line, your hit rate will go up substantially, just keep the $ low and you can negotiate later.

THIRD – GOOD WEBSITE HYGIENE:

Just you – Install the YOAST plugin, or the RankMath plugin on WordPress, write out all of your key pages meta titles and descriptions. Ensure things like tags and categories are de-indexed, start learning a bit of basic technical SEO if you can.

If you hire us – We do the stuff I just mentioned + we are always looking for little improvements like schema markup that gives Google more info about what it’s trying to parse, and a lot of our big effort in this area is around upgrading content that starts ranking, and doing ‘on page SEO’ which just means adding additional information, and formatting to ensure the page or post has the most advantage possible when ranking.

If you hire an internal person: This might be the hardest one to approximate with a hire (who’s primary job doesn’t have ‘SEO’ somewhere in the title.) Realistically – this might not be your 3rd marketing hire, but in my opinion you might want it to be in your top 10.

IN SHORT – UP TO 1M… LEARN SEO. YOU DESERVE IT, IT’S A GREAT TIME.

1M – 10M – Have an agency do it for you. It’s really hard to know a hard-working SEO focused marketer from a sloppy book report writer.

10M+ Consider augmenting your internal marketing team at least with technical SEO.

100M+ What are you doing here – just hire a technical SEO, Writer and P.R focused backlink person silly. 🙂

Quick value proposition SLASH Why we’re different than other marketing agencies- if you ever want to work with my company HOOK AGENCY:

• We only work with contractors
• We do gorgeous websites, AND we know SEO
• We take vigorous monthly action on peoples behalf for their SEO. 60+ five-star reviews, collab with industry experts, get shit done Google Specialized team
• Thank you so much for reading, and have an amazing day!

The Quick-start SEO Guide for Roofing Companies

It’s time to take big action if you haven’t already…

If you’ve ever bought SEO – I’m sorry to let you know that a lot of SEO companies don’t know how to get serious results for roofing companies. But even if you’ve had SEO “done on your site” I think you should go ensure these things are done, a lot of SEO people are scams and/or snake oil, or they do crazy shit and think that’s all SEO is…

This is rubber hits the road stuff… Listen up.

Have I got some money-making tips for you. No joke, if you took JUST these 7 tips and implemented them vigorously over the next week – you will no doubt see your traffic from Google go up significantly.

Don’t be the business owner that leaves 10’s of thousands of dollars on the table – just because you don’t want to take 10-20 hours and make sure your website is as visible as possible on Google. Do these 7 things now, and reap the benefits over the next 3 to 6 months. 

1. DO LOCAL DIRECTORY LISTINGS + GET AS MANY 5-STAR REVIEWS AS POSSIBLE.

What are “local directory listings?”
Local directly listings are exactly what they sound like – any local directories around the web that allow you to add a business to them. The most important part is that they all have the EXACT SAME –
A. Name
B. Address
C. Phone Number

That’s why these are often called ‘NAP listings’ – Get them now by using Yext, Moz Local, or even a Fiverr Gig.
Why do 5-star reviews get you higher on Google?

Google literally uses 5-star reviews to choose who to show at the top of the maps. Do everything in your power to get more of them as soon as possible, then make it a habit to ask every happy customer.

How to do it: Getting more 5-star reviews
Use Podium, PulseM, or just ask in a heartfelt way a couple of weeks after you’ve completed work for them – like I do! 

2. WRITE META-TITLES & DESCRIPTIONS FOR ALL OF YOUR TOP MONEY-MAKING SERVICE PAGES.

What do meta-titles and descriptions do?

A “meta-title” is the blue text that shows in Google search results pages.
A “meta description” is the text that shows below it.
You can actually change what this text is – by using a tool like Yoast SEO, or editing it in your content management system / website backend.

Why are they so important and how will this make you money?

These meta-titles and descriptions are INSANELY important for getting higher on Google. Your money-making keywords should be towards the beginning of these, and you should use a blend of different keywords – use a tool like Ahrefs, SEMRush, or Google Keyword Planner to see what terms have the most searches – but even attempting to guess at what people are searching and changing these would be better than not filling them out at all.

How to do it: First Install Yoast SEO, or RankMath – or make sure your content management system (we use WordPress) has an option to edit meta-titles and descriptions.

Here’s an example of what writing a meta-title & description WordPress – with Yoast SEO looks like:

3. CREATE VIDEOS FOR ALL OF YOUR KEY SERVICE PAGES.

Why does video even matter for getting more Google traffic and getting leads?

Video is powerful because it helps people stay on your page longer, and it tells the story / gives your differentiating features more quickly than any other method. Check out the way we integrated the most recent video on First American’s site along with other ‘trust factors’ to help people get why they are the ONLY choice in their area for roofing services.

Introducing – Dwell Time & Bounce Rate

You know that Google is smart right?

They can tell when people stay on your website – and when they jump right back to search results after viewing your page.
Dwell time = How long they stay, and it’s one component that determines whether Google will serve you up again and whether you get higher in the results.

Bounce rate = When people leave the site quickly – Google counts that against you, and too high of a bounce rate, and boom – you drop in rankings.

How to do it: Flip out that phone or get a decent DSLR video camera

Are you convinced you need to get videos on your site yet – to help people stay on your site longer? Flip out that iPhone and film yourself talking in front of a good looking backdrop, or up on the top of the roof. Take it to the next level with a DSLR camera, and use Premiere Pro or iMovie to mix together something magical that will keep them watching for a full minute and a half. Boom! Your dwell time average is headed in the right direction.

4. GET 5 GUEST POST LINKS BACK TO YOUR SITE.

Guest post providers

We help our clients get more guest post links back to their site – amongst 10 other methods for getting links back to the site. The concept is simple, find a site with high ‘domain authority’ (check it out with the tool Mozbar) or ‘domain rating’ (check it out with the tool Ahrefs,) and ask them if you can write a blog post for them – then link back to your site.

Anchor text

Once you get someone to let you – pay attention to the text you link back to your site with. It should be a mix of your brand, your URL, random text, brand + your money-making keyword, and for your best links just the keyword = likely [your city] + [your service].

Doing this vigorously month after month helped our client get to be #1 for ‘La Crosse Roofing’.

Do it now: 3 Places to get guest posts:

Outreach Mama
Authority Builders
NoBS.link

5. WRITE 700+ WORDS FOR ALL OF YOUR SERVICE PAGES, USE FAQ’S TO AUGMENT YOUR CONTENT

Why word count matters = Google needs context to what the page is about

Google can’t read your mind, you have to write content to explain your service, use your keyword in subheads, and at the beginning and end of the page. Bold a sentence with the keyword, and talk about sub-topics (synonyms + LSI keywords / related words to the main topic.)

How do you figure out what to write about?

Google your main topic and look at the words at the bottom ‘people also search for’, and ‘people also ask’, but the best way to add content is by thinking about what your ideal customers want to know about, and asking your salespeople what people ask the most often during the sales process.

Do it now: Google your main services and look at the ‘people also ask’ meta boxes.
Write answers to this content and add the text to your service pages, alternating images and text so it doesn’t suffer from the dreaded ‘wall of text’ – which might drive actual-ideal customers away once they hit the page.

6. GET AT LEAST 3 ‘GIANT GUIDES’ OUT ON THE SITE TO AUGMENT “TIME ON SITE.”

Google loves giant content

For some reason – Google loves when you provide comprehensive content, and it definitely increases ‘dwell time’, we’ve also seen a lot of evidence that this topical relevance gets shared to different content, not just the guide.

So if you provided a 3000-word guide for ‘siding materials’ – your ‘siding’ page would get more love in Google.
Sounds weird – but I’ve seen it over and over again, and it’s badass.

Know your ideal customer – and create big guides they’d love – make them super-comprehensive

Don’t just write content just to rank though – write stuff that actual customers will love. That’s why starting with questions your ideal customers ask, and then using one of the keyword research tools to find what keywords people Google related to that is powerful.

How to do it: take a guess, Google that, and see if you can make something 10X as good as the next thing that exists.

7. INSTALL YOAST SEO, AND DE-INDEX YOUR THIN & DUPLICATE CONTENT.

Yoast SEO is awesome

Yoast SEO makes de-indexing thin and duplicate content easy – you just need to know where to look. This is easily one of the most impactful things you can do for your site in less than 10 minutes.

Most sites have problems with it!

Lots of sites create extra random pages that don’t show up on the site in an obvious way – if you’ve never worked with a professional SEO company (and sometimes if you have worked with a low-end provider) your site PROBABLY has this, unfortunately. Low-end web designers who work with themes have horrible problems with this – don’t blame them, they don’t know any better!

Why thin and duplicate content has to be completely de-indexed

Thin and duplicate content makes your site look like it is a watered-down mess, and it’s hard for Google to know what page to serve up. In turn, your site might be getting much lower rankings than it deserves – when low-end providers get served above the best – we find that JUST PLAIN WRONG.

How to do it: Install Yoast, tap SEO > Search Appearance, and De-index tags, categories, and any testimonials or miscellaneous post types.

Just a reminders on some of the website stuff…. If you haven’t done these things already from the persuasive web design lesson.

BONUS: GET A SOLID ‘ONE-TWO PUNCH’ AROUND THE SITE OF CALL-TO-ACTION + TRUST FACTORS – TO INCREASE YOUR CONVERSION RATE.

Who cares if you get people to your site and they don’t convert. Make sure your site looks high-end, and always ask for business with a blend of ‘trust factors’ like badges and testimonials + a contact form.

We love having a ‘get a free consultation’ right away on every service page – and this seems to increase leads right off the bat.

Writing Content That Converts: SEO Blogging for Roofing Companies

1. Content that solves the problem for a prospect if they were trying to do it themselves.

One of the examples of this… “How to quickly mitigate a roof leak…” You may not be the one to handle that, but then you can get the business of a repair or the replacement

2. Content that helps them at an earlier point than you’d normally help, but introduces your solution.

• How much should a roof cost
• What types of shingles are the best
• How to pick your siding colors + trim

3. Content that explains the entire strategy in detail, but also demonstrates all of the work to do it right.

• How to roof a house

4. Content that talks about a competing solution, and also tells them ‘there’s another way!

• Is there a giant national competitor in town
• Why not to use home advisor or Angies list like a big purchase like a roof…

4 Content that lists the 5-10 solutions they could use (including your competitors) and sells your specialty within it.

• Best Roofing Companies in your city – For instance ‘8 Best Galveston, TX Roofing Companies’ or ‘5 Best Roofing Companies in Denver‘

5. Talk about the problem! Problem, Agitation, Solution formula (or PAS). 

6. The content upgrade… just make a bigger, better version of existing content that ranks

You can let them download the full thing at the end of the shorter version, in exchange for their e-mail. Voila – a lead!

Get Higher on Google Maps (Advanced Tips for Roofers)

1. Create or claim your Google My Business listing
2. Verify your Google My Business listing by call or postcard.
3. Update your Name, Address and Phone Number to current, accurate information.
4. Ensure you’ve filled out all of the relevant fields fully. (Correct service area + address, business hours/workdays – website, List your specific offerings, clearly and simply, try to add keywords in naturally when possible)
5. Ensure you’ve added all relevant categories
6. Add at least 3 high-quality photos (at least one of your office, your team, and quality work you’ve completed)
7. Get as many great reviews as possible (consider rewarding your employees for getting them)
8. Respond to all reviews – good or bad, professionally and cheerfully resolve disputes. (Ask for keywords in our reviews – add keywords to replies as well )
9. List your business in other directories (100+ perhaps) with the same name, address, and phone number. WhiteSpark has a great list of these in different areas + they have an amazing service if you want some meticulous The key is to Go back and anywhere your company is mentioned – ensure consistency on name, address and phone number
10. Ensure you have landing pages for all of the top 5 cities you serve – and have keyword focused meta titles and descriptions.
11.  Create local content that helps people in your area, beyond just your sales pages.
12. Make the link on your Google My Business yourwebsite.com/?gmb (so that you can track progress and visits in Google Analytics)
13. Corresponding landing pages with keyword rich meta titles + descriptions
14. Use Click through focused language not just the keywords
15. Location-based keywords in the anchor text of inbound links to your domain
16. A good quantity of inbound links to your domain from locally relevant domains. (You also want a diversity of inbound links to your domain – here’s how.)
17. Get links from local websites through sponsorship Links in your area. Intitle: sponsors “minneapolis” -&num=100 (mozbar to download Csv file of all results) pitch w $500
18. A video with the city, state zip in name
19. XIF location data – generator – geoimgr – or use a Geo tagged map photo plugin