The acronym SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which is the practice of increasing your roofing business rankings in the organic search engine results. Roofing SEO will benefit your roofing business because it can naturally pull hot leads that are actively looking for a roofer from google that is ready to buy. Google already has your ideal customers on its platform, you just need to tap into it. Roofing SEO in its essence is getting your website found on Google’s platform. Relevance, having a website that is highly relevant to your service and location.
Quality Content, having comprehensive content that is helpful for your reader to make a decision.
Authority, having mentions from other websites referring back to your site.
There is no doubt that ranking higher than other roofing contractors on search engines like Google or Bing is necessary. But what if you don’t understand the roofing SEO tricks and trips that will get your roofing website to the top? If you are missing out on clicks, you are actually losing leads/sales to your competitors.
BlackStorm Roofing Marketing has come to be known as the best PPC destination. But we also understand SEO, and roofers ask us all the time for a primer on SEO basics. This post will be an overview and introduction to Search Engine Optimization (SEO), a mandatory marketing strategy if you want your roofing website to be found through search engines such as Google.
In this guide to SEO for roofing contractors, you will learn:
- What is Roofing SEO, and why is it crucial
- Best practices for keyword targeting and keyword research
- Best practices for on-page optimization
- Best practices for information architecture
- How to execute link-building and content marketing
- Common technical Roofing SEO best practices and problems
- Implementation stage
- How long roofing SEO takes
- How to measure & track SEO results for roofers
- Additional Roofing SEO considerations (such as international and local SEO practices, mobile)
Welcome to Your Roofing SEO Learning Journey
By the time you reach the end of this guide, you will have learned about Roofing SEO, why it is essential, and how to obtain awesome results in a dynamic SEO environment.
What is roofing SEO, and why is it crucial?
You might have heard about SEO, and if you have not heard already, you can look for a quick definition on Wikipedia, but knowing that SEO is the “process of influencing your site visibility on the search engine’s unpaid results” will not help answer essential questions for your roofing website and business such as:
- How do you optimize your website for search engines?
- How do you estimate the time needed to do SEO?
- How can you tell good roofing SEO advice from bad ones?
At its core, roofing SEO focuses on expanding your roofing website’s visibility in the organic search results. It helps roofing companies to rank high on Search Engine Results pages. And in turn, drive more prospects to your site and increase chances for conversions. In short, SEO drives two things: visibility and rankings.
As an employee or business owner, your priority is how you can leverage SEO to help drive relevant sales, leads, and traffic, and ultimately, profit and revenue for your roofing business.
That’s what we will cover in this post!
Why Should You Invest in Roofing SEO?
What is the first thing you do when you want to buy a new product or service?
What about when you notice a flat tire in your car?
My guess: you turn to Google.
But did you know that more than 80% of online shoppers or B2B buyers do the same?
Faced with a challenge, choice, or even a problem, they Google it.
And so, it’s a harsh truth that if your site does not have a presence on Google, then your roofing business will not survive for long.
Lots and lots of prospects search for things online. That traffic can be extremely crucial for a roofing company not only because it’s huge traffic, but because there is a lot of high-intent, very-specific traffic.
If you sell windscreens, would you rather pay for billboards so that every motorist sees your ad (whether they are interested in buying a windscreen or not) or appear on Google every time a prospect types “car windscreens” anywhere in the world? Probably the latter, since those prospects have a commercial intent implying that they want to purchase something you offer.
People are looking for all manner of things directly related to your roofing business. Beyond that, your potential clients are also looking for things that are not connected to your business. These present even more opportunities to connect with such folks, help solve their problems, answer their questions, and become a trusted resource.
Are you more likely to buy your windscreen from a trusted resource that provides great details each of the five times you turned to Google with a problem or from someone you have never heard of in the first place?
Inbound marketing strategies are those that you set up to have potential clients come to you. The best example of an inbound lead-generating machine is your roofing website.
Roofing SEO can be one of the most effective inbound marketing strategies when done properly.
Here is why:
Roofing SEO is Cost-Effective
Sure, time is money (and roofing SEO can actually take lots of time to master), but all factors are considered. Still, the process comes with minimal cost compared to the revenue it generates for your roofing business.
It generates High-Quality Leads.
High-quality roofing leads are the ones that are going to generate a lot of recurring revenue over time.
Based on your targeting and keyword choice options, roofing SEO can generate highly-intention website visitors that are essentially over 90% near closing when you speak to them over the phone.
Let’s say you are a metal roofing replacement contractor in Nashville, TN.
Consider the difference between cold calling a nearby property owner versus a prospect searching for “metal roof replacement contractors in Nashville, TN” and coming across your roofing website.
They are searching for something very specific- something your business can provide them instantly, and it’s very clear from the words they are using on Google search.
- Discovery: Placement higher on search engines impacts the ability of local property owners to find your roofing business
- Reputation: Ranking on top of Google search results impacts the way prospects see your roofing brand.
- Consideration: Low-ranking roofing contractors will not even get considered when potential clients want to book roofing jobs.
- Growth: Organic search empowers every aspect of roofing marketing, making it easier to grow.
What Drives Traffic From the Search Engines?
First, it is crucial to note that Google is responsible for most of the search engine traffic. Thus, Google is a dominant player in the search results that your website or business would want to appear in, and the best practices discussed in this post will help position your site and its content higher on the search engine results pages.
No matter the search engine you use, search results are always changing. Google has updated a lot of things surrounding how they rank roofing websites by way of their different algorithms.
So what works?
How does Google determine the pages that will show up for specific user queries?
How can you get all this relevant traffic to your website?
Google’s algorithm is overly complex, and we will share some important links for those who want to dive deeper into how Google ranks websites at the end of this post, but here are the highlights;
- Google is searching for roofing web pages that contain relevant, high-quality information about the user’s query.
- Google determines relevance by “crawling” your website content and assessing whether that content is relevant to what the user is looking for, based on the keywords it contains.
- They determine “quality” using various means, but prominent among them is the quality and number of sites that link to your roofing website.
Increasingly, more elements are being weighed by Google to determine where to rank your website, and it includes:
- How do people engage with your roofing website; (Do they find the information they need to stay glued on your site, or do they bounce back and click another link?)
- Your website’s mobile-friendliness and loading speed.
- How much high-value content do you have on your website (versus low-value or duplicate content)
There are hundreds, if not thousands, of ranking factors, the Google algorithm figures out in response to searches, and they are constantly refining and updating their process.
Fortunately, you don’t have to look for a search engine guru to rank for valuable roofing keywords in the search results. We will walk through repeatable, proven best practices for optimizing roofing websites that can help drive targeted traffic via search without compromising your website’s integrity. If you want to know how search engines work, there are tons of great resources, including;
Now, back to the basics of roofing SEO. Let’s dive into the SEO strategies and tactics that will help your roofing business get more traffic from search engines.
Keyword Targeting and Keyword Research Best Practices
The initial step in search engine optimization is to determine what you are optimizing your roofing website for. This implies identifying terms that people are actually looking for (also known as keywords) that you want your website to rank for in search engines such as Google.
Sounds simple, right? I want my car windscreen company to appear when people prospects search for “windscreens” and maybe when they type things like buy windscreen, onto the next step.
However, it is not that simple. Various important factors are considered when determining the keywords that you want to target in your roofing website, including;
- Search Volume: The first thing to consider is how many prospects (if any) are searching for a given roofing keyword. The more prospect there looking for a keyword, the bigger the audience you want to reach. On the flip side, if no one is looking for a keyword, there is no available audience to find your content via search.
- Relevance: If a keyword is frequently searched for, that’s awesome. But what if it’s not entirely relevant to your potential clients? Relevance seems easy at first; if you are selling email marketing automation software, you don’t want to appear in searches that are not relevant to your business, such as “pet supplies.” But what about keywords like “email marketing software”? This may look like a very good description of your job.
Still, suppose you are selling to fortune 100 companies. In that case, a huge portion of your traffic for this very competitive term will be searchers who don’t have any interest in purchasing your software (and folks you want to reach out to may never purchase your expensive, complex solution based on a simple Google search). Conversely, you may consider a tangential keyword like “best business PPC marketing solutions” that would be completely irrelevant since you don’t deal with “PPC marketing software.” But if your potential customer is a marketing director or CMO, getting in front of them with a valuable resource on assessing PPC tools could be an awesome first touch and a good way to build a relationship with your prospective buyer.
- Competition – Like with any other business opportunity, you want to analyze the chances of success and potential roofing SEO costs. For roofing SEO, this implies understanding the relative competition (chances of ranking) for particular terms.
First, you need to know who your potential customers are and what they will search for. If you don’t know who your potential clients are, consider that it is a great place to begin your roofing business in general and roofing SEO.
Next, you want to understand:
- What types of things are they interested in?
- What issues do they have?
- What kind of language do they use to describe the things they need or the tools they use?
- Who else are they purchasing from (this implies your competitors, but could also imply tangential, related tools for the email marketing company)?
Once you have tackled these questions, you will have the first seed list of possible domains and keywords to help you get further keyword ideas and consider some competition and search volume metrics.
Develop a list of core ways that your potential clients and customers explain what you do and begin to input, such as keyword research tools such as ubbersuggest.io or Google Keyword planner.
People around the globe require roofing services, but you want to target clients in your service area. To find them, geo-target your roofing SEO. Combine the names of cities and towns that you serve with search terms that people use to find a roofing contractor. For example, “Nashville Roofer” or “roofing contractor, Nashville, TN.” You will develop a list of keywords specific to finding a roofing contractor in your service area. Now, include these search terms into the title tags and body copy of your roofing website (make sure that you do it in a way that makes sense to your readers and watch your roofing website attain higher rankings in Google)
Once you have understood how your potential customers search and talk, and have examined the roofing keywords driving traffic to your rivals and those generating traffic on your website, you require to carefully examine the search terms you wish to rank for and where the best chances lie.
Determining the relative competition of your roofing keyword can be a daunting task. But you need to understand the following;
- How authoritative and trusted other roofing websites that will be trying to rank for the same keyword are
- How properly they are aligned with the roofing keyword?
- How authoritative and popular every individual page is in the search results
Roofing contractors can go deeper into determining how competitive a keyword is by following Backlinko in-depth guide here.
Besides, various tools can give you the difficult score of a given roofing keyword, including;
- SEMRUSH Keyword Difficulty Tool
- Moz SERP Analysis and Keyword Difficulty Tool
- Serpiq
- Seoprofiler
- Ultimatenichefinder
On-Page Optimization
After you have developed your roofing keyword seed list, including your targeted keywords in your website content, each page on your roofing website should be focusing on a core term and a bunch of related terms. According to Rand Fishkin, a perfectly optimized website should visually look like this;
Title and Meta elements
Title: Baked chocolate donuts from Becky’s Bakery
Meta description: Learn the three tips to Becky’s award-winning baked chocolate donuts, get locations and times for availability, and how you can make your own donuts at home.
Let us examine a few basic, critical on-page elements you will want to know as you consider how you are going to drive search engine traffic to your roofing website:
Title Tags
While Google is striving to comprehend the actual meaning of a page better and de-emphasizing (and even penalizing), manipulative and aggressive use of keywords, including the search terms that you want to rank for on your page, is still important, and the most impactful place that you want to input your keyword is the title tag.
The title tag is not your roofing web page’s main headline. The primary headline you see on the roofing web page is typically an H1 (or probably H2) HTML element. The title tag is
what you normally see at the top of your browser is populated by page source codes in a meta tag.
The length of a title tag that Google will portray will vary (depending on the pixels, not character counts), but generally, 55-60 characters is a good rule of thumb here. Kindly remember that the title tag will be what a prospect sees in the search results for your roofing web page. It is the “headline” in Google search results, so you want to consider how clickable your title tag is into perspective.
Meta Descriptions
While the title tag is effectively your Google search listing’s headline, the meta description is an HTML element that offers a brief overview of your roofing web page. Meta descriptions effectively act as your roofing website’s additional ad copy. Google takes some caution with what they show in the search results; therefore, your meta description may not always appear. If your roofing website has a compelling description of your page that would make people searching likely to click, you can greatly boost your traffic. (Remember: appearing in search results is just the initial step! You still require obtaining searchers to visit your roofing website and have taken the action you desire)
Body Content
The actual content of your roofing page is very crucial. That said, Google has been favoring various types of content, and as you create pages for your roofing website, here are a few things that you need to consider;
Unique & Thick Content
There is no general rule in terms of word count, and if you have only a few pages on your website with a couple of hundred words, you won’t be falling short of Google’s good graces, but the recent panda updates particularly favor unique longer content. Suppose you have a huge number of concise (100-200 words) roofing web pages or lots of duplicated content where nothing changes except the page titles and text line, which could land you in trouble. Examine your entire roofing website: Are the large portion of your pages duplicated, thin and low value?
If so, try to look for ways of thickening such pages or look at your analytics to see how much traffic they are driving and exclude them (using a noindex meta tag) from the search engine results to prevent them from appearing in Google that you are striving to flood their index with low-value pages to rank.
Engagement
Search engines like Google are increasingly weighing user experience and engagement metrics more heavily. You can increase this engagement by ensuring that your content responds to questions prospects ask so that they can stay glued to your roofing website longer and engage with your website content. Ensure that your roofing web pages load in less than three seconds and don’t have design elements (like overly aggressive ads above the content) that would piss the searchers and send them away.
“Shareability“
Shareable content spreads quickly around the internet as prospects connect with a story, idea, or topic and click it to share with followers and friends. Not every piece of content on your roofing website will be linked and shared a hundred times. But in the same breath, you don’t want to churn out huge quantities of roofing web pages with thin content. You want to keep in mind those who will share and link to the new pages you are creating on your roofing website.
Alt Attributes
An “alt attribute” (also known as “alt tag” or “alt description”) is an HTML element that is normally applied to image tags to offer a text alternative for search engines like Google, Yahoo, or Bing. Using alt attributes on your images can contribute to a better user experience and help you gain both implicit and explicit roofing SEO advantages.
How you mark up your images can affect how Google perceives your roofing web page and how much traffic from the image search your website generates. Alt attributes are HTML element that helps you offer alternative information for an image if a prospect cannot view it. Your site images might break over time (users have problems connecting to your website, files get deleted, etc.), so having a clear description of the image can be vital from a user experience perspective. This also presents another chance (outside your content) to help Google understand what your page is all about.
You don’t want to stuff keywords and cram every variation of your search term in your alt attribute. In fact, if it does not naturally fit into your content, don’t incorporate that target roofing keyword at all. Don’t skip the alt attribute altogether, but look for a search term that will accurately describe your product or service. (Imagine you are explaining it to someone who cannot see it; that’s what there is for it)
By writing naturally about your subject, you will be avoiding the temptation of over-optimization (simply put, it does not look like you are attempting to trick Google to rank your roofing website for your target roofing keyword. This gives you a better chance to rank for long-tail versions of your keyword.
URL Structure
Your roofing website’s URL can be crucial from a tracking standpoint (data segmentation is easy with a logical URL structure) and from a shareability perspective (short, descriptive URLs that are easy to paste and copy mistakenly cut off less frequently). Again, don’t try to cram as many roofing keywords as possible; create a descriptive, short URL.
Furthermore, you don’t have to change your URL if the current one is not adversely affecting your prospects and business in general. Don’t alter them to be more keyword focused for great roofing SEO results. If you have to alter your roofing website URL structure, ensure you use the proper (301 permanent) kind of redirect. This is a common mistake roofers make when redesigning their roofing websites.
Schema & Markup
Lastly, after you have all the basic on-page elements sorted, you can go a notch higher to help search engines like Google better understand your roofing website through schema.
Schema markup does not improve your rankings on the search engine results (it is not a ranking factor currently). But it gives your listing an additional ‘real estate’ in Google search results, similarly to what ad extensions do for your Google Ads (formerly known as AdWords)
If no one is applying schema, you can get an undue advantage in click-through rate in some Google search results because your roofing website shows things like reviews or ratings while others don’t. On the flip side, where every roofer utilizes schema, having reviews is a great thing, and omitting them may hurt your Google CTR.
Internal Linking & Information Architecture
Information architecture refers to how you plan or organize the pages of your roofing website. The way you plan your roofing website and interlink between your web pages can affect how different content types on your website ranks in response to user queries or searches.
Search engines like Google most see links as “votes of confidence “and a way to help understand both what a page is all about and how crucial it is (whether it is trustworthy or not).
Google also looks at the actual text you utilize to link to pages, otherwise known as anchor text, which helps search engines to understand better what your roofing web page is all about.
Similarly, a link from CNN indicates that your website could be crucial if you link to particular pages from various areas on your roofing website that portrays to Google that a specific page is essential to your site. Furthermore, the pages on your roofing website that have a high number of external votes (links from trusted sources) have the power to assist the other pages on your roofing website rank in Google search results.
This relates to an idea known as “PageRank.” PageRank does not work the same way it used to when it was first introduced, but if you want to know more about it, here are some good resources;
- A good math-free explanation of PageRank
- A detailed breakdown of how PageRank works (from several years ago) with several helpful visuals
- The original academic paper published by Google’s founders
Information architecture can be a challenging subject, especially for larger roofing websites, and there are additional resources that have specific answers listed at the end of every chapter. Still, the essential things to remember are:
You want to know your most linked-to pages (use tools like Majestic SEO, Ahrefs, or Moz and search for top pages reports to determine these)
Keep your most crucial roofing search pages. This implies linking to them regularly in navigation elements and linking them whenever possible from the page that has the most links.
Generally, you want to have a flat information architecture for your roofing website, meaning that you keep any roofing page that you wish to rank in Google as few clicks as possible from your home page and most linked-to roofing web pages. If you want to know how to flatten your roofing website architecture, click on this video to learn more.
Content Marketing & Link Building
Because Google’s algorithm mostly relies on links, having many high-value links is incredibly crucial in generating search traffic. You can perform all the work you want on technical and on-page SEO, but if you lack links to your professional roofing website, you will not appear in search results listings.
There are various methods of getting links to your roofing website, but as search engines like Google become more sophisticated, most of them have turned out to be risky (even if they may work for the short term). Suppose you are new to roofing SEO and want to leverage that channel. In that case, these more aggressive and riskier ways of obtaining links are not good for your business, as you will not know how to evaluate and navigate the risks properly. Besides, attempting to create links specifically to trick Google into giving your pages a higher ranking does not add value to your roofing business since Google algorithms can change. Eventually, you lose the rankings.
A more sustainable and practical approach to developing links is concentrating more on general content marketing strategies like promoting and creating valuable content that incorporates particular terms that you want to rank for and engaging in conventional PR for your roofing business.
The process of developing and promoting content that will give you social shares and links is an uphill assignment. Furthermore, you will get a step-by-step guide to different aspects of roofing content marketing below, and there are numerous ways to create content, help it get discovered and rank well in the search results.
However, most approaches will need you to walk through some variation of the three steps outlined below:
Understand and Identify Your Sharing Audience and Linking
The first crucial thing you need to do to get traction for your roofing web content is to know who is likely to share and link to your content. Various tools can help you understand influencers within the roofing niche, but the most powerful one is Buzzsumo.
Similar tools include Ahrefs, follower wonk, and Little bird. The concept is taking advantage of such tools to establish potential linkers and thought leaders in your roofing space and understand what they share and link to. Identify what problems they are experiencing, the types of content they normally share, and begin to figure out how you can create something valuable and wish to share with their prospects (who would also deem it important too).
As you ponder through this process, begin to figure out how you can help out these influencers. What can you do to help them achieve their goals, or what could you offer that can be valuable to their audience? Do you have unique knowledge or data that could assist them in performing their jobs more efficiently? If you can consistently use smart content creators within the roofing niche, you will begin to develop powerful relationships as you continue creating high-quality content.
Before you create any roofing content, you should figure out who will share the post and why they should take this action.
Deciding What Roofing Content You Can Create and How You Can Promote it
The next step is to determine the type of content you can create that is likely to be shared and promoted by others. Here are some tips to help you create roofing content that will attract a higher number of shares:
- Create roofing content that identifies and solves your customer’s problems.
According to Mathew Woodward, you can find great roofing blog topics by listening in on social media and forums.
- Reverse What Already Works By examining what already works and developing content that is of that level, you can reduce the risk and make your posts as fail-proof as possible.
- Make others look great: Mention the kind of tools that you use daily.
Concentrate on creating various content types that will have enormous value, promote such content, and don’t be afraid about informing people whose audience would benefit know that it exists.
Map Your Roofing Content to Specific Keywords
Lastly, don’t forget to include your roofing keywords! This does not imply that you require to cram a keyword that does not fit any time you develop a great resource. It means that you can utilize keyword research as a way of discovering the pain points (if prospects are turning to search engines to look for products or services, they want roofing content that responds to their questions).
Technical Roofing SEO
Modern roofing marketing works through internet marketing strategies. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the technique of organizing content, design, and off-page marketing easily indexed by search engines like Google.
Technical SEO refers to search engine marketing techniques that are not related to content. While SEO basics, such as improving search engine rankings through links, have changed recently (and content marketing has become an indispensable tool), what many roofing contractors deem as a conventional SEO is still essential in generating traffic from Google.
While on-page and offsite SEO are normally discussed, technical SEO is vital for online presence. Some of the basic aspects of technical SEO include:
Page Speed Optimization
Search engines emphasize having fast-loading roofing websites. Fortunately, this is good for search engines and your website conversion rates and users. Google developed a tool that offers some suggestions on what you need to change to address your roofing website speed issues.
Mobile Friendliness
If your roofing website is generating (or possibly driving) significant Google traffic from mobile searches, how “mobile-friendly” your roofing website is will affect your rankings on mobile devices, a fast-growing segment.
With the increased usage of mobile devices, technical SEO has become even more valuable. Your roofing website must adapt to various mobile devices and present optimally to each of them. Most prospects searching for roofing services perform a search on their smartphone.
Nowadays, Google displays results depending on the proximity of the user to your roofing business location. Roofing contractors can improve mobile SEO through the following methods:
- Responsive design: A design technique that helps roofing websites adjust to the currently accessed device.
- Seamless Navigation: Internal Links and URL hierarchies, are even more crucial on mobile.
- Test your mobile roofing website: Use Google’s mobile-friendly test tool to verify your location. Make sure that your location details are on Google maps and are embedded in your mobile website.
Header Response
Header response tags are crucial technical SEO issues. If you don’t have the technical expertise, this can be a complex topic. Still, you want to ensure that your roofing pages are returning the right code to search engines (200) like Google, and pages that are not easily found are returning a code (400), showing that they no longer exist. Getting such codes wrong could indicate that a “page not found” page is a functioning page, making it appear like a duplicated or thin page. You can utilize a server header checker to determine the status code that your roofing web pages are returning when Google crawls them.
Redirects
Roofing contractors should continuously explore ways to improve their technical SEO. Failure to implement redirects properly can have serious effects on your search results. One of the less-discussed offsite improvements is 301 redirections. A 301 redirect is a type of permanent forwarding of one URL to another. But what benefits can a roofer get from a permanent URL redirection?
Here are some reasons why your roofing website may want to redirect to another page as outlined below:
- Similar or Duplicate Content: say, for instance, your roofing website has a page for asphalt roofing, but you want to upgrade to residential asphalt roofing. You probably want to redirect the low-value page to the high-quality one.
- Prefix Consistency: Google considers HTTP:// pages different from www pages of similar content. Redirecting all your links to the same prefix increases your domain authority.
- Search Optimization: If one of your URLs is search engine friendly but requires to be shifted to a duplicate page, 301 redirects will get the job done.
- Website Rebranding: If your roofing company does a rebrand or gets a new website, you want to redirect the well-performing pages to their counterparts.
If you migrate to a new roofing domain name, it is highly recommended that a 301 redirection occurs before you launch your new roofing website. If you don’t do this, your new roofing website will suffer confusion as Google tries to crawl your website. If you need professional help in redirecting your roofing websites, our talented web designers will do the job!
Duplicated Content
Duplicated and thin content is another area that was addressed by the recent Google Panda updates. Google is known to value high-quality roofing content. By duplicating content, you are diluting the value of the link between two pages instead of directing it to one page, reducing your chances of ranking for competitive keywords with a website that is gathering its link equity into one document. Having massive quantities of duplicated content makes your website appear like it is cluttered with low-quality content in the eyes of Google and other search engines.
Various factors can contribute to duplicate or thin content. Such problems can be difficult to diagnose, but you can check the webmaster tools under the search appearance >HTML improvements to obtain a quick diagnosis. You can also check Google’s breakdown of duplicate content. Many paid SEO tools also discover duplicate content, such as screaming frog SEO spider or Moz analytics.
XML Sitemaps
XML sitemaps can help search engines like Bing or Google understand your roofing website and locate its content. To make sure that you don’t include irrelevant pages and submitting your page for a sitemap does not guarantee that your site will rank for any keyword. There are disadvantages of having an XML sitemap, and implementing can have positive benefits to your roofing SEO.
XML sitemaps are particularly essential if:
- Your roofing website is not well-linked or properly structured
- Your website has a few external links or is new
- Your roofing website has lots of archived content
MetaNoindex, Meta No Follow, and Robot.txt file
Finally, you can dictate how you want search engines to handle your roofing content. For example, you can instruct Google not to crawl a particular section of your website in a robot.txt file. This file may exist for your roofing website at yourwebsite.com/robot.txt. You want to ensure that this file is not blocking any content to be indexed on your site. You can use the meta nofollow or meta noindex tags for the same purposes, though each works independently from the other.
Technical SEO can be daunting to do on your own; you should seek help from a reputable roofing SEO agency.
Roofing SEO: The Implementation Stage
Roofing SEO is a huge undertaking that is spread across multiple activities. You should not expect to get a glimpse of every optimization used in the website at first glance.
Critical research and planning make it simple to implement your roofing SEO smoothly. As the cliché goes, ‘failure to plan is planning to fail.’
Here are some preparations you need to make when implementing your roofing SEO strategy:
Custom Website Design
When prospects land at your roofing website, it will take less than a second to form your roofing brand’s subconscious impression. This impression will either make them stay glued to your roofing website or navigate your competitor’s website.
Several factors come into play here, including those that are affecting user experience. Some are not tangible such as the aesthetic taste of your roofing website. Other factors can be easily defined as resolution.
Apart from pleasant appearance, prospects also crave clear and compelling calls to action, simple navigation, instructive menus, and clear graphics. They want to feel confident about your roofing company’s reputation and leave with a reputation of reliability and trust. Roofing websites with obsolete or poor designs are likely to be labeled as scam-y. The good news is that you can get a functional, custom roofing website from experienced designers at an affordable rate.
Contact Information
The most crucial part of local SEO for roofing contractors is contact details. Since the roofing lead conversion funnel is checked at the user’s call to action, NAP visibility is paramount. NAP is an acronym for Name, Address, & phone number. That contact information should be clear on every page of your roofing website (particularly the homepage).
Your NAP details should be consistent and accurate across every page of your roofing website. An error in your roofing business phone number or address can lead to a substantial loss of leads. For this reason, you should constantly check whether your contact details are up-to-date.
Call to Action
A Call to Action (CTA) is a segment of your roofing website that directs prospects to perform a certain action, like calling your office. Your contact details normally accompany it. A clear and compelling CTA encourages potential customers to take some action that drives them straight to the sales funnel. Call to Action Vary in design and complexity. The simplest ones urge potential clients to call your roofing business for a free consultation.
Roofing Website Personalization
Nothing fosters trust faster than website personalization. Your roofing business website should show photos of your business. No matter who takes the photos, it can be easy as snapping some photos of your crew on a smartphone. If you like, you can hire a photographer to follow your employees when undertaking roofing projects. You have several options to personalize your roofing website. Your homepage deserves unique photos, most of all. Potential customers want to know who they are dealing with. Ordinary stock photos will not convey that trust but limit it.
How Long Does Roofing SEO Take?
- Results take time: Roofing SEO campaigns can take up to several months before you start to see significant results. This is because Google requires time to crawl your website and monitor visitors’ behavior and interaction with your roofing website.
- A lengthy Campaign Implies Better Results: An effective roofing SEO campaign needs you to put in lots of hours per week for several months before the results become apparent.
- Results are tied to two major factors: A good roofing SEO campaign leads to a high ranking in the SERP, but more essentially an influx and steady increase of new customers.
- Roofing SEO results will eventually plateau: New customers should continue to stream in overtime and reach a point where maintaining client numbers is your main priority.
How to Measure and Track Roofing SEO Results
After you have developed an awesome SEO strategy for your roofing company, it is crucial to determine how you will track your campaign’s success. It is also vital to set clear objectives of what you want to achieve, book more jobs, more leads, or email signups.
How can roofing contractors measure the success of their campaigns? This question has a very straightforward answer since some metrics can help analyze your SEO campaign’s performance.
Keyword Rankings
Examining where your roofing website ranks for various keywords certainly is a vanity metric since you cannot pay your employees in rankings. Issues like personalization have caused them to be valuable across various locations and so hard to measure, and they indicate where you appear in the search engine results. Some can even go further to declare them as dead.
But obtaining a rough idea of where your roofing website ranks for important keywords can be a good indicator of your website health. This does not imply that you should be obsessed with rankings for any particular term. Remember: your main aim is to drive more relevant search traffic that drives new business – if you sell car windscreens, it is more crucial that you rank for “car windscreens” or implement an SEO strategy that helps you to sell more windscreens cost-effectively. Use rankings to check the health of your roofing website and not a course-chatting KPI.
Various tools can help you to monitor your rankings. Most offer similar functionality, but features like mobile or local rankings are peculiar in some premium tools. If you are starting in roofing SEO, we recommend using free tools to monitor important keywords to gauge your progress.
Organic Traffic
Organic traffic is the best indicator of the health of your roofing SEO efforts. By analyzing the organic traffic to your site, you can know the number of visitors coming to your roofing website and where they are going.
You can track your organic traffic easily with several analytic tools because they are absolutely free. For a random check, you can look at your website’s reporting page and click on “all sessions” to filter organic traffic (free traffic from Google that excludes paid search traffic).
You can also drill down to examine the specific pages generating traffic by designing a custom report and designating goals completions and users as your main metrics. Landing pages to act as your dimensions.
Organic Sales & Leads
Obviously, the most effective way to measure your roofing SEO efforts’ success is sales, leads, and revenue/ profit.
The simplest way to do this is by setting goals in Google Analytics. You can use reports from this tool to examine organic traffic by landing page, which implies that you examine who converts among people who may have landed on your roofing website from a Google search (versus people who might have visited your site via PPC).
This seems straightforward and generally, for most roofing contractors, is an effective way of measuring your roofing SEO efforts’ success. Still, there are a few things to keep in mind with this information.
- Web-based analytics are always imperfect: If you are transitioning from newspaper ads or billboards to internet marketing, you will be impressed by the high level of precision and data available, but the degree of skepticism about such data may be unfounded.
- Your system may create gaps in tracking: If you have a backend system that does not work seamlessly with analytics for some reason, you may have some difference between what you track as actual roofing sales and your goals.
- Lifetime value and attribution metrics can be cumbersome: This is more of a web and business metrics problem than something specific to roofing SEO. But thinking about how you can attribute roofing sales and factoring in lifetime value to your roofing website traffic can be tricky.
As a roofing contractor, you must track your SEO campaign results to know what is or not working and make necessary changes if necessary.
Phone Tracking
With phone tracking, you can tell which aspect of your SEO made the prospect call your business, thus helping you discover which part of your campaign is delivering the best results.
Form Tracking
When a prospect fills out a contact form on the internet, you can know their exact location. Knowing where your customers help your roofing business to develop a more targeted SEO strategy.
Ranking Reports
Ranking reports can help you know where your different roofing keywords rank and identify the less effective ones to change your strategy accordingly.
Traffic Reports
You can gauge the amount of traffic that is driven by your roofing website and where it is coming from, and what pique’s prospect’s interest, using tools like Google Analytics or Coremetrics.
Additional Roofing SEO Considerations
For many roofing contractors, getting the technical elements of SEO right, knowing the keywords you want to target, and having a strategy for getting your pages shared and linked to is all you need to understand about roofing SEO. However, there are particular cases and types of roofing companies concerned with a particular kind of search.
- International Roofing SEO: There are several trade-offs and benefits to ranking roofing websites in different countries and languages. If you are trying to tap into international markets, Google also provides best practices and recommendations in their guide.
- Local Roofing SEO: For small roofing businesses, obtaining local rankings for various variations of your {location} + {your service}, for example, Middle Tennessee Roof Installation Company, is the most valuable search engine traffic available.
- App Store Search Engines: If you have a roofing website app to help interact with your prospects, having your app appear in several app stores is extremely valuable.
So what Now?
So if you have come this far, you should have lots of information about how search engines work in ranking roofing websites and how you can position your website and business to generate more traffic from Google. What should you do next?
Work With A Reputable Roofing SEO Company
Search engine optimization is here to stay, and if you want to compete in the local roofing industry, you need to make sure that your roofing business shows up when prospects search for a roofing contractor in your location. Local SEO for roofing contractors can make that happen, which is why it is the most crucial investment that you can make in your roofing business nowadays.
Remember: there is a wrong and right way to do roofing SEO. In the industry, it is known as White and Black Hat SEO, which is how your business decides to execute its SEO strategy. While Black hat SEO can seem effective in the short term, it does not play by the rules and can get penalized overnight.
On the flip side, white hat Roofing SEO, which we practice here at BlackStorm Roofing Marketing, sticks by the rules and can last for many years, ensuring that you get value for your time and money. By building links from legit and relevant sites and boosting your social media presence, we can drive more traffic and lead your roofing business.
If you want all the advantages of roofing SEO, we can help!
We make your roofing website visible on search engines by applying our business expertise.
At BlackStorm, we bring many years of experience to search engine optimization for roofers. With our personalized internet marketing strategies, combined with our passion for driving real results, we will provide your roofing business with more revenue, phone calls, and quote requests.
We hope this guide has provided crucial information to rank your roofing website higher in the SERPs. As always, if you have any questions, feel free to schedule a free profit session to learn more about our award-winning roofing SEO strategies today!
