What is SEO for Roofers?
Search engine optimization (SEO) for roofers are the strategies and techniques used to make the brand profile and website for your roofing company more visible in Google and other search engine results.
That may not sound overly impressive but employing an on-going local SEO strategy can have profound effects on your roofing business.
How Does SEO Help My Roofing Company?
People are less connected to each other than ever. Because of technology, we spend less time asking others for recommendations on products and services and more time doing our own research and sharing opinions online.
This disconnection has translated into how people find your business. If you aren’t showing up in search engines, then there is a good chance a large portion of your potential customers will never find you.
On top of finding you, a solid Google profile builds immediate trust with these potential customers. Think about it this way—a person needs their roof replaced and gets a recommendation for your business from a neighbor.
They don’t know the neighbor super well so they go online to check you out. Your profile has mostly four and five star reviews with positive recommendations from other people in the area, so they confirm the neighbor’s opinion and call you to get an estimate.
Now, what happens if the person cannot find your business profile or your website?
Or, worse, you haven’t been paying attention to your profile and only a few disgruntled reviews show up.
An ongoing SEO campaign will ensure potential customers can find you and when they do find you, your business is presented in a way which converts them into paying customers.
Steps to Successful SEO
Launching a successful SEO strategy for local roofing business consists of your Business Profiles, on-page factors within your website, and off-page factors which are factors from all around the web.
Each one plays a role in giving your business the best exposure to your target audience.
Business Profiles
Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines give you the opportunity to manage how your business shows up in their local search results, which is done through claiming your business profile.
If you have never claimed your profile then it may contain false or out of date information, or it may not exist at all.
By claiming your profile across the major search platforms, you control how your business is presented to the public and you have the opportunity to optimize the profile so it shows up higher in the search results.
On-Page Factors
On-page SEO, frequently called technical SEO, consists of any activity performed on your website which can assist the search engines in understanding what your business is about and provides signals your business is a trusted source for roofing information.
To make it simpler, stuff done to your website to help your Google search rankings.
On-page factors include simple things like having a contact page and an “about us” page on your website.
It also includes more complicated tweeks like making sure the site works well on mobile devices or properly using the schema markup language and meta descriptions in your website code.
Off-Page Factors
Off-page SEO consists of any activity that happens away from your website which assists in the search engines seeing your business as an authority in the roofing marketplace.
For local SEO, this means your business needs to have a presence in all the places a roofing company should be online.
BBB listings, local and national online directories, trade publications, and other sources that have your correct contact information (name, address, and phone number) will help the search engines know that you are a well established and trusted roofer.
Search Ads vs SEO
We frequently run into business owners who confuse advertising on search engines with SEO. It’s a very easy mistake to make because the listings are showing up right next to each other when you search.
The best way to think of it is ads are a quick way to get started with getting traffic from the search engines, but ads also do not convert as well because the consumer knows you are paying for their attention.
Website traffic that comes from SEO is typically called organic traffic. As with most organic things in life, SEO is slower to get going, but provides superior results.
When your business ranks among the organic results, it is more trusted by the customer, so inquiries which come from SEO more readily convert to new clients.
To make the difference even clearer, here is a search result which clearly shows you the ads and SEO sections of a Google search for roofers.
Google is obviously in business to make money so they show the ads first.
However, the most powerful part of this picture is how one company is utilizing both ads and SEO to maximize their chances of getting an interested prospect. This is the strategy we use at Tavallo to get our roofers the best results.
Why Hire an SEO Agency
If you see the value of attracting new customers through SEO and ads then you have three choices.
Do Nothing
Maybe your roofing company is doing great and your word of mouth referrals keep you busy. That’s great!
However, if you ignore online marketing you run the risk of other businesses entering your marketplace and taking customers you want or eventually need to keep your business growing.
Do it yourself
Doing it yourself means you, a current person on your staff, or hiring an employee to manage digital marketing for you.
For business owners who handle it themselves or assign a current employee digital marketing is the third or fourth most important thing on their agenda (or lower). This usually creates poor to no results.
Hiring a full-time employee to handle your SEO and search advertising can produce the results you want but is the most expensive option.
Hire an Agency
Our reasons for hiring our SEO agency are threefold:
- We love working with roofers and want to see your business succeed.
- We love SEO and have a process for helping you generate more leads online.
- Because we do this all the time, we can do it more effectively and affordably than most who try doing it in-house.
All of these factors are why working with roofers to help them optimize their online presence is a primary focus of our agency.
If you are ready to start seeing more leads from phone calls and the contact form on your website, reach out to our team today to see how we can partner with you.