Search engine optimization (SEO) drives more traffic, leads, and clients to all businesses, especially service-based businesses like roofing.
SEO seeks to improve your roofing website’s ranking in the search engine results page on search engines like Google or Bing.
Your online presence puts you in front of more prospective customers, and ultimately gaining more revenue.
Most searchers rely on the results on the first page, so if you don’t appear near the top of the results, you could miss out on a lot of valuable business.
SEO for roofers is the process of improving your website’s reputation and visibility online by achieving a higher ranking in
Google search engine results pages (SERPs). The higher your ranking, the better the chances that you’ll attract visitors and customers to your site.
Related: Guide to HVAC SEO
SEO has plenty of benefits, including long-term brand awareness, a wider search audience, and greater revenue.
Improved Credibility
A site that earns a high ranking on search engine results pages is considered high quality and trustworthy by search engines.
Search users know this, so it automatically gives your roofing company website more credibility.
Unlike marketing strategies like pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, SEO is an inexpensive and cost-effective marketing tactic – it only costs you time. If you hire an SEO agency or SEO expert, you will pay for it, but it still boasts a larger return on investment than other methods.
Related: Benefits of an SaaS SEO Agency
Original website content is vital to SEO. When you create content for visitors, your site earns a higher ranking in the search results. But by extension, the aspects of your content that help it earn better ranking, such as images, videos, and keyword optimization, also provide more value to your users.
Your competitors will be investing in SEO, which means you need to as well. The results on the first page of Google get the majority of search traffic, so you can’t afford to have your site showing up on the third or fourth page.
Related: Guide to SEO for Plastic Surgeons
A lot goes into SEO, but here are some steps you can take to improve your ranking on the search engine results.
Quality content is a huge driver of search engine rankings – thin, poor-quality content won’t cut it. Your content should be created specifically for your target audience to improve your site’s authority and relevance.
For roofers, this may be topics like “do I need a roof repair or replacement?” or “what’s the best roof for [state].”
Related: Guide to Real Estate SEO
All of your content should include keywords that are placed naturally, not stuffed, links to authoritative sources for your claims, and formatting like headers and bold phrases.
Related: Guide to SEO for Doctors
Studies indicate that 9 out of 10 people access the internet using a mobile device. And Google uses an index that weights the mobile version of your site heavily.
You can see if your website is mobile friendly using the Google Mobile-Friendly Test. This is a pass/fail grade, but it gives you a starting point to identify issue with your mobile user experience.
For example, you can check into your loading speed on PageSpeed Insights, which is a big factor in your site’s mobile friendliness. A slow-loading website also increases your bounce rate and acts as a Google ranking factor.
There’s a lot of focus on external links, but internal links also matter. Each internal link sends authority from one page of your site to another, which is why you want to use them to establish a hierarchy on your site. This shows Google which pages are most important, such as your service pages. It also helps website visitors navigate your site to find the content they want.
Related: Understanding SEO for Dentists
Local SEO is a type of SEO that increases your online search visibility with searchers in your proximity. This is necessary for brick-and-mortar businesses with a physical location or a service-area business with local clients, such as a roofing company.
Optimizing your website for local search is important because people use search engines to find local businesses and services, such as roofing contractors.
According to Google:
Ideally, you want to appear in both the Snack Pack and the organic search results. The Snack Pack, also known as the local pack or map pack, is a Google-specific feature that shows the top business listings with the map at the top of the search results page for local searches. The organic search is the results that appear on the regular search engine results page.
Local keyword research helps you understand and identify the terms people use to find local services like roofing and optimize for them.
For example, some searchers looking for information in the roofing industry may type in “roofing services near me,” but others may rely on related roofing keywords and search terms like:
You can also check for keyword search volume in your state, city, or town with the Google Keyword Planner.
From there, you can check for local intent, which means users are looking for services nearby. While you can certainly target keywords without local intent, that’s more general SEO than local SEO.
As mentioned, local SEO includes both the Snack Pack and the organic results. Ranking factors depend on which one of these you want to rank for, but some should be both.
The Google Business Profile is a local listing that has information about your business, such as your name, address, hours of operation, phone number, reviews, and images. It appears in the Snack Pack with Google Maps.
These results are limited to Google Business Profile, so you can’t rank in this spot without one. When you’re optimizing your
Google My Business page, remember to:
Your name, address, and phone number (NAP) citation is essential to a complete and valuable entry in business directories.
Users can discover your business online with an accurate NAP citation and ensure that they have the correct information.
The best practices for NAP citations include:
Related: Guide to Personal Injury Lawyer SEO
Reviews are an important factor in your Google Business Profile. Google wants to provide the most valuable results to users, so if you have bad reviews – or worse, no reviews – it’s not going to show your business above your competitors. Reviews also build trust in your customer base.
Here are the best practices for reviews:
Related: Guide to Drug Rehab SEO
Backlinks are a huge ranking factor for Google and other search engines. When you have links from other authoritative sites, it’s a vote of confidence that shows Google that your site is trustworthy and reliable. Essentially, the authoritative site is passing some of its credibility onto you.
Here are some best practices for backlinks:
Related: Ultimate Guide to Local SEO for Small Businesses
You can’t improve your search engine rankings overnight but following these steps to optimize your site and content will see gradual results over the long term. As you gain more authority, you will see more traffic, and by extension, more clients.
Website traffic comes from search engines like Google, and to be visible, you need SEO roofing marketing as part of digital marketing strategy. For local businesses like roofers, it’s even more important and effective to target prospects and customers in your local service area.
SEO is often used as an umbrella term that includes search engine marketing (SEM), but the latter refers exclusively to paid advertising. SEM is about generating traffic with paid ads, whereas SEO strategy is more about gaining, monitoring, and analyzing unpaid – organic – traffic patterns. Though you may pay for services with an SEO company for an SEO campaign, it’s still an organic strategy.
Service-based businesses like roofing companies need SEO to attract customers and appear in the organic search results, but local SEO is especially important. Because roofers typically work within a geographic service area, local SEO is crucial to drive traffic from potential customers in the proximity.
