Best Digital Marketing Practices for Roofing Businesses

If you are an roofing business, you may be wondering if and why you need to worry about digital marketing. After all, you do something highly specialized, related to roofing repair, replacement and installation. 

Roofing isn’t exactly something most people can do on their own. 

But that doesn’t mean you don’t need to worry about digital marketing. You have a lot of competition, and will likely only have more as time goes on. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that roofing will grow faster than other industries over the next ten years.

And selling goods and services in your space is no different than offering interior painting. You need to compete with other companies that paint too. 

At SEO Design Chicago, we work with many companies in roofing. We’re specialists in roofing digital marketing strategies that drive quality traffic to your website, resulting in high quality leads. We know how to get you the top of Google’s search engine results pages (SERP), which is where you want to be. When people have roofing emergencies, they tend to call the first few numbers they see after searching for something like “air conditioning repair near me” or “heating repair near me.” You want to make sure you appear in Google maps, in paid Google ads and in Google search results. There’s a science to making sure you appear in these priority digital spaces. We can handle it for you, but we like to explain what we do. So this post reveals the best digital marketing practices for roofing specialists. 

 

Always Keep SEO in Mind

Word of mouth recommendations are likely one of the main ways you get new customers. Google likes to think of themselves as friends who give other friends (the people who search on their site) recommendations for companies.  So you want to make sure every page on your website is put together with search engine optimization (SEO) in mind. 

The way Google’s algorithm works doesn’t come with an instruction manual, like the heating or air conditioning units you fix and install. Google  keeps the way their machinery works a secret because they don’t want competitors to come up with a similar search engine. 

Think of the algorithm like the most complicated job you’ve ever had. There are over 200 factors that goes into what makes one web page rank higher than another. As lifelong learners, we’ve learned some of these factors to help your roofing website rank higher in SERP than your competition.

Some of the secrets of SEO include:

• Finding and using the right keywords related to roofing
• Making sure your site loads fast
• Structuring each page with headings
• Including outbound links and linking from one page on your site to another
• Regularly updating your site with new content

We don’t know a lot about roofing. If you don’t know a lot about the terms we just used above, that’s why you may want to call us to make sure your website is fine-tuned. 

 

Invest in Pay Per Click Ads

Known as PPC, pay per click ads, help roofing businesses get their names at the top of a search engine results page (SERP). These are the ads that appear under “Sponsored” whenever you search for something on Google. 

You only pay for these ads if a person clicks on the ad. What’s great is that often, a person will see your roofing company’s name in an ad, but scroll a bit more and click on a webpage from your company that appears in the free search results. That’s great for you. Your company name made an impression in the user’s mind, but you didn’t  have to pay for them clicking on the ad.

You don’t want to overpay or underpay for an ad. Google ads work like this – you set a daily budget that tells Google, “I won’t pay more than this for my ad to appear if a person searches for x.” 

If another company bids higher for that search term, Google will show their ad exclusively, or in a higher spot than yours. 

We can help you figure out what your daily budget should be, and more importantly, what keywords or search terms you should be bidding on. 

Google ads work – studies say that for every $1 a company spends, they earn back $2 in leads, sales or brand awareness. 

Think Beyond Words and Photos

If you’re in the roofing space, you probably sell or offer high-tech goods and services. Words and even images aren’t enough to sell your services or products. You want to create, edit and embed intriguing  videos, zoomable photos and 3D modeling to better educate potential customers.

Here’s another thing to think about – you don’t have to create all of the content on your site (or pay a company like us to create content for you). You can rely on user generated content. This means reviews, photos and videos that satisfied companies send to you, post on review sites or post on social media. Let other people do the writing, photography and videomaking. 

 

Monitor Website Traffic and Patterns

Many companies only track how many people visit a website. That’s not enough. Web analytics is really about tracking user behavior, call tracking, and other data like what times your customers visit your site, what specific web page makes them leave your site, and where your users are located. This helps you educate your own employees about who your customers truly are, and what they truly want. This also helps you redesign your site so that people don’t leave, or get stuck, on certain pages.  

You monitor analytics through free software like Google Analytics 4. If you don’t know how to install this on your website, or read the reports, we can handle this for you. 

Now, we want to answer some questions you may have. 

 

What’s the difference between digital marketing for roofing companies and digital marketing in general?

The difference between the marketing of roofing services and other services is that roofing businesses are highly specialized. That means you really need to invest more time and thought into the research of keywords. We use AHrefs and Google’s keyword research tools to find the terms people use when searching for roofing companies. 

If you hire us to handle your content creation, we’ll do the research for you, then advise you on how much to create content structured around these keywords (or we’ll do the content creation for you) and how much to bid on for certain keywords for PPC ads (or if you should take another, less expensive route).

We also can embed tools so people can have access to a 24/7 chat bot, book consultations online and even pay their bill online. You don’t need to employ someone to chat with people. A chat bot can answer simple questions, like your phone number. The main goal is to have a chat bot to take in leads, which you can then follow up on however you choose.  

 

Why is SEO important for roofing companies?

roofing businesses need a search engine optimization plan that will make their website rank high in SERP, and definitely higher than the competition. 

Many users are more likely to visit a website they see more than once on a search result page, especially if they are looking at a big, expensive repair or purchase. You want to appear in the “people may ask” area, and in Google maps. We know how to make the most use of the Google Business tools to make sure you appear everywhere in SERP that you possibly can. 

Why is Paid Search important for roofing businesses?

Paid Search (also known as PPC, Pay Per Click, or search engine marketing) is an important part of roofing digital marketing strategy because it allows you to target the online users looking for the products or services you offer. Sure, you have to pay for the ads, but they outperform ads on all other platforms, from radio to TV to social media. 

Paid ads aren’t just the “sponsored” ads that appear at the top of SERP. Paid ads also appear under shopping, next to one’s Gmail correspondence (and people certainly love to email friends about their roofing problems) and other websites that are part of Google’s display network – those are certain websites that niche audiences visit.

At SEO Design Chicago, we specialize in making sure your roofing products and services are at the top of specific search results your customers use. Reach out for a free SEO page analysis and we’ll start there.