SEO for Roofing: 5 Best Practices to Implement 

You know your roofing company does great work because you’ve got excellent customer feedback to prove it. And while customer referrals will help your business grow, you can make far more traction with a digital marketing strategy.  

Digital marketing reaches potential customers anytime they are online — and they are online a lot. You have many options when it comes to digital marketing but one of the core practices that will make the most difference for your roofing business is search engine optimization (SEO).  

SEO is a set of practices that help your roofing website rank higher in search engine results pages. With these practices in place, your website works for you even when your business is closed for the day.  

Why is SEO for Roofing Companies Important? 

Many companies already have some form of an online presence. You might have a barebones website with a company name and contact information.  

But do you have important elements like: 

• A detailed description of your services 
• A list of the neighborhoods you work in  
• Metadata to attract search engines 
• Roofing-related keywords 
• A blog with regular, informational, relevant posts 
• 5-star reviews 

You must strategically apply SEO practices to your website to ensure potential customers find it. A roofer digital marketing company that understands the industry can help you do just that.  

SEO, or search engine optimization, is a set of processes and practices that leverage Google and other search engines to increase traffic to your website use. For example, a potential roofing customer may do a web search for the phrase, “leaky roof repair in X city,” leading to several pages of roofing companies that all claim to fix leaky roofs. How does the potential customer know which company to choose? 

The answer is: They don’t. As a result, they’ll simply pick the first website in the search results. The first organic search result has an average click-through rate (CTR) of 28.5%. That rate continues to fall with each result. The second and third results will get an average CTR of 15% and 11%, respectively.  

It’s clear that if you don’t use the latest SEO tactics to get one of the top spots on Google search results, your business website may not be seen at all.  

Roofing Marketing SEO Best Practices 

If you’re concerned about how to get your potential customer’s attention in a crowded online space, don’t worry. There are several roofer marketing content practices we use at Socius Marketing to help our roofer clients move up on the search engine results page (SERP). 

Roofing SEO Marketing Practice #1: Do Keyword Research 

There are several steps our SEO team follows to identify relevant keywords for your roofing business. 

1. We work with you to brainstorm the words or phrases your ideal customer might use to find your business through a search engine.  

2. We research the search volume and competitiveness of those keywords to identify the ones you are most likely to rank for (UberSuggest is an excellent free tool for this). 

3. We use industry-leading keyword research tools to conduct competitor research that will show us what keywords your competitors might be targeting and how they are ranking. 

4. We identify the best primary and secondary keywords for your company to target. 

Here’s an example of local SEO: If we decided that “local roofing company” is a good potential keyword, we would use online tools to find the information we need about that keyword and other relevant keywords. 

Keyword	Volume	Difficulty
local roofing companies	9,900	66
local roofing contractor	1,300	49
local roofing company near me	1,000	55

We might look at this list and decide that, while “local roofing companies” has the most volume, it is very difficult to rank for. While “local roofing contractor” has a lower volume, we might be more successful getting your website on the first page for that keyword. 

In addition, our SEO tools show us additional valuable information like the intent of the keyword (are they searching with the intent to inform, investigate, research for a future purchase, or buy now?) or the search volume on mobile vs. desktop. 

All of this information is collected and analyzed to find the words and phrases that will provide the most SEO value for your website and content. 

Roofing SEO Marketing Practice #2: Use Keywords, but Keep it Real 

Once we have worked with you to identify your target keywords, it’s time to build a webpage and blog content that strategically uses your keywords. In the early days of the internet, all a business had to do to be ranked high in search engine results was to pick a few keywords and use them as much as possible across the website. 

This doesn’t work anymore. Keyword placement is still important, but if the usage seems abnormally high, the copy doesn’t read naturally, or you have a high bounce rate (this means people leave your website promptly after clicking on it), Google will devalue your website.  

Instead, first focus on filling your website and blog with informative, helpful, and unique content that keeps visitors on your website for as long as possible. As you write, find opportunities to place your keywords in headers, copy, linked text, and metadata in a way that flows with your storytelling. 

Here are some examples of helpful, informative blog titles that use the keyword “local roofing companies” in a natural way: 

• How to Vet Local Roofing Contractors Before You Sign a Contract 
• 5 Roof Maintenance Tips Most Local Roofing Companies Don’t Know About 
• When to Talk to Your Local Roofing Companies About Replacing Shingles 
• 10 Reasons Local Roofing Companies Suck (And We Don’t) 

Okay, maybe that last one is a bit too off-the-cuff, but you get the idea. If you use your keywords to inform and help your audience, they will read your content, and Google will know that your website is worth ranking. 

Roofing SEO Marketing Practice #3: Fill in Website Metadata 

Metadata is one of those advanced SEO roofing marketing strategies that many companies miss when they build their own roofing website. Metadata is a basic summary of the information on your roofing website and individual web pages. These titles and descriptions show up in search engine results to inform visitors and search engines about the intent and purpose of your page. 

Here are a few types of meta tags we prioritize for each webpage: 

• Title tag 
• Meta description 
• Image alt text 
• Header tags (for H1s, H2s, H3x) 

When Google crawls and indexes webpages, these bits of data help it know whether or not your site is relevant to a given search query. It’s extremely important not to overlook this aspect of SEO — and to include your target keywords in your metadata. 

Roofing SEO Marketing Practice #4: Establish a Regular Publishing Cadence

What does Google want, what does it really, really, want? It wants fresh, up-to-date, relevant content. This is what your prospective customers want as well. When your blog includes recent posts that are relevant to the needs of customers, you build their trust in you and your expertise.  

Publishing consistently has several benefits for your roofing business: 

• Alerts search engines that your business is alive and well, helping to improve your search ranking. 
• Increases website traffic and higher quality leads. 
• Educates your potential customers on what you do and how you do it, helping to keep your company top of mind when someone needs your services. 

A regular publishing cadence can be as little as once per week. However, if you want to increase your chances of moving up the search ranks faster, you may want to consider publishing a blog post two or more times per week. 

Here are some suggested topics that will help your company stay relevant:[Text Wrapping Break] 

• Recent natural disasters and their effects on roofing 
• Seasonal considerations — what should customers prepare for on the eves of winter or summer? 
• New and effective repair tools and strategies you use 
• Warning signs of roof damage 
• Tips & tricks your team discovers in the field — these can be DIY maintenance tips or services you offer 

Roofing SEO Marketing Practice #5: Generate 5-Star Reviews

Did you know that 49% of consumers trust online reviews just as much as personal recommendations? Online reviews from Yelp, Google, and Facebook can help make your roofing services look more reliable in the eyes of potential customers. 

As a first step to getting great reviews, we suggest simply asking for reviews as part of your customer service process.  

1. Politely let the customer know before service begins that you’d appreciate a 5-star review once your team delivers excellent service. 

2. Remind them once the service is complete.  

3. Assure your customer that leaving a review only takes a couple of minutes of their time.  

Make the review process even easier by automating it. Socius Marketing has a system that can automate review requests, surface bad reviews so you can address them (before they hit the interwebs), and publish them to your preferred public-facing sites. 

We can also get your reviews on industry sites like Home Advisor and Angi’s List.  

Need a Better Roofing SEO Strategy? 

Socius offers roofing marketing services and understands your industry. If you’re ready to update your roofing website to increase your visibility and pull in quality leads with roofing SEO services, let’s talk about building a better strategy. Schedule a consultation here.