Introduction to SEO for Roofing Companies
The average cost per click on Google for many localized roofing keywords is over $20, making it a highly competitive vertical. If you can get your website to rank well organically for services such as roof repairs, replacements, or storm damage restoration, you don’t have to pay for these clicks, and your marketing efforts become more profitable.
Let’s dive into how to make this happen.
Understanding Intent
When someone searches on Google for “MedSpa Near Me” or “Medspa in Columbus,” they have strong intent, meaning there’s a high probability of conversion. The beauty of SEO is that when you rank well, it’s an earned placement, so you don’t have to pay per click, which leads to higher profitability.
76% of people searching for a local business on their smartphone visit it within 24 hours [source]. The local 3-pack results get 44% of actual clicks on Google’s results page. If your med spa gets local, organic traffic, you have a high chance of converting them into paying customers.
Competitiveness of Roofing SEO
Roofing is a competitive vertical. According to SEMRush, the keyword difficulty can range higher than 70%, which is more competitive than the average local business we work with.
Since roofing is a localized business, people search for nearby companies rather than national ones. Adding location-specific keywords can significantly reduce keyword difficulty. For example, “Roofing Companies Columbus Ohio” has a keyword difficulty of 50, while “Roofing Company Columbus Georgia” scores only 12. This difference reflects market size—Columbus, Ohio, represents a larger, more competitive market than Columbus, Georgia.
If your roofing company operates in a smaller market, ranking well becomes more achievable with the proper implementation of SEO. However, even in mid-sized markets like Columbus, Ohio, a keyword difficulty of 50 remains highly competitive for local businesses.
Right Strategy & Structure are Crucial
SEO for roofing is competitive. You’re likely reading this article because you want to crack the code and achieve page one rankings for your roofing company. Before diving into different tactics, it’s essential to have the proper foundation in place.
If a shoddy roofing company works on a roof without using the right materials and proper protocol, leaks and issues will form. The same holds for SEO. You must have the proper foundation.
Think of your roofing company’s SEO structure as a ladder. At the top of the ladder is the descriptor term for your business, “Roofing Company,” and the steps leading up to the ladder represent all the services (roof repair, gutter repair, storm damage repair, commercial, etc.). We list the most important services at the top of the list and the lowest-generating services at the bottom, allowing us to prioritize our SEO efforts.
Don’t forget to add pages onto your site if you serve a niche market. For example, if you do metal or wood shake roofing, definitely create a page about this service and showcase your work. These more niche pages can lead to big projects.
Your SEO strategy will vary significantly depending on whether you have a single or multi-market roofing business. Let’s dive into some examples to illustrate this better.
Newman Roofing – Operates in One Market
- This is a single-location roofing company in Columbus, Ohio
- The homepage (aka the most powerful page on the site) is optimized for “Columbus Roofing Company,” the descriptor term that receives the highest volume.
- The service pages are optimized for Columbus keywords
- When operating in a single market, this is the most common strategy to follow.
They also have service area pages for the suburbs they want to target [more on this later]
Feazel Roofing – Multi-Location Operation
- Feazel operates in 9 markets.
- Their homepage and service pages are not optimized for any specific market.
- They have location pages for each market, such as Columbus, Ohio, where the local optimization happens.
- In addition to location pages, they have service area pages for the suburbs they serve, which we’ll dive into shortly.
The illustration below shows the SEO structure for Feazel. You can see it’s much more complex as you’re dealing with hundreds of pages between location and service area.
Every roofing company has different needs based on location count and market priorities, so schedule a consult with our team to make sure your foundation is solid before wasting time on tactics that won’t work for your specific situation. When you have the proper structure and strategy mapped out, your chances of achieving SEO success in this competitive vertical improve significantly.
Service Area Pages
Service Area Pages, often called SAPs, are pages built on a website for suburbs or cities that a business services [source]. These pages are extremely prominent as roofing companies do a lot of their work in suburbs throughout the city.
Let’s take Newman Roofing as an example. Their primary market is Columbus, Ohio. Their homepage is well optimized for “Columbus Roofing Company,” the descriptor term. Their homepage ranks well organically, which drives countless new leads and business each month.
97% of search engine users search online to find a local business [source]. If you rank well organically for suburb queries, we’ve seen roofing clients increase online leads by more than 30%.
Newman Roofing built out a Service Area Page for “Westerville Roofing Company.” They rank in the #1 position, which is driving more business in affluent market.
For a single location business like Newman, this strategy isn’t overly complex. This can be a daunting project when you have multiple locations. Feazel Roofing has many service area pages as they do work in 9 markets and have service area pages within each market. What’s highlighted below is 54 different Service Area Pages.
Clicking on the Service Area Pages article below will teach you how to create and optimize suburb-specific pages for areas your business serves without physical locations. You’ll learn best practices including creating unique content, using local case studies and photos, proper internal linking, and sending targeted paid traffic to these pages. The article provides real examples from businesses like Feazel Roofing, offers an organizational template for scaling across multiple locations, and explains how to avoid duplicate content issues while capturing valuable hyperlocal searches.
Learn more about best practices for Service Area Pages
Picking The Right Keywords & Tracking
Going back to the ladder analogy, once you have all of your services solidified and determine the market you want to target, we recommend creating a list of 5-10 keywords for each service you want to target. You can use Claude or ChatGPT to come up with this list. Don’t forget that you want to track your service + the city.
This will allow you to strategically incorporate these keywords onto the page and track them versus the competition utilizing a software like SEMRush.
Again, we’re making sure we have the right foundation before proceeding to implementation.
Below is an example of a client of ours, Division 7 Roofing. We’re tracking countless keywords for them but I’m showcasing how when you use a software like SEMRush, you can drill into each keyword, see your rank versus the competition, which allows for you to be tracking progress. You can see for the coveted term, “Commercial Roofing Columbus” they are ranking #4 on Google where there competitor, Capital City Restoration is ranking #1. This gives us a game plan to know that there’s room to improve by gaining organic visibility.
When a new roofing company contacts us, we have an upfront conversation to let them know they are climbing an uphill battle to rank in a competitive market and this doesn’t happen overnight.
Even if we were to create extremely well optimized pages that are better than competitors, a low authority score would likely not catapult your content onto the first page.
Authority score/domain authority, is a metric that’s used to grade your site on a scale of 1-100. The more links you have pointing to your website, the more authoritative your site is in the eyes of Google.
Below, you can see some of the backlinks coming in for Feazel. They have a sponsorship deal with the Cincinnati Bengals and were linked from their site. Experience Columbus showcased that they are a veteran owned business. The more established your company, the more links you’ll have pointing to your site.
Google likes authoritative backlinks.. If you just launched a roofing company, would a consumer be more likely to trust you or a company that’s been around for 20 years with thousands of reviews and links from authoritative local sites? The more external links you can get pointing back to your site, the better.
My recommendation for roofing companies seeking more backlinks:
- Do a sponsorship with a local sports team where in exchange, they’ll add your logo onto the leagues site. This is a great local backlink and gets you involved in your community!
- If you’ve done commercial roofing jobs, ask clients if they can add you to a partners section of their site.
- Do a search on Google for “Best Roofing Companies in [Your Local Market] and inquire about getting listed on these directories
- Write linkable content from your blog that other roofing companies or consumers may link back to
- Get listed on your chamber of commerce site and any other local business directory
If you’ve had a roofing company for a decade, there will be natural links. If you’re starting up or want to improve your authority score, being proactive with the ideas listed above will help.
Implementation Tactics
We’ve gone into great details about having the right foundation, properly tracking and leveraging your authority score. It’s now time to dive into the execution that can improve your rank on Google.
Expert Interviews
You don’t want a generalist writing content for pages on hail damage repair or metal roofing. Your content should come from a roofing expert. Google values unique, expert written content. We recommend using an AI software like fireflies.ai where you can have your roofing expert talk about what goes into the sale process and the expected results. What’s the average cost? Timeline? How do you work with insurance companies? When you have content coming from experts, it provides better sales collateral, speeds up the sales process and improves SEO.
Invest in Video and Photo Content
“Having unique photos can be beneficial, especially in areas like Google Image Search and Google Knowledge Panels, where images are prominently featured,” says Google’s John Mueller. He suggests that “for certain topics, audiences expect real images.”
This certainly holds true for the roofing industry. When someone is about to make a $10,000+ investment on their roof, they expect to see real photos.
We recommend investing in professional photography, drone videography and customer testimonials. This will add unique content onto key pages of your site.
AZ Roof Co. does a great job showcasing images on their portfolio page. You can see real employees in company gear working on roofing projects. I can’t tell you how many roofing companies use stock photos. Differentiate your business with professional photography and videos.
Optimize Google Business Profile
The local pack results generate 44% of clicks on the first page of Google [source]. Getting your business to populate in the local three pack is a game changer based on the prominent location at the top of Google. Let’s explore the various ways to enhance your local pack exposure.
Review Management
Reviews are a crucial component of ranking well in the local pack [source]. Google uses reviews as a trust signal, and businesses with more positive reviews and higher ratings are more likely to rank higher in the Local Pack.
If you’re a small roofing company doing less than 50 jobs per year, text or email your clients a link to leave a review on your Google Business Profile.
If you’re doing more than 50 jobs, you may want to consider a service like GatherUp, which has automations to send text messages and emails.
After a job is completed, the customer will be asked to grade their experience on a scale of 1-10. If they leave a rating of 8 stars or higher, it will encourage them to leave a Google review. If it’s below an 8, they’ll be prompted to a customer service survey. This will enhance your customer service and help you secure more Google reviews.
Primary and Secondary Categories
Picking the right primary category is one of the most important ranking factors in the local pack. We recommend picking “Roofing Contractor” as the primary category and selecting applicable secondary categories based on your business.
Primary Category:
- Roofing Contractor
Secondary Categories:
- Roof Inspector
- Gutter Cleaning Service
- Construction Company
- Siding Contractor
- Storm Damage Restoration Service
- General Contractor
- Home Improvement Contractor
- Solar Energy Contractor (if you offer solar roof installations)
- Insulation Contractor
- Sheet Metal Contractor (if you work with metal roofing)
Linking to Location Pages
If you have numerous locations, this means you’ll have multiple Google Business Profiles. A mistake we often see is that the destination URL for each GBP location points to the homepage. Instead, you should link each profile to its respective location page. If you only have one area, the homepage is the ideal destination.
Feazel’s headquarters are in New Albany, a suburb of Columbus. They are linking to the Columbus page, which is the right course of action
Following Our Checklist
We’ve put together a Google Business Profile checklist to help you review your GBP page and ensure you have the correct foundation. Keep in mind that Google has many ranking factors for GMB, including your proximity and website authority. While following our checklist and tips will give you a stronger foundation, competition for the local pack remains fierce, so there’s no guarantee you’ll immediately rank in a prominent position.
Other Tips To Improve SEO for Roofing Companies
Seek Out Relevant Directories
Conduct a Google search for “Best Roofing Companies in [local market]” and view the directories listed on the first page of Google. We recommend that our clients get listed on these sites. It can drive quality referral traffic, leading to new business, and is a strong trust indicator to Google.
Related Blog: Learn more about the importance of business directories for SEO
Follow Standard Optimization Tactics
I’ve provided resources below for more SEO tactics to follow. The remaining advice is generalized as it can be deployed across any sector.
- Properly optimize the title tag and headings
- Conduct strong internal linking
- Make sure you have a fast page load speed and strong technical SEO
- Provide a strong user experience. Google is putting more emphasis on UX, so put your best foot forward with an easy-to-navigate, intuitive site.
In Closing
Roofing is competitive. You must be patient, but with the right SEO strategy, you will reap the benefits of one of the most profitable marketing initiatives.
Hopefully, this comprehensive SEO guide will help you surpass competitors on Google and acquire more customers!