Need SEO? Wondering what it is all about? SEO for roofing companies is incredibly important. If You want to learn how to get started and how to rank in the search engines – this guide will give you actionable tactics – how to execute them, and the software applications you need to get the job done.
The price for effective SEO for contractors can be anywhere from $700 to $5000 a month depending on who you hire and your budget. If you don’t have the budget and you have someone with marketing skills on your team, you can get results with the right knowledge.
Just remember, less experience means that you might be wasting resources on training and wasted efforts. You know your business better than anyone, the roofing company strategy you choose depends on how you want to promote your business.
No matter what, it’s smart to consult with someone experienced in local SEO for roofing companies. This how-to is designed to get you up to speed on SEO and hit the ground running. These methods are tried and true based on our experience.
Contents: Roofing SEO - All You Need to Know for 2021
- What is SEO?
- What is Organic SEO?
- Why do You Need It?
- Starting Out: Getting Your Feet Wet
- Research: Keywords and Topics
- On-Page SEO
- Off-Page SEO
- Free Tools
- Link Building
- Technical SEO
- Analytics
- Local SEO for Roofing
- SEO for Roofing and Beyond
What is SEO?
It stands for search engine optimization. It’s a type of digital marketing needed to show up in the SERPs (search engine results pages). It ties in with general marketing like target marketing, promotion, outbound marketing, and branding. Roofing company SEO is about getting more business. It involves:
- Content strategy
- Social media marketing
- UX (user experience)
- Frontend development
Pretty much everything you do online. If you already know what it is there are some good reminders as well as new tricks you may not know. I thought I knew a lot after I learned the basics but I did miss a lot of things.
What is Organic SEO?
Organic SEO is optimization that doesn’t involve paid ads. There is also SEO for paid ads on Facebook or YouTube or any other platforms out there. There are lots of different paid ad platforms but Google is the biggest. Using Google’s advertising tools can help you find the best roofing company SEO strategy for keywords and topics. Skip to the tools section if you want to learn more at this point.
Additionally, the main problem with paid ads is that you need to spend a decent amount of money to get them to work. Small and medium-sized businesses average somewhere between $1,000 to $10,000 a month on paid ads. If you want to go this route, SEO is a good place to start if you aren’t sure who your customers are and how you need to reach them. It’s also a good thing to fall back on when paid ads just aren’t working.
Why Do You Need It?
So why do you need it? Search is king for web traffic, you need roofing SEO to show up in the results when people search for terms related to your business. Have you ever seen the movie Field of Dreams?
“If you build it, they will come.” In other words, if you build a good site people will show up. That rarely works. You have to let people know you are out there. Search is one of the best ways to get in front of the right customers.
Besides getting people to your site, you need to satisfy their needs. When was the last time you asked a question on your phone? You probably asked one to get here...like what is “local SEO for roofing companies,” or maybe you just typed in the “roofing SEO” to get here.
Every second someone is searching the net for answers. SEO for Google, Bing, DuckDuck go and other search engines is a must if you want a presence online. Additionally, there are separate tools for each search engine. As a general rule starting with Google is standard best practice.
There are billions of people searching Google every day. Whether you want people in Germany to find you, people in Japan, Russia, etc. you’ll need some SEO industry-specific roofing company SEO, even if you are just using social media. We’ll talk about social media SEO later on in the off-page section.
Starting Out – Getting Your Feet Wet
It all starts with research. If you are brand new to the SEO game, it’s like anything else. Practice makes perfect. Many SEO greats learned by making mistakes. Many people never get better at it because they don’t learn from their mistakes.
Usually, it’s a good idea to learn enough to get started and jump in. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t get a mentor to help you understand SEO for roofing companies. A coach is always better and you get the benefit of their wisdom. This will give you a giant head start, at least 50 hours of work in a fraction of that time.
Just hiring someone will give you an idea because you’ll learn from their tactics. Many SEO pros will show you what they are doing for a reasonable fee. It may be extra but it’s worth it. Don’t expect all of them to do this. Like any other business people are tight-lipped about their secrets.
Tip: in the SEO Tools section we go over some free tools (software). Read their blogs, check out their social media – often these companies are leaders in the industry and they will show how to use their software.
Research: Keywords and Topics
So you know there is an ocean of traffic out there. So how can you find out where to find fish in an ocean? Do a little bit of research. SEO for contractors starts with keywords and topics. People are searching for services or products that you offer. If you are the first or second or third or even the tenth business they find from search, it’s a safe bet you will get some traffic on your site.
People now also go to the second and third pages because often there are ads or maybe there are similar sites that don’t have exactly what they want. In this day and age, people want it fast, and they want it now so the top 5 spots are ideal.
Keyword Research
Keywords will be the foundation of any SEO for roofing strategy. Finding keywords is also known as market research. Finding out which questions people are asking and which terms they are typing into the search bar will help you understand what you need to do to lure them in.
Definition of Keywords: the phrase can be confusing because it can be a single word like “roofer” or several words like “roofers near me.” It can also be a longer phrase like “where can I find a cheap roofer near me,” or “where are the best roofers in my area” There are several ways to get started:
Start with a search: try searching some terms that you think people want. We did some research and realized people were typing “SEO for roofing companies'' when they were wondering how to optimize a site for their business.
Scope out the competition: the search will bring up all your competitors. They may be indirect competitors, with a different product or service alternative to yours. If you search “roofing companies near me,” you will find a blog that goes over what you need to do to find the best roofing company – rather than a construction business that does roofing.
Use free keyword research tools: these tools will give you a view of the big picture. Information like how many people are searching for a specific keyword each month and similar keywords you can investigate.
Without software like the tools we mention in this guide, you’ll be out of the loop. These take virtually all of the guesswork out of keyword research. But things do change as we mentioned, just because a term is popular now, like the “SEO for roofing contractors,” doesn’t mean it will be next month.
Example:
- Type in a keyword in the search bar, make sure autocomplete is on in your browser. As you type, a list will pop up under the search bar with phrases people are searching for. Write those down or copy and paste them and keep the list ready.
- Go to Google Keyword Planner (we mention this in the tools section) and type in a keyword.
- Start a Google Adwords account. You don’t need to pay for anything just use the Keyword Planner. The page will ask you to set up a payment account but you don’t need to it’s free.
- Enter one of the keywords. The keyword planner will generate a list of keywords. information on how many people are searching per month, how difficult it is to rank on the search engine pages for those keywords etc.
- Export the list into a spreadsheet and sort it accordingly. If you are beginning your SEO journey, don’t go for anything with a difficulty rating higher than 60. The goal is to find a term that people are searching for, maybe 300 hundred a month, which has a low difficulty rating. 0-30 maybe or lower.
- Go for a few harder ones as a long-term goal. It might take a year or two to get these. Could be sooner depending on how savvy you are.
- Start with just 5. 5 is a good number. Maybe 10 if you are feeling lucky. Don’t make a huge list otherwise, you will be all over the place. You’ll have to be very specialized to find opportunities that are actually within your reach.
Topic Research
The software tools in the sections below will also give you topics related to the terms you are researching. This gives you an idea of what kind of content to publish. We are publishing things on roofing SEO because that’s what you are looking for.
It’s either someone who needs a roofer, your competitor who wants to copy your strategy, or maybe someone just curious or wound up there by accident. It could also be a bot. You’ll have to play with the topics you start with.
Example:
- Go to google trends. Enter one of the keywords you think is a good choice to go after. The results will give you a page that lists topics related to the keywords. It calls them “parent topics.” You can enter multiple keyword terms to compare their popularity in the search.
- This tool is nice because it also gives you information on which areas people are searching for these terms.
- Use another SEO tool like SEMrush. It’s free. Go to the Keyword Overview section from the links in the sidebar. Enter one or more keywords into the search bar. They give you up to one hundred so if you just want to paste the keywords in your spreadsheet feel free.
- In the results, you’ll see related keywords, variations, and questions. Questions like ‘how to find a roofing contractor near me?”
Below is an example of SEMrush keyword research. The results are for desktop. Also, search for mobile because more than half of all the people are searching for mobile.
Below is an example of a Google Trends search. You can see that related topics include metal roofing, solar power, and home repair company. These would be good things to focus on when you are creating videos or blogs for your site.
The next sections give you some things you can do to get your site prime for search and ready for visitors. After that, we go over some tools to use which also give you a better understanding of roofing company SEO.
On-Page SEO
On-page, SEO takes place on your website. It’s all the things you do to help people get to your site. On-page SEO is a one-time thing or an ongoing thing. On-page involves everything you need to do to make it easy for crawlers (software like Google search or an SEO tool). If you are an online store you should do this for every product page.
If you are trying out a roofing company SEO strategy, you should do this for every page you want people to see. The tips in this section also mention tasks that are technically called “technical SEO,” which we mention later but they are all things done on your website.
When you should not try to optimize a page?
If there is something like a membership dashboard for a member on your site or a page only your staff uses, you probably don’t want it to come up in search. You will also have to optimize for those to block crawlers.
You just want to add instructions on your site that tells search engines not to list them, which is pretty easy.
How? Use a robots.txt file. This is a single .txt file on the pages of your site. It should be on the index page.
Here’s an example below:
More On-Page SEO:
- Meta descriptions: this is what you see in the search engines under the title and link of the site.
- If you don’t set this up, the search engine will just take the text on your site and put it there, which might not be good for you.
- Keep the meta description short and to the point, maybe from 130-180 characters. It just depends. Use keywords.
- Meta title: the meta title is the title that the search engine sees, which is different from the page title or it could be the same if you want. It’s the URL. This is known as a “canonical URL”
- Sitemap: make a sitemap, provide multiple sitemaps for your site to help crawlers understand how your site is structured.
- Minify Javascript: this removes spaces in your code, which takes up extra space and affects loading time.
- Optimize for mobile: make sure your site is responsive and looks good on every device. Tablets, phones, any mobile device.
- Remove dead links from your site.
- Redirect URLs
- Build internal links: crawlers work by going from link to link to link...and on and on. For every website. Link building will help crawlers but also get more traffic if people click on them to make the jump to your site.
- Schema markup: this is in code on your web pages. This is used to mark up questions and other written content. If you have a question in search like. “what is roofing company SEO? '' The questions pop up first or second on the results.
On-Page SEO: Writing Content
When you figure out what topics to focus on, you will want to publish pages on those topics. A common thing to do would be a page about your services. A roofing company would need a page about what they do, some contact information, why you should hire them, etc. Other pages include about me pages, pricing pages, case studies like stories, and pictures of your finished projects.
Blogging - Using Content to Improve Your Search Engine Ranking Positions
Write blogs, articles, whatever you want to call them. This is a blog page. It could also be called a landing page or a product service page. It’s just a matter of semantics sometimes.
Roofing SEO for your company is a competitive game. You will want to outdo your competitors. This means publishing articles that are longer, highly relevant, focused on topics and keywords that people are searching for, and more useful. This takes constant work in most cases. The more you publish the better.
Here are some tips:
- Publish regularly
- Make good content – no spelling errors etc.
- Write for everybody – some read every word, some scan.
- Cover topics in depth. Use short articles that are shareable.
- Use images, videos, infographics, and other visual media.
- Use audio like podcasts.
- Write ebooks and ask people for their email before you can download them.
Reasons why you should do this:
- You own it, meaning it’s on your site and you control the content.
- Help people find your site with regular publishing.
- Has great long-term value.
- Regular updates of pages will continue to bump up your rankings.
Some problems with SEO for contractors:
- It takes time and effort to regularly publish.
- You might be writing about the wrong topics.
- If it’s not well written, it makes you look like an amateur.
On-Page SEO: Setting up Your Site
Okay, so every page needs to be set up properly to make it easy for crawlers and people to find you. What does this mean? It means that the structure of your site and the code in your pages need to be on point. The search engines emphasize user experience, loading time, how long people browse your pages (bounce rate), and dozens of other factors–some that are secrets no one knows about, not even Google employees (Googlers).
Off-Page SEO
Off-page SEO happens on social media, on google maps, on other websites, anywhere online that sends traffic back to your site. Local SEO for roofing companies is one of the best things to do right away.
You don’t own the off-page media you publish on, so it’s not quite as valuable for long-term growth online but it is essential. Maybe it drives 15% of your traffic, search has a better ROI but social media can be amazing. Some businesses do well without SEO but not nearly as well as they could be doing with it.
Examples:
- Add keywords to your social media posts.
- Add links to your blog articles in posts.
- Find websites to guest post on or influencers in your niche.
- Put your website on your social media profiles.
- Local SEO for roofers #1 priority – create a GMB (Google My Business Account).
- If you have a GMB setup for your business, it will list you on Maps.
- Maps pop up to the right of the results, right at the top if you are visible.
- Use Twitter cards, use Facebook Open Graph. Every social media site: LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, etc. has its own search engine. Here’s an example below of markup you need to connect your site to your accounts.
This is technically on-page SEO but it sort of overlaps. This is code on your site that can help social media search engines direct people to your page.
