GET A PROPOSAL - May 19, 2024
As an SEO expert specializing in the roofing industry for over a decade, I’ve witnessed firsthand the game-changing impact local search optimization can have on contractors’ businesses.
In 2024, cracking the code of local SEO is no longer a luxury – it’s an absolute necessity for roofers looking to maximize leads, sales, and revenue growth.
The roofing companies that develop an advanced local search presence will essentially be handing themselves a perpetual lead generation machine, with high-intent local homeowners finding them through Google Maps, local finders, and organic listings daily.
In this definitive guide, I’ll reveal the foundational pillars, advanced strategies, and forward-thinking tactics that roofing SEO veterans are utilizing to earn online local dominance this year.
You’ll learn:
Let’s start by understanding the immense implications of ignoring local search visibility as a roofing company in today’s digital landscape…
Study these local consumer behavior stats and realizations:
The data is clear – we’re far past the mobile-first era and are living in an almost mobile-only consumer landscape where “near me” searches reign supreme.
Part of the reason local intent is so prevalent? The ability to book services immediately from search results drives immense urgency among local consumers.
92% of those searching for local services follow through with a visit or call within 24 hours (Wordstream)
This sets the stage for a golden opportunity for roofing companies – homeowners in their service area are desperately seeking accessible, bookable roofers for repair and replacement jobs daily.
Best of all, research shows roofing purchase costs range from $5,000 to upwards of $20,000 for full replacements! Even capturing just a few new local customers per week can result in a six-figure annual revenue windfall.
The Google local 3-pack and localized organic results attract a staggering 89% of consumer engagement from local searches (SEMRush)
Without putting in the work to elevate your roofing company’s local rankings, you’re essentially wasting your whole marketing budget.
Why? Because no matter how great your service is, if you’re not showing up for those high-intent local queries, customers will never have the chance to find you online in the first place.
So with local SEO clearly being a non-negotiable requirement for running a profitable roofing business in today’s climate, let’s break down the core tactics and strategies…
Having worked with over 1,000 roofing companies on local search optimization over the past 13 years, I’ve found your localized digital presence needs to be impeccable across three key “pillars”:
As you likely know, having an incomplete or unverified Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business listing) means you’ll be ineligible to even show up in Google’s local finder results or the mapped pack.
This simply cannot fly in 2024.
I work with my clients to craft and optimize every aspect of their Google Business Profile listing to ensure optimal visibility, like:
Your optimized Google Business Profile creates the critical first impression of your roofing business to nearby searchers. I ensure every asset and feature adds up to an unmissable, trustworthy local listing.
Many SEOs concentrate on Google Business Profile optimization and citations – but the truth is that Google aggregates signals and data points across your entire company website to gauge true local-level authority and relevance.
As a result, you need a cohesive, intelligently optimized web presence built with local search discoverability at the forefront:
Most roofing companies serve multiple cities and suburbs in their geographic area. This should be reflected on your website through:
Content arguably serves as the loudest signifier of local expertise and goodwill to your community. Your website should feature a steady stream of:
As a roofer, producing this local-optimized content at scale establishes trust and authority in Google’s eyes.
Resist the urge to keep your website stripped down or impersonal. Let’s reinforce your company’s jurisdictional legitimacy with:
These pillars of a well-optimized local website build a repeatable formula for ranking well in Google’s organic and local finders.
At the most fundamental level, local SEO relies on your business establishing enough prominence, legitimacy, and relevance around your core service cities through online citations and backlinks.
We want to earn links and mentions that verify your company’s active presence and reputation as a roofing leader within the community, through channels like:
Ensuring NAP (name, address, phone number) consistency and link value across the major data providers like Neustar, Localeze, Acxiom, etc.
Local directories relevant to roofers fuel your initial link equity, like registration across sites like Yelp, HomeAdvisor, Angie’s List, etc.
Build real relationships locally by sponsoring neighborhood events, youth sports teams, church/community programs and earn followed backlinks.
Create guest content for local bloggers, realtors, contractors in complementary fields in which your roofing services can be a value-add plug.
Tools like my company’s DataPins software allow roofers to log and verify all residential and commercial projects. This enables embedding interactive job maps rich with local link equity that Google finds irresistible.
The key is laying the groundwork for backlinks through genuine relationship building, like joining local industry organizations and networking groups, interviewing for local reporters’ stories, donating services or resources to the community and more.
Simply put: the accumulation of locally-relevant citations, embeds, and backlinks verifies your prominence and expertise in Google’s vicinity-specific algorithms.
While I’ve outlined the key pillars here, I still see even advanced roofers making critical mistakes due to outdated local SEO assumptions pervading the industry…
With each passing year, search intent modeling and algorithmic shifts force SEOs to re-examine our approaches – and local SEO for roofers proves no exception.
Let me counter some increasingly obsolete practices and share advanced tactics helping roofing companies cement their presence atop local rankings in 2024:
A decade ago, local SEOs relied heavily on keyword volume data from third-party tools to guide their strategies.
While tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, and Moz are still valuable, far too many local roofers cling to these projected search volumes as gospel truth for local intent.
The truth? Close to half of all consumer search queries don’t even register meaningful volume on traditional keyword tools.
Instead, local searchers are leveraging “hidden” or untracked longtail phrases filled with location and business modifiers, often spoken aloud using voice search.
Example of an untracked “hidden” local roofing query: “emergency roof repair contractor for hail damage in Aurora Colorado”
By focusing on building comprehensive hubs and resource assets around longtails and nuanced subtopics, your website can intercept these less obvious localities and intent types versus strictly targeting archaic keyword lists.
For years, hyperlocal targeting and personalization were rooted in mining and leveraging consumers’ online and mobile activity, like locations services or cookies.
But data privacy and security legislation like iOS14’s App Tracking Controls and the eventual phasing out of third-party cookies shakes the foundation of what many considered “local SEO” a few years ago.
While still important, modern local website architecture and technical optimizations are already surpassing retargeting funnels and paid geo-targeting as the top drivers of qualified local leads.
Roofing SEOs who diversify channel mix and get back to first-party, opt-in data capture will see the best results.
Some cutting-edge methods:
The future of local marketing prioritizes consensual first-party data and proactive relationship-building over intrusive location tracking.
We’ve covered how showing up for slippery, underreported queries is table stakes… but you’ll need to double-down on insanely granular specificity within your actual content assets to shatter past local SEO performance.
I implore roofing companies to move beyond basic location pages and start crafting materials with the sole intent of saturating your coverage for every hyper-niche query imaginable.
A few examples:
These hyperfocused resources build trust and relevance while intercepting rich hyper-local purchase intent.
Just publishing isn’t enough though. You’ll want to bolster these assets through active distribution strategies like:
The pillars of local SEO remain the same, but the modern methods to own granular regional queries compounds in effectiveness every year.
My final advanced advice piece revolves around tackling possibly the biggest local SEO headache for roofing contractors…
For the better part of a decade, the local SEO obsession revolved around your company’s Google My Business reviews.
And don’t get me wrong, your review quantity and sentiment across Google’s listings is still impactful… but it’s far from the whole story in 2024.
The best roofers recognize that establishing visibility across multiple platforms generates a healthy reputation footprint that ultimately benefits your local rankings and bookings.
For starters, you can’t put all your eggs in one basket anymore. If sudden shifts arise in GMB management policies or algorithms, diversifying your reviews and listings helps stabilize your local presence.
There are still many homeowners who consult focused reviews on niche sites like HomeAdvisor or Angie’s List – you want to visibly meet them where they frequent.
While exact impact differs, multiple data points show local business listings that secure reviews on supplementary platforms see compounding rank boosts as their visibility and prominence broaden.
Many local finders and aggregators reference and cross-populate reviews from major platforms like Yelp, Facebook, BBB, and more to dynamically shape listings. Showing up complete across multiple sites is clutch.
The key is integrating strategic, sustainable practices that continually expand your business’ reach and reviews over time, like:
I recommend roofing companies invest in dedicated tools like GatherUp to streamline multi-channel acquisition and data management as review depth becomes the difference maker in local rankings.
By getting ahead of the pack, mastering a unified reputation strategy sets your business miles ahead of competitors still singularly obsessing over GMB.
Whether you’re a weathered veteran or just starting out with local SEO, I hope the insights and tactical recommendations throughout this guide provide a solid roadmap to elevating your company’s discoverability and lead flow this year.
The tactics and principles outlined represent the real-world strategies that have helped my agency’s clients collectively earn hundreds of millions in local roofing revenue over the past 13 years.
At a high level, here are the key takeaways to internalize as you move forward optimizing your roofing operation for local dominance:
📌Optimizing your Google Business Profile is non-negotiable to enter the game on local rankings. Treat this as a full-funnel conversion asset synced with your website.
📌But beyond GMB – Google gauges your localized authority signals across your full web presence, including site architecture, content assets, visible credibility indicators and more.
📌Earning prominence with locally relevant citations, links, and relationship-driven promotion channels remains the eternal currency for dominating hyperlocal rankings.
📌However, rigid old keyword dogma is antiquated – you need built-out asset clusters and pages catered to the nuances of longtail, localized, and voice-based consumer searches.
📌Similar evolution is required for your local marketing and reputation management, diversifying across high-value platforms and proactively courting reviews at every turn.
📌Advanced local roofers embrace hypergranular community immersion, with localized asset creation and promotion amplifying relevance at enriched geographical subsections.
As Google’s AI grows increasingly sophisticated at parsing local intent, relevancy, and real-world proof, the leaderboard of #1 ranked roofers will be defined by those mastering compounded citation strength and ultra-specific localized optimizations.
I firmly believe the preparation, prioritization, and consistent advancement outlined here provides the ultimate blueprint to join those ranks.
So bookmark this guide, rally your team, and get started on leveling up your local roofer SEO execution – your digital real estate in high-value local results awaits!