To understand what SEO for roofing companies is, you should first understand what SEO is. In the simplest of terms, SEO (search engine optimization) is the process of getting your website to rank higher in search results. This is done by following certain rules and optimizing your website.
SEO gives your business a competitive edge in the industry. Your business receives more visibility and you won’t have to pay for advertising consistently. Instead, you’ll be generating organic leads and growing your customer base naturally.
For your roofing business, search engine optimization can really boost your business. Although it is a popular marketing element, many businesses don’t think to use it or believe that their time can be better spent elsewhere.
Search engine optimization, however, can help you beat out the competition without taking your focus off other marketing projects.
SEO affects every aspect of your roofing website from coding to web design. Since it is so broad, it’s best to outsource the work instead of expecting one of your in-house roofing company employees to take on the extra load. With a professional in control, you’ll see SEO results faster.
To help you get your head around SEO for your roofing website, here is a SEO checklist just for roofing contractors.
Roofing SEO Checklist For Roofing Contractors
When it comes to SEO for your roofing website or business, there are two different methods: on-page SEO and off-page SEO.
Both are used and work together to bring you the best roofing SEO results possible and help your roofing website climb through the ranks. Here, we’ll cover both types of SEO and give you examples of each.
What is Off-Page SEO (Search Engine Optimization)?
Off-page SEO is the SEO that is done outside of your website. It involves the actions you take to improve your website’s rankings that are not done on your webpage.
Off-page SEO will also help improve trustworthiness among your customers and help your website find visibility, relevance, and popularity.
Even though you may not think that off-page SEO is nearly as important as on-page SEO, many professionals see the difference. Without the help of off-page SEO tactics, it may take longer to see results and your SEO may not be as effective. What’s more, Google actually takes into account the off-page SEO factors when ranking your website.
How do you cultivate your roofing website off-page SEO? Here are some of the top ways for getting started:
1. Backlinks
Backlinks are the spine of your off-page SEO. Without them, your website won’t be half as strong.
Google routinely looks at the quality of backlinks your roofing website has and the stronger, higher quality backlinks you have, the better Google will deem your website.
The term “backlinks” is pretty general, so let’s dive quickly into the different types of backlinks.
Natural Links: These are the links that another website adds when they think your website content is relevant to their own or useful for their readers. For these, you don’t have to do anything. They’ll just add a link to your website on their own!
Manually Built Links: These links you do have to build. You generally create these links through influencer marketing or outreaching to other websites.
Self Created Links: These links are created by incorporating backlinking into online directories. They can also be built on web forums or blogs.
2. Guest Posts
Guest posting is simply publishing content on external websites where you include a link to your own roofing website. It’s important that your guest posting remains relevant to your roofing business, so don’t go looking for opportunities anywhere you can. Irrelevant guest posts can be useless or even worse, they can harm your current SEO work.
3. Infographics
Learning or researching is always better when there are eye-catching photos or infographics and your roofing business would do well to remember this. Even if your content is talking about something as simple as choosing roofing materials, add an infographic.
Infographics are another way to create backlinks and people would much rather read a colorful infographic than a paragraph of text. Some of your customers may even be more visual learners, so incorporating an infographic can help them better understand what you’re talking about.
Whatever the topic is, creating infographics and sharing them will help you get more links pointing to your roofing website. Websites that agree to publish or share your infographic will publish your website link to credit you for the image.
What is On-Page SEO For Your Roofing Business?
When it comes to on page SEO, the goal is different. With on page SEO, you’ll be creating and editing your own roofing company content to help search engines understand the context surrounding your website. It will mainly consist of HTML and your written content.
By using keywords and certain SEO techniques, you guide search engines into understanding and ranking your website. These keywords that are incorporated in your content have a direct effect on your Google ranking and how your customers will find you.
How should you go about optimizing your website’s on-page SEO? Here are our go-to methods.
1. Create Valuable Content
No one wants to read something that’s been scribbled down haphazardly. It’s pointless and can even count against you in Google rankings. Rather than trying to fill your website with content just to have more keywords, take the time to create valuable, high-quality content that customers (and search engines) can enjoy.
This isn’t limited to your roofing company services page. While your customers would ideally spend most of their time looking through your services and then calling you up, they’ll also spend time on other parts of your website.
Google will take into account your roofing website as a whole. Provide accurate and in-depth content that’s written in a well-thought out manner.
2. Use Internal Links
We love it when customers stay on our site longer and we bet you do too. One way to ensure your customers aren’t redirected somewhere else is by creating internal links.
Are you discussing how to design your roof? Include a link to a previous post about choosing your roofing materials or how to maintain more unique styles.
Be careful not to use too many internal links. You don’t want every other sentence to include a link back to a previous post, but one or two can be helpful. If there’s some information you think your customers might want to look up anyway, write a post about that and link it to your current one.
Internal links help guide your readers by placing relevant information and articles in front of them. This increases the overall time they spend on your roofing website. Internal links also help your website establish a well-interlinked structure that search engines will favor.
3. SEO-Friendly URLs
If you’re like many website owners, you probably didn’t even think about applying SEO tactics to your URLs. This can be a grave mistake and one that you can easily avoid. Not only do poor URLs make it difficult for customers to remember your website, it can also keep search engines from favoring your website to display in search results.
URLs help search engines know how relevant your website is and help customers recognize a good website. For example, if you had to choose between the two links below, which would you pick?
www.roofingbusiness.com/3pd458j
www.roofingbusiness.com/preparation/choosing-materials
The second link is obviously better. With it, your reader will know exactly what content they’re getting and they’ll feel that your website is well organized.
Creating clean, SEO-friendly URLs can boost your ranking and increase the trustworthiness of your website in the eyes of the customer. When it comes to on-page SEO, this is an important aspect you should not overlook like many of your competitors will.
3 Ways to Beat Your Competition
SEO is already a great way to get ahead of the competition, but it’s likely that your other roofing contractors’ websites have also incorporated SEO in some way. In order to beat them and stay one step ahead, here are three extra tricks you can use.
1. Implement Location Specific Keywords
Everyone thinks of keywords when they think of SEO, but not usually location specific keywords. This is unfortunate as this unique type of keyword is great at bumping your roofing business up a few spots for location-based search inquiries.
To use location specific keywords, you can take advantage of Google’s free Keyword Planner to see which keywords would benefit you the most. You can also take the time to brainstorm them on your own and compare your notes with Google’s.
Here are a few keywords you may come up with:
- Roofing contractors + location
- Location + roofing service
- Roof maintenance + location
Ask some of your roofing company employees what they might search for as well and create a long list of location-based keywords to choose from. You won’t want to add all of them, but once you compare with Google’s Keyword Planner, you’ll have a pretty good idea of which keywords to keep and which to toss.
2. Be Consistent
Keeping a consistent image across all your roofing company business pages plays an important role in your SEO. You should display your roofing business address and contact information in an obvious spot.
The easiest way to do this is to mount it at the very bottom of your website on the footer. This will ensure it is visible no matter which page your customers are on.
With a consistent address and contact method, Google will also recognize your roofing business’ physical location. This will tie back directly to your location specific keywords as Google will connect your address to any search results that are made within the nearby area.
Of course, if you ever change your roofing company phone number or move your physical address, make sure you update it as soon as possible.
Ideally, you would do this the same day you make the change and you should do it across all platforms. You don’t want your website to say one thing while your Google business page says another.
3. Create a Google Business Page
Even before you created a roofing website, you probably had a Google business page for your roofing company. If not, then it’s definitely time to make one.
Having a Google business page helps your roofing company stand out in the search results and helps your business look more official. Luckily, creating a Google business page is a simple process.
When you create your Google business page, be sure to implement other SEO tricks such as keywords and backlinks.
Final Thoughts
SEO can be applied to any website; even your roofing website. Many roofing companies still don’t understand how to use local SEO or they don’t realize how valuable roofing SEO can be for their business. Get ahead of your competition today and contact us to see how we can help you optimize your roofing website and cement your status as one of the top local roofing companies in your area.
Stephan Boehringer is the CEO of Get The Clicks, a web marketing company. Stephan has over 20 years of experience in the field of web marketing, and has been a speaker and consultant for many years. Stephan is passionate about web marketing and helping their clients be the best they can be.
Stephan Boehringer graduated from the University of Florida with a Bachelor of Science in Business, Management, Marketing, and Related Support Services.
