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Two things that reliably create business for roofers: A once-in-a-generation storm that…
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Two things that reliably create business for roofers:
One of these is unpredictable, can change direction at a moment’s notice and comes together only once in a while. The other is a weather phenomenon…
Jokes aside, creating and implementing a digital marketing strategy for a roofing business can be a daunting affair. What are the options? Where should you start? How do you know if it’s working?
At Advance Online, we’ve devised and implemented digital marketing strategies for dozens of roofing businesses. We know what works and what doesn’t.
From SEO to social media, we share our knowledge of digital marketing for roofers.
When marketing a roofing business, there are three options: traditional, digital or a combination of the two. But what does each entail?
Traditional marketing covers all marketing efforts carried out offline. This includes:
Digital marketing encompasses everything that occurs online. But that doesn’t just mean building a website and letting the roofing customers come. It also includes:
A multi-pronged approach for digital marketing is highly advisable, but of course, it takes time, effort and budget. More on that later.
Do you prefer the idea of hands-on traditional marketing? Or are you excited by the prospects of reaching a broader digital audience? There are pros and cons to both.
Traditional Marketing
Pros:
Cons:
Digital Marketing
Pros:
Cons:
In reality, a hybrid approach is suitable for a roofing business active in a local area. There’s also a great deal of overlap between traditional and digital marketing. For example, the logo you choose when determining your traditional marketing strategy will appear across digital platforms and your brand guidelines should be used to design your website.
The digital space is hotly contested for roofers and roofing businesses. To rise to the top, you need to understand the various digital marketing options and choose what suits you and your business.
Web design is the practice of designing and building a website to advertise your business. As well as containing the necessary contact details, it needs to be eye-catching and appealing – it should sell your business.
The average time spent on a webpage is only 52 seconds, so you haven’t got long. Use large, bold statements and images showing exactly what you do. Where possible, avoid stock images, as users often have a sixth sense for inauthenticity. Before and after photos of roof repairs are a sure-fire way to impress visitors, just remember to take them first.
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the practice of optimising a website in order to appear at the top of search results for certain search terms, also known as ‘keywords’.
The driving force behind this discipline is the fact that the 1st, 2nd and 3rd search results attract the vast majority of the traffic (40%, 19% and 10%, respectively).
Search engines rank results based on differing criteria, but broadly it comes down to the ‘relevance’ and ‘authority’ of the webpage.
‘Relevance’ is determined by whether the web page addresses the keywords included in the search term. For instance, if someone searches ‘roofer’, the webpage should feature the words ‘roofer’ in the page title and copy.
‘Authority’ is determined by the depth and expertise of the content on the website, as well as the perceived authority that other websites ‘give’ to yours. If, for instance, you write a roofing blog about leaking chimneys and a home improvement website links to it, this will increase the authority of this page and your website.
Search Engines also assess the technical standing of the website to ensure it’s easy to read for both it and its users. Factors such as page speed are important here.
There’s much more to SEO than this summary. For more information, see our blog post ‘SEO for Local Businesses’ or talk to an SEO specialist.
By gathering the email addresses of a list of engaged customers and sending emails that contain useful information or offers, roofing businesses can generate significant leads.
Each email should have a specific purpose and be part of a targeted campaign. For instance, if you anticipate a downturn in business over the summer, share offers over email to entice customers to fill up your schedule.
Use software to track data, such as opens, click-throughs and unsubscribes, so you can understand where your email campaigns are and aren’t working.
If you Google ‘roofer in London’, the first thing you will see is the ‘sponsored’ placements at the top of the search results.
These are one example of ‘pay-per-click’ advertising.
Pay-per-click advertising does exactly what it says on the tin. In return for a premium position in the search results or on a webpage, a company pays for each click it receives
The pictured example is more specifically ‘search engine advertising’. In this case, the companies have bid in an auction to appear in the paid places for the keyword ‘roofer in London’. Every time someone clicks on the sponsored link, the company pays their bid price. Competitive keywords command high bid prices and less competitive keywords typically require low bid prices.
Other types of pay-per-click advertising include ‘display’ advertising, whereby a clickable image or gif appears in the advertising space on a website, and ‘paid social media’, where companies pay to have their posts appear in users’ feeds.
Social media is a great place to share your work and your business’s personality.
Upload inspiring images of the roofing jobs you’ve completed or ‘how to’ videos on, for example, patching simple leaks to demonstrate your expertise.
You can also use social media to promote offers and collect customer opinions.
As ever, use the data – views, likes, follows and bookmarks – to better understand which of your efforts are most effective.
Sharing content on your website helps your digital marketing efforts in several ways:
Content marketing covers a wide range of media. While blogging is often the first port of call, videos, infographics, quizzes and ‘white papers’ (expert in-depth papers) also exist within the content marketing sphere.
Finding it difficult to know where to start with your digital marketing campaign? Our step-by-step guide, ordered in terms of ease and importance, will help you get off to the right start.
The simplest way to build a searchable online presence is to populate a Google Business Profile. Google Business Profiles contain the most important information a customer would need about your business – this information will also appear in search results and on Google Maps.
Much like websites, Google Business Profiles are subject to a ranking system. Ranking is based on three criteria: ‘relevance’ (the relevance of your business’s offerings to the search term), ‘prominence’ (in brief, the number of positive Google reviews you have) and ‘distance’ (the proximity of your business address to the searcher’s location).
You can optimise for these criteria by carrying out the following:
To encourage reviews, provide customers with a ‘review card’ displaying a QR code that links to the review box of your Google Business Profile.
In a digital world where success can be so easily imitated, authenticated review sites offer consumers an unbiased view of a business’s reputation.
Visibility on a review website is particularly important for roofing businesses, where a ‘cowboy’ approach from an improperly qualified roofer can cause a disaster in the home. Roofing customers are especially careful and will scour numerous reviews before getting in touch.
Google Business is the first port of call for many, but other trusted sites with review functionality include TrustPilot, Which? and Facebook. Make sure you’re present on all three.
Bad reviews are inevitable. Make sure you reply to each one. It might be a simple apology and a promise to do better in the future, or you might have counter-arguments disputing the facts if a customer is being unreasonable. Whatever the case, remain polite and professional.
Keywords are search terms for which you want your website to rank highly. They can be short, such as ‘roofer in Basingstoke’ or long, such as ‘how to tell if your chimney needs repairing’.
Choosing the right keywords for a roofing business is essential to your digital marketing strategy.
First, list all the services you offer. Include everything from broad terms, such as ‘roofing’, to more niche services, such as ‘EPDM rubber roofing repairs’.
Next, note down the areas in which you operate at a town and county level. Combine each service with each area to make a keyword master list, from which you will select the keywords you want to target.
Finally, you need to assess the data underlying each keyword, namely the ‘search volume’ (the number of times per month the term is searched) and the ‘keyword difficulty’ (a score which assesses the stiffness of the competition, indicating how difficult it will be to rank for this term).
It’s important to find a balance between search volume and keyword difficulty. Opt for a keyword with a high volume but high difficulty and you might not make the front page and will receive little traffic. Choose a keyword with little volume and it won’t generate the traffic you need, even if you rank highly.
In our experience with roofing websites, changing the target areas is the best way to alter the volume and difficulty. In general, larger areas come with high volumes and high difficulties, and vice versa. Start off targeting your local town and grow from there.
For more information, see our blog posts on how to choose keywords for a local business.
Before diving into the images, colours and copy of the website, you need to map out the structure of the website – this will be dictated by the target keywords.
As a rule of thumb, each service keyword should be targeted on a separate page, along with the main one or two areas. Additional areas should also be targeted on a separate page.
If you are targeting ‘roofer’, ‘roof repairs’ and ‘chimney repairs’ in three areas: Weybridge, Woking and Leatherhead, the page layout would look something like the below.
Once you’ve mapped the keywords correctly, you can start thinking about how to design and build the website. Use your branding guidelines to inform the design, making sure you include the following:
Needless to say, the website should be responsive and easy to use, otherwise, customers might get impatient and look elsewhere. A slow loading speed is bad for SEO too.
While for the uninitiated, SEO can be a bewildering prospect, there are certain steps you can take to optimise your website:
More complex (or at least complex-sounding) is the ‘technical SEO’. The website should be easy to crawl and index for the search engines. Uploading sitemaps to Google Search Console helps in this regard. The website should also load quickly (less than two seconds) and be usable on mobile devices.
Find more SEO tips for local businesses in our Help & Advice pages, or contact an SEO specialist for a helping hand.
A ‘citation’ is the mention of your company and its details on another webpage. Citations help boost your website’s ‘authority’, which is a key ranking factor. The more citations you have from reputable and relevant websites, the higher your website’s authority and the higher it will rank in search results.
Citations come in two forms:
Structured citations are particularly powerful as they contain all of your business’s information, making it easy for search engines to track the citation back to your website. Build these citations by entering your information into directories. Make sure the information is complete and consistent – conflicting information is bad for customers and SEO.
For a list of directories applicable for all local businesses, see our blog post ‘The 20 Best Directories for SEO in the UK’. Some more roofing-specific directories include:
While citations are the mention of your business information, a backlink is an actual link to your website. It’s a more powerful way to determine your website’s authority.
Backlinks from high-authority websites count for more in this regard, e.g. a roofing federation lends more authority to your site than an unmanaged blog post.
Backlink-building for local businesses takes time and results aren’t always guaranteed, though several methods can give reliable results. These include:
Another way to attract backlinks is by writing content that other sites naturally link to. Informative blog posts help in this regard (more on that later).
A word of warning: Anyone who offers to build thousands of backlinks on the cheap is likely using spammy SEO tactics that could attract a search engine penalty in the future. Avoid backlinking offers that seem too good to be true.
Pay-per-click is an excellent way to generate quick results. If poorly implemented, however, it can quickly erode the budget and generate little in return.
Explore the effectiveness of PPC by using a PPC ROI calculator and implementing several limited campaigns. Keyword data will help here too, with keyword research tools providing an estimated ‘cost per click’, so you can judge for yourself whether targeting a particular keyword is worth it.
Start, for instance, by targeting ‘roofer’ in your local area and measuring the results. You can always grow your PPC campaign if it’s successful.
When implementing a PPC campaign, you also need to create an engaging landing page that converts visitors into customers, otherwise it’s money down the drain.
‘Long tail’ keywords are those with lower search volumes (technically speaking, they appear in the ‘long tail’ of the statistical distribution, but if statistics isn’t your thing, that’s not important).
In roofing terms, long tail keywords typically come in the form of niche services, such as ‘EPDM rubber roofing disposal’ or questions or statements, such as ‘how to tell if your EPDM roofing needs replacing’.
Long tail keywords form the basis of content marketing.
While these long tail keywords might not have the pulling power of the likes of ‘roofer’, they can be easier to rank for, and, by targeting enough of them, can generate significant traffic.
They also capture customers at different stages of the sales funnel, for instance, when they’ve identified a problem in their home before they’ve even realised they need a roofer.
Good content also improves your site’s topical authority and can attract backlinks, both of which are great for SEO.
Use your expertise to write blog posts and create videos and images that help customers and post them regularly to your site. It might take a while to see the positive effect, but it will come.
If your business isn’t already on social media, it’s about time you joined. Social media offers a great avenue to engage with customers near and far.
Don’t just post for the sake of it. Try to have an overarching strategy and ask yourself whether each post achieves at least one of the following.
For inspiration, some well-curated roofing social media accounts are:
Capture past and prospective customers’ emails by:
Once collected, use the list wisely. Make sure email campaigns offer something genuinely useful to the user, such as information on new roofing regulations or discounted offers on roof surveys. Otherwise, that carefully collected list might quickly shrink.
When implementing a digital marketing strategy for your roofing business, one of the most important decisions you’ll make is how to do it.
Do you want to lean on the broad expertise and economies of scale of a digital agency? Or do you want to work closely with one or two freelancers? How about learning the ropes and devising and implementing the whole strategy yourself?
All options are possible, it’s just a matter of preference. To help you decide, see our blog posts ‘SEO through Freelance or an Agency’ and ‘Can I do SEO Myself?’
Every business is different and requires its own digital marketing strategy. To help you understand what a digital marketing strategy might look like for a roofing business on various budgets, we’ve detailed some typical solutions below.
£ Basic £ (budget = £300-£600 per month)
A small website targeting two to three service keywords, such as ‘roofing’ and ‘roof repairs’, and two to three small areas. Activities include fundamental SEO, such as SEO setup, citation building and tool maintenance.
££ Intermediate ££ (budget = £600-£1,500 per month)
Five to six service keywords targeting broad and niche services, including the likes of ‘chimney repairs’ or ‘roof surveys’, and more and/or broader target areas; intensive SEO efforts including regular audits and backlink building; quarterly or monthly content marketing; PPC campaigns; some social media posts.
£££ Advanced £££ (budget = £1,500 – £5,000 per month)
Ten-plus competitive service keywords and broad target areas such as major cities; advanced SEO and link-building tactics including guest posting, PR and link insertion; long-form content; significant PPC budget targeting a range of keywords; social media strategy planning and posting; email campaigns.
Needless to say, it’s possible to increase your budget and your marketing efforts as your business grows. In fact, it’s advisable.
Digital marketing is an excellent way to generate leads for your roofing business.
Here at Advance Online, we’ve devised and implemented marketing strategies for various roofing businesses, big and small.
If you’re interested in finding out more, please don’t hesitate to get in touch via the contact page.
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