Roofing SEO Podcast

Do you ever worry about what shows up when people search your company on Google? While there are all kinds of results that benefit your brand, it pays to pay close attention to local search results! In today’s podcast, Nolen and Jason discuss these topics and other aspects of your Google Homepage. So if you’ve struggled with low traffic or poor reviews, be sure to listen in.

Helpful Tips on Google Homepages:

• Regular GMB (Google My Business) updates make your site more valuable to Google.

When a potential customer searches your company name/brand, the result that pops up is what’s known as your Google Homepage. You’ll see a knowledge graph on the right-hand side that contains crucial information about your company, including contact information. The listings on the rest of the screen may arise from many sources, such as:

• Your Company Website

The sum of all these listings and features is your Google Homepage. From this homepage, consumers or commercial prospects will build a perception of your business. That’s why you must control what shows up when people search your name.

Think of the knowledge graph as a hub where people can access info on your company without ever stopping on your website. There’s a wealth of contact and location-based information. Potential customers can even contact your team directly from the knowledge graph by phone call or instant messaging. The Google Homepage feature also provides convenient buttons that link directly to maps and your homepage for those needing directions to your office or your website.

Those are just a handful of the features housed in the knowledge graph.

Did you know that your knowledge graph contains a section for direct questions to your business? This handy feature allows local consumers to interact with your company almost directly, learning handy tidbits and history about your brand. While anyone can post answers to these questions, this feature offers one fantastic opportunity.

You can post questions to your FAQ, then answer them! 

Think of some of the most popular topics people bring up about your company. Then, you can proactively answer questions about your roofing team’s services, your experience, and your warranties. Answering questions might encourage someone to investigate your services further or even prompt a call directly from the Google Homepage!

Businesses can also use their GMB accounts to create posts within the knowledge graph. You can use these posts to promote your latest blog articles further, show off ongoing promotions, or even introduce your team members. There’s only one catch: posts disappear off the knowledge graph after seven days. Consumers can still access them, but they won’t be visible after that period.

Try posting at least once a week if you want to get the most out of the GMB posts. 

You can further improve their functionality by adding pre-programmed calls to action at the bottom of each post. For example, “Learn more” is perfect for segueing into a blog article, while “Call now” is an excellent option for encouraging impulse calls. Again, experiment to see what sort of formatting works with your audience.

Want to take back control of your Google Homepage? Start by reviewing all the materials that Google likes to see for your business. Then, you can start creating positive mentions of your brand through various channels.

Great Listings for Your Google Homepage

• Better Business Bureau profiles and reviews

Any of these listings look fabulous for your brand. However, you don’t want negative social media posts showing up because your company hasn’t been active online! Of course, it’s not the end of the world if that happens, but you’ll need to get busy if you want to improve your reputation.

Take an active stance on updating your Google My Business account. Start posting regularly, and take some time to upload some quality photos of your work and staff! These create a more personable feeling for your brand, and they look great in the knowledge graph. Be sure to make that FAQ we talked about earlier too.

Next, you’ll want to get start regularly posting blog articles each month. “How To” posts are powerful fuel for website traffic, and you can tackle some pressing homeowner issues. Competent contractors can make these posts travel farther by sharing them on social media.

Finally, be sure your company appears on all the popular citation directories. The BBB, Yelp, and Manta are all great listing companies for roofing contractors. It will make it easier to collect reviews from all your happy fans as you complete your projects.

The post The Google Homepage For Roofers (Podcast) appeared first on Roofing Webmasters.

Monthly billing helps businesses save valuable time and effort, not to mention thousands of dollars. That’s because this type of accounting pushes your local search marketing team much harder to produce results. Jason and Nolen talk about the roofing industry, roofing marketing, and some glaring red flags to look out for as you reassess your online investments.

Key Lessons for Roofing Professionals

• Transparent pricing and reporting are key in accountable PPC advertising.

In local SEO for roofers, there are clear winners and losers. Most people gauge success by rank position, whether their business makes the Google Search Engine Results Page (SERP). However, the more experienced marketing professionals know that their clients (and their agency, by extension) truly win when those keyword rankings turn into site visits and roofing leads. That’s what separates the search marketing champions from the rest of the industry.

Winners continually strive to produce higher volume, higher quality, and lower cost leads. 

Losers look for surface-level results, the kind that makes them look good on a monthly report. So much effort goes into producing just enough results to maintain their clients, but not a lot into creating long-term success. That’s the unhappy truth for many roofing companies and their marketing agencies.

So what kind of qualities can a roofing professional look for as they hunt for a winning team?

A little obvious, right? Unfortunately, most contractors don’t understand what expertise looks like in the search marketing industry. After all, they (probably) didn’t go to school for digital marketing and advertising! That’s why knowing the critical signs of fundamental expertise is so crucial.

Signs of a Winning Search Marketing Team

• Excellent Keyword Rankings (For Their Company)

Keyword rankings serve as a resume for companies that work in local search marketing. If they enjoy page one rankings for their primary industry keywords (such as “roofing seo services” or “seo for roofing”), that’s a good sign! Should their clients enjoy excellent keyword rankings in organic search, that’s even better.

Your marketing company should know their craft well enough to explain it to anyone in your staff effectively. Winning search marketers also learn how to communicate their services and deliverables so that you can accurately set your expectations for the coming months. But, of course, all that expertise is specifically adapted to help your business, which in turn demands a basic understanding of the roofing industry. If they can’t understand the lead development cycle for a homeowner or commercial organization looking for roofing services, how can they market those services?

Have you ever received a shady service bill? It’s not a pleasant feeling, especially when you see fees that you didn’t anticipate. Unfortunately, when there’s little to keep a service provider accountable, these sort of shady practices can creep up in any industry. As a relatively new sector, however, digital marketing still lacks many of the safety mechanisms consumers rely on to ensure quality service.

Sly businesses often use sketchy reporting and costing measures to skim money out of your marketing budget without investing it in your local SEO or PPC campaigns. Unfortunately, this practice is prevalent among lump-sum, flat fee service packages where money can easily be distributed wherever the agency desires. At the Roofing Webmasters, we’ve heard this story a lot more often than we’d like.

How can you make sure that your search marketing team is held accountable?

• Examine their reporting process ahead of time.

Reporting is a fickle thing. On the one hand, industry giants like Google make it their goal to provide thorough, detailed accounts of your spending and results. But, on the other hand, agency reporting and even third-party services tend to blur where your money is going. That’s why it’s always prudent to arrange your PPC billing to go directly through your advertising platforms (Google, Facebook, etc.). Transparent billing prevents marketing agencies from up charging ad costs per click.

Understand your search marketing company’s process for implementing website changes (for SEO) and ad campaign updates (for PPC). If you discover it’s almost impossible to receive updates once your services go live, then it’s wiser to look for another provider. Consider talking with a handful of your prospective marketing agency and see what they have to say about their service.

When it comes to local search marketing, a successful business must know how to adapt to industry changes. Google regularly shakes up its algorithm so that one type of content buoys to the top while the other sinks to the back pages of search results. For instance, how-to guides and Q&A-styled articles tend to rank very well for consumer searches.

Potential Challenges to Overcome in Local Search

• Rank drops

When your website traffic takes a dip for a month, how does your local search marketing team respond? There are many potential reasons for the lower volume. If your company quickly works to understand the problem and present a solution, you know you have a winner on your hand. On the flip side, a sluggish (or nonexistent) response could indicate your company doesn’t care.

Local search marketing takes time and effort, but an experienced and dedicated team makes all the difference! If you’ve struggled to make headway with your current agency, our team at Roofing Webmasters would love to talk with you. In addition, we offer free consultations for anyone looking to understand their recent search marketing performance. 

The post Skin in the Game with Roofer Marketing Dollars (Podcast) appeared first on Roofing Webmasters.

Top ranking companies rarely succeed by accident, especially when it comes to organic search results. For roofing businesses that want to start claiming higher positions in local search, keeping up with Google’s ever-changing standards makes all the difference. In the latest podcast from Roofing Webmasters, Nolen and Jason discuss two key areas to establish your brand expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. If you crave better lead generation for your company, be sure to listen in to these Roofing SEO changes.

Tips on SEO for Roofers:

• Find the baseline SEO standards, then exceed them for higher ranks!

There was a time when no one believed it was possible for a human being to complete a mile run in less than four minutes. Then in 1954, to the world’s amazement, Roger Bannister destroyed that barrier and created a new threshold for professional distance runners. Thanks to Sir Bannister’s contribution, men around the world have gone on to set even more impressive records below the four-minute mark. We can learn many lessons from this incredible feat of perseverance, but one applies particularly well to our talk today:

The bar for success is always moving higher. 

This unavoidable truth is especially crucial in SEO for Roofers. Meeting the established standards doesn’t guarantee success. Exceeding them does! We find several powerful examples of this in digital marketing. For instance, Moz developed the 10x Content concept for creating more powerful blogs, infographics, videos, etc. Roofing Webmasters took the industry standard 10-ish points of schema coding customization, multiplied it, and raised it to 100 for much stronger website performance!

Today, we’re going to briefly review the current search engine optimization baseline for roofing companies. Then we’ll dive into two Roofing SEO changes to help you soar above the competition and earn your higher rankings.

At Roofing Webmasters, we have a handful of online marketing attributes and activities that we lovingly refer to as “The List.” Master these elements, and you’ve got a golden ticket to higher rankings automatically. Some of these include:

• Google My Business Listing Completion 

The list above is the bare minimum if you want to get noticed by Google’s search engine. Most companies can be considered lucky if they nail just one or two of these elements. Then again, most companies never see page one rankings! If you start making these Roofing SEO changes now, you could begin earning better traffic within a few months.

Remember, over 90% of pages listed on Google never even earn a single view. According to an Ahrefs study, only 10% of pages earn visitors from the world’s largest search engine. Half of that segment earns more than ten visitors a month. So you better believe that the lion’s share of traffic is going to the front pages of search results.

Instead of feeling disheartened, take these numbers as a challenge. If you haven’t yet, start creating your roofing SEO foundation with a quality custom website, a GMB account, and listings in the top 10 citation sites (such as the BBB). Don’t stop short and double down on PPC or purchased leads; that’s a difficult hole to escape. Once you’re ready, you can chase after the following Roofing SEO changes and knock out the competition.

As much as we’d hate to admit it, it’s theoretically possible to earn some success with a cookie-cutter website template. It’s certainly better than having no website at all, but not that much better. However, if you want to kick some online butt, your roofing company needs a custom schema-coded site. Schema coding is designed to fit your website content and provide crucial data to Google’s web crawlers. As the Roofing Webmasters’ Jason Landry puts it, “Schema coding tells Google crawlers what your content means.” 

In other words, this specialty coding takes all the various elements surrounding each of your website pages and identifies their purpose for Google crawling. As a result, markup makes it remarkably more accessible for the search engine to identify and appraise your content, earning higher rankings in the process. Higher rankings, of course, lead to better traffic.

Unless you have a dedicated programmer/design expert in your roofing team, you’ll probably have to hire this task out to a seasoned web developer. But, even if it costs a few thousand dollars for a brand-new site, the reward is certainly worth it! Just make sure you keep your established domain name.

Few signals impact your brands’ trustworthiness, like customer reviews. If you’ve done an excellent job of faithfully collecting reviews, you already know the power of positive client feedback! With that being said, there’s a way to supercharge your reviews for two to three times the impact: geotagging. Geotagging attaches location-based data onto your reviews, creating a digital footprint for local search. 

Many applications and software services complete this tagging process effectively, but those create some outstanding improvements for your online search. At Roofing Webmasters, our favorite geotagging software is DataPins. The tool integrates seamlessly into our custom websites, making it easy to sync with both city pages and service pages. RR also makes it easy to post geotagged check-ins and reviews to your website, creating precious data that Google eats up like frosted cupcakes!

Just imagine the benefits to your local search and keyword rankings if your reviews worked three times as hard for your roofing business. Whatever solution you land on, make sure it incorporates reviews from all your primary citation sources. That should include (at minimum): Google Reviews, Facebook, BBB, and Yelp. Google Search values reviews more when they come from a variety of sources.

These Roofing SEO changes make it so much easier to earn premium rankings in organic search! If you’ve been struggling to make headway in online marketing, our team at Roofing Webmasters would love to help. Our collection of seasoned content writers, programmers, SEO strategists, and website designers supports hundreds of businesses throughout the United States. As a result, clients regularly earn front-page rankings, earning higher traffic and more substantial leads.

The post Mega Roofing SEO Changes in 2020 (Podcast) appeared first on Roofing Webmasters.

Are you fed up with your roofing lead generation? It’s a story we hear so many times at Roofing Webmasters: “I need leads, but I hate paying my company for them.” In our latest podcast, Jason and Nolen discuss the truth behind leads and where they ultimately originate. So if you’ve never considered how your lead-selling company works, be sure to listen in.

Helpful Tips for Lead Generation:

• Don’t forget: lead-selling services make local businesses compete for the same pool of leads.

Have you ever met someone who only eats at fast-food restaurants? When they complain about the soaring costs of eating out, you want to point to the nearest grocery store and say, “Make it yourself!” While the process may take a bit of work, preparing your meals is ultimately much cheaper than dining out. That’s just a fact of life!

When it comes to online marketing, learning to feed yourself is just as important. Even so, thousands of roofing companies are stuck waiting for a third-party lead generation vendor to spoon-feed their business. All the while, those same vendors gather leads from the same sources that roofers should target independently.

Picture this: A laborer and a smooth-talking salesman walk next to an enormous freshwater river. On the bank of the water, the hard-working laborer notes the extreme heat and moans about how thirsty they’ve become on the walk. Then, as the two near the clean water supply, they happen upon a bucket set on the shoreline. The salesman walks up to the buck, dips it deep in the river, turns around to the laborer, and says, “For $20,000, I will give you a sip of this water.”

This story sounds ridiculous, but it amply describes many roofing contractors and lead generation.

Google delivers the most significant volume of roofing leads than any other digital source in the United States. The search engine craves trustworthy businesses to direct consumers and even provides free tools to simplify the process. In addition, because Google matches consumers with companies in their local community, the resulting lead quality is generally much better than other sources.

Lead generation companies step in and create a gap between consumers browsing through Google Search and roofing companies hunting for customers. Instead of connecting interested homeowners and businesses directly to a single local contractor, they offer the same leads to multiple roofing companies within the same community. This “lead” may be a person who’s simply looking for prices or bids, not a ready-to-buy individual to complicate matters further.

Maybe you don’t buy leads from another company. Perhaps you buy them from PPC campaigns off Google Ads or Facebook. These advertising venues aren’t as cheap as they used to be, but they provide a dependable lead source. You also only pay for clicks, a very actionable source of business.

While PPC offers plenty of opportunities to grow your business, it represents an equally dangerous source of lead generation addiction. 

After all, these campaigns are relatively easy to manage and remarkably simple to track results. Moreover, even if a roofing company owner is too busy to run the campaigns themselves, dozens of digital marketing experts are willing to handle the load. That, of course, makes the endeavor even more expensive.

Generate the leads yourself! You know all those businesses sitting at the top of your local search results are there for a reason. Self-sustaining lead generation doesn’t happen spontaneously. For example, those successful roofing contractors exercised the meager time, money, and effort necessary to win. Now they reap in the outstanding traffic and leads.

You don’t have to give up on purchasing leads or running campaigns all at once. Instead, simply start putting a little money each month into developing a long-term supply of clients.

• Your brand starts to earn greater recognition.

If you’re tired of paying out the nose for leads, or if you’re curious about creating more growth for your roofing business, we’d love to help. 

The post Roofing, Marketing, and the Truth About Leads (Podcast) appeared first on Roofing Webmasters.

Does earning front-page rankings for your roofing business seem impossible? You might be closer to breakaway success than you think. In our latest podcast, Jason and Nolen discuss how to set your brand apart from the rest with SEO services for roofers. So if you’ve struggled to make headway with your business online, be sure to listen in!

Helpful Lessons on SEO for Roofers:

• Just completing the SEO basics puts you miles ahead of other roofing contractors.

Anybody can jump into the online marketing fray without laying the proper groundwork. The backend pages of Google Search results are lined with roofing contractors that thought their SEO preparations were “good enough.” These companies earn little to no website traffic, and they shake their fists wondering why their haphazard efforts have failed.

There’s a bare minimum that every company must perform to rank for their desired services.

SEO Basics to Start Ranking

• Step #1: Claim Your Google My Business Listing

So what does a dedicated roofing company need to do to start earning business online? First, they need to claim and fill out their Google My Business (GMB) profile. A GMB listing allows the search engine to better understand the location and function of your company. Whatever address you use for the GMB account, make sure all your other citation sources match it!

The profile will request many other details of your business. Fill out as much of the information as you can, and check back yearly to make sure your data is still accurate. GMB also allows you to post photos and videos of your business and personnel. Try taking some pictures of your finished roofing projects to post on your account! You can even use existing materials from your Facebook Business to get started.

We can’t stress enough just how important it is to nail your company website! So many businesses put up a cookie-cutter, terribly written website and earn inferior leads as a result. If you want your website to do well, make sure you have it crafted by a professional team that knows what they’re doing. A healthy site relies on an organized collection of service pages, keyword optimization, quality content, simplified navigation, lots of schema coding, and review integration. 

No single marketing professional can provide all of these aspects, which is why it’s best to rely on a well-rated team. Few other factors of your online marketing so heavily impact your online lead success! Once you’ve established a well-optimized website, you’ll have the foundation necessary to spring into the rest of the SEO basics.

There’s no greater mark of authenticity than a host of glowing customer recommendations. Client feedback shows trustworthiness, one of the three E-A-T factors that Google analyses when ranking a roofing company brand. But, of course, the only way to pull in reviews is to establish listings for your business. As we’ve already mentioned, your GMB account is a great place to start. In addition, Google Reviews naturally integrate well with local search results, making your business much more visible.

However, the search engine provides better results when reviews come from a variety of sources.

That’s where citation sources come into play. These companies offer additional venues to list your company address and services, not to mention a convenient way to collect reviews. While some shady companies might push you to list dozens of obscure websites, it’s best to start with more established brands. The Better Business Bureau, Yelp, and Angie’s List are a few intelligent places.

We have a saying at the Webmasters, “You don’t have to be perfect. You have to be better than everyone else.” So far, we’ve covered online activities that will keep you in pace with the rest of the successful roofing companies. Now we come to the SEO basics that make your brand stand out as a clear winner.

SEO Strategies for Winners

• Ask for reviews all the time.

We’ve already talked about how critical reviews are for your business. So why not ask for them consistently, especially after a job is well-done? Our team at Roofing Webmasters gets even more SEO power out of client feedback through a tool called DataPins. It adds geotagged data that shows Google the approximate locations of all job sites and showcases our clients’ roofing projects. While that level of review enhancement is pretty rare, a few other tools out on the market can provide added benefits for all your reviews.

Few roofing companies faithfully add to their company blog, which is why those that do consistently add well-written content are certain to stand out. The best part? You can take the informative material and share them on your social media pages for some added oomph! That’s just one reason to create a Facebook Business page, by the way. The social media platform offers a beautiful place to share information about your business, showcase your latest work, and tactfully address negative customer feedback.

Follow these winning strategies and SEO basics, and you’ll undoubtedly start earning higher rankings for your website. If you’ve been frustrated with organic or paid search, however, our team at Roofing Webmasters would love to help. Check out some resources throughout our website.

The post How Do I Beat Other Roofers Online With SEO? (Podcast) appeared first on Roofing Webmasters.