Roofing SEO Podcast

Setting your expectations for the future, finding a fruitful city to operate in, and optimizing your online efforts all represent significant challenges for a roofing contractor. With such a heavily fluctuating market, it’s easy to panic when your service area hasn’t seen a business-driving storm in many years. Nolen and Jason discuss strategy in the latest podcast, whether there’s a storm on the horizon. So if you’ve struggled with earning the long-term growth, your roofing company craves, be sure to listen in.

Key Points in Our Podcast:

• Most roofing contractors (and family members) don’t know how to optimize.

A tiny segment of roofing professionals can effectively chase after hail storms and hurricanes and turn them into profit. While every eager contractor indeed longs for the year they earn 750 roofing clients a single storm year, that’s not the norm for most businesses. It simply makes more sense for the vast majority of roofers to put down roots and work for steady growth. Not only is it more pleasant for your family and staff, but it’s also better for your roofing SEO.

Believe it or not, Google works extremely hard to develop lists of the most dependable industry professionals within a geographical area. Search engines evaluate E-A-T factors (expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness) when choosing top rankings. So what kind of businesses capture these coveted front page listings?

Common Factors Among Top-Ranked Companies

• They earn high reviews from a variety of platforms.

All the factors listed above drive traffic towards your roofing company’s website. The last two likely affect your results the most. Nothing impacts local search rankings more than a location change. Even changing addresses within the same city can change your rankings, for better or for worse. Google’s search algorithm gets very picky when it comes to changes in address. Even a minor difference in how you abbreviate the same address between multiple online listings may lower your chances of seeing front-page listings.

So don’t go changing your address without doing significant research prior!

Below, you’ll find a few critical rules of thumb regarding changing location and how changes affect your roofing SEO. If you make any of these mistakes, it’s not the end of the world. However, you will likely need to partner with an experienced online marketing professional to get your team back on track for search.

It takes roofing contractors years to develop an established reputation in a city. Google’s vetting process is a never-ending cycle of evaluation and re-evaluation. That’s why it’s so frustrating to see a successful business jump ship and move to a new city, then expect the same level of success from the get-go.

Any business that moves to a different location, especially out of state, can anticipate the old challenge of earning credibility in their comparative market. In our podcast, Jason and Nolen speak of a former client who opened up two new locations within the same state and couldn’t understand why they didn’t see immediate results. The situation was made more heated when the prolific storm damage market dried up in its original location.

Our Lesson: SEO results take time to grow in each new location.

Just don’t do it. Google’s grace for virtual offices seems to have run out for the time being. It may seem like a lucrative method to expand the reach of your service area, but business listings can get suspended (and delisted from search results) for this sort of behavior. In reality, you’ll be shooting your business in the foot and slowing down lead generation.

Our Lesson: If you need to expand, do it the natural way. Create new physical locations for your company and let your friends and family avoid the hassle.

Like many famous bands, roofing contractors typically start working out of a garage. You’ve probably used your home address for Google My Business and other listings. That’s perfectly fine! Our word of caution applies to businesses that are looking to take on a second location.

When you take the plunge and open up an official company office, your home address can no longer serve as a company location. One good office deserves another, so Google seems to believe. Your rankings could suffer if you ignore this crucial rule.

Our Lesson: If you can’t afford to move business entirely out of the house, don’t open up that new office just yet. However, if you’re ready to move, you’ll need to either close your home (as a company location) or open up a second office.

Before finishing our discussion, we need to touch on many roofing contractors who seem to struggle with lead volume. Your average lead generation rate depends on multiple factors, such as:

• Local climate and storm frequency

Some commercial roofers feel happy with just three projects a month, considering their larger scope and higher value. Residential companies may need a minimum of 8 to 12 to earn their target monthly revenue. While your market may produce a higher volume of leads, it’s crucial to establish a baseline average.

Suppose a business operates near the Florida coast or a Texas coastal city like Corpus Christi. In one average year, the company might see an average of 200 projects completed. However, after a particularly destructive hurricane season, the yearly amount may rise to three times as many projects. While that may provide opportunities to expand the business (or buy that dream home), owners need to remember that business eventually returns to the baseline. Forgetting that could lead to undue financial stress and overstaffing.

At the Roofing Webmasters, we support numerous roofing contractors across the nation. Whether you depend on storm seasons or normal wear and tear for the bulk of your projects, our team can help you optimize your online presence to earn more substantial results from Google Search. As a result, clients dominate their local search rankings, enjoying better traffic and faster lead generation.

The post How Many Roofs Would a Roofer Roof? (Podcast) appeared first on Roofing Webmasters.

2021 Update: Rigthous Reviews is now DataPins.

Finding a capable (and convenient) reviews platform can be complex. However, roofing contractors and other industry professionals live or die by the quality of their reputation management. In today’s podcast, Nolen and Jason talk about collecting reviews, jobsite check-ins, and geotagging. You’ll also hear them brag about our own fantastic reviews software, Righteous Reviews.

If you’ve struggled with getting your company name on the online map, be sure to listen in!

Key Facts to Learn:

• How you use your reviews is just as important as how/where you collect them.

Righteous Reviews (RR) is a web-based application developed by the skilled development team at Roofing Webmasters. Our team incorporates this feature into our websites (including our internal sites) for tremendous SEO benefits. However, because the application requires specialized coding, we only provide it as part of our general SEO for Roofers program.

Collecting reviews from clients is challenging work, especially when a roofing contractor gathers reviews through multiple citation sources, on their website, and their social media platforms. Righteous Reviews greatly simplifies the reputation management process, allowing roofers to consolidate their reviews through one refreshingly easy-to-use platform.

The website application offers two key features:

• Jobsite Check-ins

While it might not be evident at first, these capabilities provide tremendous SEO enhancements for our roofing clients. Here’s why:

In the eyes of Google, what separates your business from the many competitors in your service area? Google has to sort through countless service company websites, each with a score of professional services and dozens of city pages. Apart from these pages, the search engine doesn’t have any actual proof that a business operates in the areas they claim to.

That’s where geotagged check-ins come in handy! With Righteous Reviews, roofing contractors can check-in to a jobsite, fill in the related service and location data, include the client’s phone number and email address, take a project photo, then post it to your related service and city pages. You can complete everything in under 60 seconds per check-in.

What’s the point of this activity?

• It shows Google your business is active.

With teams checking in at multiple job sites each day, you’ll quickly create a large map of your team’s job history that Google can reference as proof of activity. Every pin on the map offers the data the search engine craves, and your future clients will be impressed by the long history of activity in their local community. All it takes is a quick 60-second check-in at each jobsite.

Now any consumer wondering if you perform a particular roofing service can see examples of your performing that exact installation, repair, etc., in their community. That’s enough evidence to sway many undecided homeowners and businesses. But, of course, Righteous Reviews has other invaluable perks for your roofer SEO.

With the Righteous Reviews program, our team provides a simple request-for-review template. Then, whenever your roofing teams finish a job, their jobsite check-in immediately sends an invitation via text or email with links to your various review sources. Our research over the years shows that Google prefers to see company reviews coming from multiple resources. So we suggest links to your Facebook Business profile, your Google My Business account, your BBB listing, and wherever you want reviews.

Again, these Righteous Reviews add geotags to any reviews submitted through this invite. The review gets uploaded to the respective service page and city page, and Google notices the extra data when it re-examines your website. No other reviews platform (that we know of) provides this automatic upload capability. Additionally, every review submitted to your company comes with our special coding that makes them work even harder for your roofer SEO.

Imagine getting the latest reviews from Facebook, Google, and Yelp automatically uploaded to your website. A simple request-for-review process generates when your teams check into each jobsite. As long as your contractors continue to perform these 60-second check-ins, you should see tremendous improvements in your website SEO.

Like all of our solutions, Righteous Reviews results from lengthy research, skilled development, and careful integration. But, unlike other review software out on the market, it isn’t a simple widget you slap onto a website. That’s why we only include RR with our custom-built websites. As a result, you’ll notice the difference in website search performance and platform ease-of-use.

The post Righteous Reviews (Podcast) appeared first on Roofing Webmasters.

Why do my competitors rank in Google Maps listings but not my business? It can be an extremely frustrating situation to find yourself in, especially when your business has more reviews, higher ratings, and more extended history. In addition, with Google’s history of frequent algorithm changes, it can be challenging to put the finger on exactly what’s going wrong with your roofing SEO.

In our podcast, Jason and Nolen explore what it takes to show up in mapping and earn more leads as a roofing contractor. So if you’ve been coveting a featured listing for some time, be sure to listen in.

Look for These Key Points

• Should businesses focus exclusively on gaining Google Reviews?

By now, almost any roofing contractor can tell you that ranking #1 on Google means big business for your company. The top ranks of search engine results pages (SERPs) continue to shift with each passing year. The ultimate win for roofing SEO these days is scoring a spot in local packs, a feature of Google Maps listings.

Google Maps, of course, is a satellite and database-powered tool that connects consumers with local services. It features the standard pins on the map and nearby cross streets. In addition, maps listings now include crucial contact and reputation data on each business, including addresses, service type, operating hours, and reviews. That last element is a point of contention in the roofing contractor community. We’ll talk about that in a little bit.

On the other hand, local packs are a unique SERP feature that pulls three of the most relevant entries from Google Maps listings. As their popularity and influence increase, local packs grow more and more competitive each year. As a result, they earn a large percentage of clicks, pulling traffic away from other lower front-page listings. As a result, local packs typically claim second or third place in the front page order, just below Google Guaranteed entries and paid ads.

Beyond the traditional keyword optimization, Google looks for three essential qualities in a website. These include:

• The expertise of the content creators

These E-A-T factors can be traced back to Google’s 2015 Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines and heavily impact the search engine’s ranking of your website (including Maps listings). However, when it comes to proving trustworthiness, few elements influence Google’s (and people’s) judgment more than User Reviews. 

In the past, Google emphasized the collection of reviews on its platform. The relationship between reviews and list ranking seemed clear: get more five-star reviews and get higher rankings. However, Google now recommends earning reviews across a broader spectrum of sources. Some of these may be from social media platforms (such as Facebook and Instagram). Others come from citation companies, including Yelp and Angie’s List.

Your roofing team probably works hard as it is earning new reviews from clients. Now there’s the thought of collecting them across different platforms. The most important players in this new plan are the people interacting directly with the clients. Simply asking for reviews and offering a reference card will usually do the job. Next, make sure your social media platforms have the reviews call to action optimized and ready to take on the additional traffic.

Google also rewards businesses that display reviews within their website. The widget you incorporate could have a significant effect on Google’s perception of your business. One of the review tools that we love at the Roofing Webmasters is DataPins. Our clients can pull reviews from various platforms with this widget and allow customers to leave reviews directly on the website for their chosen medium (Facebook, Google, or Yelp, for example).

Roofing contractors can also use the widget to send invitations to review. Imagine quickly requesting reviews via text messages that include a direct link to your website! Finally, roofing professionals can check into job sites and that geo-location data gets embedded in your website. Essentially, this provides proof to Google that your company performs services in those locations. You can listen to Jason’s take on this capability around 8:10 in the video.

We stress the importance of other roofing SEO factors in your company’s Google Maps listings. Reviews alone will not provide the rankings you desire. Google’s examination of your company website also impacts your local SEO rankings. If a business skimps out on professional design, keyword optimization, and other essential activities, they will almost certainly not appear in local packs. With that being said, reviews are crucial to ranking well.

Are you tired of getting left out of top ranks or even the front page altogether? Our team at the Roofing Webmasters would love to help! We support numerous contractors with website design, ad campaign management, and SEO for roofers (among many other services). As a result, our clients enjoy premium rankings, higher site traffic, deeper user engagement, and superb lead generation.

The post How To Show Up On Mapping (Podcast) appeared first on Roofing Webmasters.