Roofing SEO Podcast

There are many SEO scams online in today’s marketplace, and roofing companies can fall victim to their shadiness. On today’s podcast, Nolen and Jason of Roofing Webmasters discuss SEO scams for roofers and how to avoid lousy marketing companies like the plague. Investing marketing dollars wisely can make or break your roofing business, and choosing the wrong agency can ruin your company. Let’s take a look at some surefire scam signs.

Any roofing marketing agency that locks you into a long-term contract (6 months or more) should be considered a red flag. Roofing companies should only partner with agencies that offer month-to-month agreements so that they can keep them accountable. In addition, once you’re locked into payments, your agency can stop worrying about your website because they get paid either way. 

One of the biggest scams in digital marketing is black box billing for PPC. If your agency handles your Google Ads, they should offer transparent billing through Google. You should know how much of your ad spend goes directly to your Google Ad campaigns and how much goes into your agency’s pockets. If they can’t provide detailed billing for your PPC campaigns, you have entered into a bad deal.

If an SEO agency asks you to choose from a list of keywords, run for the hills. While it might sound like a good idea at face value, the reality is that choosing keywords is a horrible SEO practice. A good SEO agency will optimize your website for every viable keyword in your niche rather than limiting it to select keywords. Worse yet, most of the listed keywords are easy to rank for and require very little expertise from the agency. As a result, they fool you into thinking they accomplished something great when most SEO companies could easily replicate the rankings.

Any highfalutin marketing agency that tries to act superior by using vague terminology that makes them sound smarter is acting in bad faith. If they speak about branding from a conceptual standpoint, they’ve likely hooked you into a bad deal. The actual value of branding is lead generation. So the idea of branding from a theoretical perspective is a waste of time. Unless your agency can show you how their services lead to sales, they are just talking to sound smart.

Not every generalized marketing firm is terrible, but it certainly helps to choose an agency that focuses on roofing. If your agency handles everything from eCommerce to medical accounts, they may not have the expertise to handle roofing, or they may lose your account in a pile of higher-paying clients. If you choose a general SEO company, make sure they can provide examples of roofing campaigns they’ve helped succeed recently.

The post Identifying Bad SEO Marketing Companies (Podcast) appeared first on Roofing Webmasters.

Roofing companies often question whether social media benefits their business. After all, social media seems associated with celebrities and millennials who don’t respect blue-collar workers who live on the grind. However, while social media has its downside, its upside is enormous for roofers serious about establishing an online presence. Ultimately, when it comes to social media for roofers, companies get out what they put in for 2021.

There are many avenues to tackle in the social media world, including social media marketing for roofers and social media advertising for roofers. When you combine that with the countless social platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn, it can get overwhelming for roofing companies. With this in mind, Roofing Webmasters offers some simple ways to maximize your social media presence as a roofer.

Even if you ignore most aspects of social media, you can’t avoid the branding aspect in 2021. Established companies in any field are expected to have social media profiles on the major platforms. Failure to create a listing on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter signals to your consumers that you don’t take your business seriously.

Although roofers might not get business directly from social platforms, the signals created can strengthen your website and SEO, ultimately producing more roofing leads. Sharing blog posts, videos, and other marketing materials on social media creates links and engagement for your website. Google sees social signals and considers them when analyzing brand authority.

Social media can serve as a platform for current and future clients to ask questions and inquire about your business. Whether someone sends a direct message or asks a general inquiry, you can use the opportunity to expand your brand’s reach. However, always remember that public messages can influence other people who read your social media feed. With this in mind, always maintain a professional tone.

Any kind of brand engagement serves your roofing company now and in the future. We mentioned how social signals influence SEO, but they can also impact your brand’s general perception. As you share content on your social feeds, be sure to track engagement using Facebook Insights and other built-in measurement tools. You can even use UTM links from Google Analytics to track which users visit your website from a social media link.

The post Social Media Doesn’t Work Because You Don’t Work Social Media (Podcast) appeared first on Roofing Webmasters.

Some Roofing Companies have multiple business locations, which can create a challenge for SEO. However, Google likes things clean with local SEO for roofers, including a website, a Google Maps & My Business listing, and consistent and accurate NAP citations. Attempting to optimize for more than one location disrupts the typical local optimization signals for search.

Luckily, there’s a way to execute multi-location SEO that will maximize your roofing leads throughout all of your service locations. The most common tactic is mass-producing “city pages,” which are essentially duplicates of your main page but include the specific city name within the title and content.

Mass-producing location pages can violate Google’s guidelines since they can be considered doorway pages that provide no unique value to users. The key is creating unique city pages that feature content exclusive to the area. One way to ensure uniqueness is to use DataPins, a software that allows roofers to drop pins every time they do a job. The software automatically publishes the pin on the corresponding city page.

Google is more than happy to accommodate your second or third business location if it’s legit. But you must do your part as the business owner too. The first step is creating subfolders on your primary website. For example, if you are myexamplesite.com, you’ll want subfolders for each of your actual business locations. So if you have locations in Dallas, Houston, & Austin, you’ll have URLs (subfolders) for each city. 

Location pages will be top-level URLs, which can then have child pages underneath them. Each page should be unique and not a duplicate copy of another page. See how they might look below:

1. myexamplesite.com/dallas

As we noted, these pages must be separate from one another, not just in URL location but in content. The worst thing for Google to see is duplication. So never use spun content or switch out the city name within identical content. Instead, a unique page should be handwritten for each city. Again, it helps to distinguish your locations in real life and represent that on your website. 

A great way to do this is to use DataPins. The DataPins tool creates schema markup for each job you perform and allows roofers to include a picture and caption that automatically publishes to the corresponding city page. You might also feature some of your top employees in these areas. You want the visitor to view each location as a separate entity and one that looks “real.” 

All of your locations need their own Google My Business account, and they all must be linked to the appropriate subfolder of your website. For example, your Dallas Google listing must link to 

myexamplesite.com/dallas and your Houston Google listing must link to myexamplesite.com/houston. 

It is the only way to instruct Google to correctly categorize your locations and promote them to the most relevant users. When executed in this manner, users in the Houston area will find your Maps listing on their local searches. At the same time, consumers in Dallas & Austin will discover the appropriate Maps listing in their respective regions as well. See the examples below:

1. Dallas Google Maps —> myexamplesite.com/dallas

The post Multi-Location SEO for Roofers (Podcast) appeared first on Roofing Webmasters.

So you’re a newb when it comes to marketing for roofers—big deal. The reality is that everyone has to start somewhere, and there’s no better time to start than now. Embarking on a new business venture can be both exciting & intimidating. There’s the lure of the unknown and the challenge that comes along. At Roofing Webmasters, this podcast wasn’t created to earn new clients (we have a line out the door) but instead to impart our knowledge of what it takes to become a successful roofing contractor in 2021.

Nolen Walker, the founder of Roofing Webmasters, started from humble beginnings. Like those of you reading this post, he didn’t have the money to invest in big-time marketing right away. So instead, he spent his time mowing lawns & painting curbs to build enough cash to parlay into a long-term investment. 

Planting your flag as a digital footprint, albeit a comparatively minuscule one, lays a foundation that you can build on many years later—Google factors in tenure when assigning trust to a particular brand or entity. Claiming a domain name now (even if it shows a dirt cheap website) is still a step in the right direction for prospective roofers. Here’s what you need:

It would help if you had a website and domain name ASAP. Although you can’t expect to succeed on Google organic with a template website, having any website at all is better than not having one. Why? Tenure matters in the eyes of Google. So while you won’t directly benefit from your website today, you will be setting the stage for future endeavors in terms of lead generation. 

Remember, you have limited funds, and so you have to make the most of them. You can’t compare yourself to other roofers with massive budgets because that will only discourage you from trying. Even if it is a baby step, the first step can start a meaningful push to lead to sustainable success. Domains usually cost 9.99. Go for a roofing domain name that has a dot com extension.

If you do nothing else with your web presence, make sure you at least claim & optimize your local Google listing. GMB listings account for both your Google My Business profile & Google Maps address. Every business owner in the world can do this free of charge if they have a legitimate business. 

Google explains how to claim your business which is the simplest way to establish a web presence with no money. Make sure you add company photos to your profile as you take them. As a newb, you may not have many to start, but your GMB can be continuously improved over and again. First, maps addresses must be verified, which is most commonly done via postcard mail. Once verified, you can rank on Google Maps.

Once you’ve claimed & optimized your Google listing, you should pursue as many reviews as possible. Even if you have a dirt-cheap website, consumers can find appeal in a GMB listing with several positive reviews. If a prospect searches your brand name, they will see your GMB listing in the knowledge graph on the top right of search results.

Google is not the only platform on which you should generate reviews. You also want to disseminate them to business directories like Angie’s List, BBB, MapQuest, etc. But perhaps more importantly, you want to get them on Facebook, which serves as a social media platform as well as a top business directory.

Speaking of Facebook, social media platforms are free to market and present a powerful web entity for roofing newbs with no money. Sure, you can’t advertise on Facebook or Instagram without funds, but you can certainly market yourself on them. Facebook marketing is primarily about establishing a business page that will show up on Google search results.

With Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube, you have a chance to generate some organic impressions on the platforms themselves. Unfortunately, Facebook no longer empowers brands to show up on organic feeds as a way to discourage the clickbait that has plagued the social network over the past decade or so. But you can still use it to your advantage, as a newb roofer with no $.

Once you transition from newb to moderately successful roofer, you should take your earnings and re-allocate them towards superior marketing. The first step will be contacting a professional web designer who can replace your old site with a newly customized one coded for SEO.

Since your domain will already have tenure at this point, you can leverage its age to hit the ground rounding with your newly designed website. Yes, that’s right, you keep the domain that you bought for 9.99 some years ago but now energize it with a superior design. Combining tenure with SEO creates a perfect storm of digital promotion that one can enjoy the benefits of for years and decades to come.

Remember, this post is not for people who already have a dominant online presence; it is just a reminder to those who want to reevaluate once they gain that position. Roofing Webmasters has been working with roofing contractors for years, and our data supports consistent excellence in roofer internet marketing. We attend to detail, review the latest algorithmic trends, and constantly look for advantages to put our clients over their competitors on Google organic rankings.

The post Roofing Marketing for Newbs (Podcast) appeared first on Roofing Webmasters.

Many Roofing websites engaged in keyword stuffing in the early days of Google, a severely antiquated SEO content technique meant to boost search rankings. The stuffing tactic worked well initially since Google’s algorithm could not yet adequately process language through text. However, in 2021, Google’s algorithm is so far advanced that it can identify keyword stuffing instantly.

Google can enforce its keyword stuffing ban through its increasingly intelligent search algorithm. Nevertheless, the influence of roofing keywords is still significant, especially in title and header tags. However, ranking well on Google now requires modern keyword strategies, particularly synonyms and LSI keywords.

LSI or Latent Semantic Indexing is an information retrieving methodology speculated to be utilized by Google’s algorithm. The method focuses on relationships and patterns between terms.

Regarding SEO, an LSI keyword relates to the primary term without replicating it. For example, it might be a synonym, or it might be a term that is closely associated with substantial groupings of data. Tools like LSI Graph track that data and produce lists of LSI keywords based on a primary word.

Roofers might wonder why they should care about LSI keywords. If you rank #1 for your primary keywords, then you probably shouldn’t care. After all, the bottom line is what matters to most. But the reality is that most people reading this aren’t ranking #1, and probably not ranking #2, #3, or even #4. That’s why they are looking for tips to improve their SEO which will eventually increase lead generation. 

LSI keywords can enhance your content and help you rank higher on Google search results. The result will be a more consistent lead acquisition and a more significant presence on organic search results. In addition, roofers who take their content seriously can make gains in ranking positions. 

Unfortunately, as we noted, many roofing websites continue to exhibit low-quality content and engage in keyword stuffing. You can separate yourself from competitors by having more diversely written content with more logical language. Not only does this signal to Google that your content deserves special consideration, but it makes for a better reading experience for the user.

The emergence of LSI keywords renders keyword stuffing useless. While you still want one instance of the primary term in the body content and the title, header, and meta description, you don’t need to use it much in writing itself. Therefore, Google publically discourages the keyword stuffing tactic, and roofing companies should avoid it without hesitation.

You can use a primary term several times if warranted, but you should never approach even ten instances. Unnatural keyword insertions create a negative user experience. Not only can you lose rankings from this action in of itself, but you can further lose ranking based on users’ reactions. After all, they are Google’s clients, and how they behave on your website remains the most significant indicator of your site’s value.

LSI keywords indicate a more extensive effort from a website and its writers. It shows that content on your roofing website is diverse and cohesive, which is ultimately what Google, and most importantly, its users, want. Instead of a page that only sells the service, a page that informs the consumer why this service is right for them, how it relates to their current problem, and how they can rectify the situation efficiently holds far greater value. 

We understand that roofing websites exist for the contractor to make sales, but Google’s duty is to its users, and users will always prefer the more engaging content. It would be one thing if none of your competitors were improving their content, but that is not the case. We’re seeing roofers that invest in their content writing ascending on search rankings, while those who remain stagnant in their old-school ways are losing ground.

Depending on local competition, poor keyword usage may prevent your website from ranking. Content is one piece of the SEO puzzle, but Google values it more than ever. Content works best when accompanied by custom web design, clean coding, local maps placemen. 

Keep in mind also that Google’s algorithm continues to evolve as we speak here today. What worked ten years ago no longer works today. The key is to view marketing as a fluid process that roofing companies must adapt to continually. Of course, it helps to have a digital marketing company like Roofing Webmasters on your side to help you get there.

The post LSI Keywords for Roofers (Podcast) appeared first on Roofing Webmasters.