SEO is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search results, this means that unlike Google and Facebook Ads, you don't need to pay for the clicks. However, SEO does require ongoing work and unlike paid ads which are relatively quick, often takes months of work upfront before you see results.
If local customers are your most valuable, your focus should be local SEO, which are SEO strategies focussed on helping your business be more visible to customers searching for your services in your local area.
Here are some top tips on helping your roofing business get found in the local search results.
With more searches becoming geographic specific, setting up a good Google My Business (GMB) profile is one of the quickest and simplest things you can do to generate local leads effectively.
If you haven't heard of GMB before there are a few basic things to know. Firstly, GMB is a free listing Google provides to businesses. It allows you to provide and regularly update important information about your business that Google can then display to relevant local searchers.
Everytime a potential customer searches 'roofing companies near me' or 'gutter repairs sydney' they will displayed with three local businesses that meet their search criteria, these companies all have a GMB profile so not having one takes you out of the race.
Which three companies are displayed and in what order comes down to optimisation. Let me run you through how to do that.
First, ensure you company information such your phone number, address and trading hours are correct and exactly the same as the information on your website. It may not seem like a bit deal, but Google penalises you quiet a bit if your address, phone number and company name don't exactly match up with the information on your website.
You should also update your trading hours for holiday periods such as Xmas.
Next, pick the right category to ensure you show up for the relevant searches.
Write a good description, don't just say 'roofing company', think about the things that make your company good to deal with like;
Once you've got your description down, you can also add some attributes to further describe your business. For your roofing business the main attributes to consider are those related to Health & Safety which were added by Google due to COVID-19.
These attributes allow you to highlight what measures your business is taking to ensure staff are safe when visiting peoples home to do work such as conducting temperature checks and disinfecting surfaces.
Now it's time to look at the visual aspects of your GMB profile.
A study by Synup found that "Listings with photos are 2x as likely to be considered reputable and get 35% more clicks".
Typically you'll want to have a profile picture, your logo for example as well as additional photos of your team, trucks and projects. These all help build trust and demonstrate that your company is reputable and trustworthy.
Now that you've got your GMB profile setup, there are a few good habits you should aim to get into to really maximise the squeeze the value out of your profile.
Reviews are one of the most important elements in building trust and improving your conversion rate. They also improve your Local SEO.
Think about your own experience picking a restaurant or hotel or just about any other service, are you more likely to pick the business with lots of good reviews or the one with no reviews...the answer should give you the motivation you need to get on the review band wagon.
Generating more positive reviews is simple but you need to be consistent to really grow your base.
The easiest way to get more reviews is simply to email customers when you complete a job with a link that invite them to give you a Google review, this makes it easy for the customer to take action and will help you generate a consistent stream of reviews.
It's also good practice to regularly respond to reviews, good and bad in a timely manner, You can do this through the GMB admin section.
Make sure you thank everyone who leaves you a review, good or bad and if someone does leave a bad review, let them know you'll either be in touch to discuss making things right or have taken on board the feedback and will improve.
If someone does leave you a negative review for a legitimate reason and you call them and help them resolve the problem, you can then ask them to update or remove the review.
When it comes to local SEO, search engines love consistency, so make sure that the NAP information on your website (everywhere) and your GMP match exactly. That means check for misspellings, abbreviations, missing unit or suite numbers or phone numbers with different formats (eg. some with brackets around area code and some without).
To complete the picture you should also use a NAP citation checking tool (like MOZ or Brightlocal) to run a check across the internet to check the consistency of your information.
Use your about us page to not only tell your store, but also to describe your local area and why you love it.
The first thing to do when setting out to create your service areas page is to think about which main areas your customers come from and how they'd search for services.
If you are in Sydney for instance, would someone search for 'roofers Cronulla' or would they instead use 'roofer Sutherland Shire'? List down the most important areas your customers live.
Depending on time, you can start with a single page listing these areas but the best case scenario is to have a page dedicated to each area, with a brief description of the area and what services you offer there.
Make sure you don't just copy and paste the content from one page to the next, Google doesn't like duplicate content and may penalise you.
Make sure you embed a Google Map on your contact page.
Another great way to add local content and show prospective customers the results of your work is to create some customer success stories.
In your story you can describe the nature of the problem you solved, questions the customer had, how long it took, images of before & after as well as mention the area eg - 'Terry from Surry Hills in Sydney had a leak...'
Finish it off with a testimonial from the customer and you've got a great piece of content that not only helps your SEO efforts but also builds credibility with prospective customers.
Most towns and cities have a good selection of local business and tradie directories. These are often free and they directly contribute points to your local SEO effort.
Creating a listing usually requires the following information:
Having these handy will make the submission process that much quicker, just be sure to use the exact NAP information as what you did on your website and GMB profile.
Thanks for reading! If you have any questions or would like to discuss how our digital marketing strategy just for Roofers can benefit your business, schedule a free call with us here.
Use the buttons below to jump to Chapter 5 where we get into the next key strategy for Roofers who want to dominate their local market - How to convert MORE inbound leads.
