Roofing contractors often lack the time and/or experience for properly launching and optimizing digital marketing initiatives for their business. As a result, digital marketing agencies are usually hired to take care of things for them. While outsourcing digital marketing activities to experts is a good idea overall, having some basic knowledge of popular strategies in the space will go a long way to ensure that you get the most value for your buck.

Why Digital Marketing is Crucial for Roofing Contractors

For any company to have an effective web presence, digital marketing is essential. While there are number of tactics that can boost your digital presence and result in more leads, some strategies are more effective than others. Here are 8 digital marketing strategies with information included specifically for roofing companies.

Keyword Research

Keyword research is not only important for search engine optimization (SEO), but it can also turbocharge your PPC and social media campaigns. You can find what your target audience or potential customers are searching for the most by conducting a thorough keyword analysis using any of the many tools available. Google Ads Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, SEMrush, Microsoft Ads Keyword tool, and Moz are some of the most popular tools for conducting keyword research.

For best results, evaluate relevant long-tail keywords such as “flat roofing companies in Chicago” as they tend to convert well regardless of the marketing approach chosen. In general, people want an expert in the specific service type needed. However, if the main purpose for your research is to go after highly competitive short keywords with higher traffic volume such as “roofing contractor”, then we would generally recommend going after smaller cities that have less competition. The reason is because even if you are successful getting a broader keyword in a large city, usually it’s only a matter of time until someone with additional resources puts in more time and money to take it away from you.

SEO

Writing keyword-specific content is one of the best ways to signal to search engines that your website is the perfect match for what people want. It’s also important that you fully optimize the title tag, meta description, alt tags on images, schema, etc. so that you can outrank competitors in your industry. Of course, there are other factors like page loading speed that can also impact how well you are favored by search engines.

While SEO has changed a lot over last 2 decades, it still remains the most effective way to get targeted traffic to your website without having to buy ads. SEO does require a lot of time, energy, and resources to get ranked on the first page, but the results are worth the effort. Once your website is ranking high for a long list of keywords, you will keep getting organic traffic 24/7, 365 days a year with proper maintenance.

Backlinks

Building backlinks is a digital marketing strategy all on its own. Contrary to what some marketers may say, it still works well as even a few links from high-quality websites in your industry can boost your first-page rankings for multiple keywords. At the end of the day, the backlink profile of your website will always matter. If a large number of quality sources are linking to your website, search engine crawlers will know that your content is of high quality and deserves a higher rank on search pages.

PPC

PPC or pay per click ads are one of the fastest methods of getting targeted traffic to your website. While SEO takes some time to deliver results, there’s no such issue with PPC as the results are visible as soon as your ad campaign is launched. Although, it’s important to keep in mind that unlike SEO, PPC involves buying ad space and the success of your PPC campaign also depends on several factors including the budget that you have for PPC.

Ideally, PPC should be used to complement your SEO efforts when fast results are desired. Otherwise, you will find the best ROI if you fully commit your resources to SEO since you can keep grabbing more and more keywords over time. The snowball effect of constantly creating new content and securing more first-page rankings pays off in a way that no other approach can.

Social Media Ads

To truly achieve success with social media advertising, many different aspects must be understood well. First, be sure to use a platform that allows for advanced targeting features like Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. Also, keep in mind that considerable branding of your logo is needed over the long term if you’re not already well-known among the targeted demographics. People usually won’t engage with you the first time they see your ad. The average person needs to see something 7 times before they truly consider engaging.

Another key tip is that social media platforms will favor you more if you don’t encourage people to leave their platform. For instance, instead of driving traffic to your website, use the ads to encourage users to send you a direct message right within the app.

You should also change up your ads every 7-10 days with something fresh. Whether focusing on different services, introducing specifics of your unique process or showcasing the personality of your team members, it’s important that your content never gets boring to those you’re targeting.

Call-Only Ads

Call-only ads are ads that are designed to increase the number of calls to your business. When a searcher sees your call-only ad on search page, they’ll be able to directly click the call button and connect to you quickly. These ads are ideal for roofing companies as long as someone is readily available to answer the phone.

Retargeting Ads

Retargeting, also known as remarketing, refers the practice of showing your ads to customers who might have visited your website or clicked on an ad in the past. With installation of the necessary code, Google and other ad networks can store tracking data of each visitor to your site and then use this information for showing display ads across other websites and apps.

Local Search

Local search should be an integral part of your digital marketing mix. This applies to every single roofing company or contractor out there as people instinctively look for local roofers compared to distant ones.

Listing your roofing business in Google My Business and local business directories is the first step in the process of optimizing your business for local searches. The next step is to improve your listing and make it more visible using techniques that are out of scope of this article. However, at minimum, you should get as many reviews as you can and upload photos of your projects.

Conclusion

These 8 digital marketing strategies for roofing companies have all been time tested and still work well. If executed correctly, these strategies will ensure that you have a steady flow of targeted traffic, qualified leads and paying customers.