As a roofing contractor, you need to stand out in your industry in any way possible. You need a high-quality website where your customers can get free quotes, get an idea of what services you provide, and even pay for your many high-quality repairs and replacements quickly and safely.
Roofing companies like you need to understand the best ways of boosting their website’s presence. The following steps will help make your website faster, more efficient and help draw in many more customers. It’s something that you can’t afford to do as a business.
Step One: Increase the Speed of Your Website
Did you know that your website speed will significantly affect how many people use it? Just think about it from their end. If you visit a website that takes too long to load, are you going to stick around and check out what it has to offer? Probably not and nobody would blame you. Here’s why you need to find a great server host, a professional who can keep your website running smoothly and efficiently.
First, a host for your server is a wise investment because it will ensure that your website loads as quickly as possible. These hosts create a fast-paced connection that helps ensure that your sites load quickly and include as much information as you desire.
Typically, there are a few different considerations that must be made before you invest in any host. Just a few of these options include:
- The total speed package that they provide
- Ways they help enhance your overall website
- The cost of their services on your end
- Any other service package that they may provide
Each of these points is something that you must take into account before you hire any good server host. Ensure that you take the time to look through a handful of different options to narrow down your choice. When seeking out a good host, there are a few services that you should consider for your needs. Just a few of these high-quality options include:
- Cloud-Based Storage: Try to find a server that backs up all their information in the cloud to get the most protection for your server. This ensures that you don’t have to pay expensive recovery fees or rebuild your entire website from the ground up again.
- 5G WiFi Connections: Although 5G is just becoming a widespread option, getting this from your service provider will help make your internet stronger. Doing so helps make it easier for you to upgrade your site and provide the kind of content that your many customers deserve.
- In-Depth Encryption: Your host needs to provide an encrypted network that keeps your information safe from prying hackers. Even if you might not think of hackers attacking your business, these criminals will attack any website that they find with weak security protection.
These services are all things that any host worth your time should already possess. If you find that your host doesn’t provide a few or even most of these options, it is time to look elsewhere. Don’t forget – even roofing and construction companies need high-tech websites that draw in traffic. And if you don’t feel comfortable taking these steps, your host can keep your server solid and secure.
Step Two: Set Up Your Google My Business
Google My Business has become one of the most important ways of connecting with customers around your service area. This site lists many businesses, like yours, and includes elements like their contact information, service hours, and more. However, Google My Business also allows you to post videos, photos, and tweak up your Google presence in a handful of different ways.
Why is this step so crucial for a roofer like you? Well, most people trying to find services will use Google to do it. Something like 90% or more of all search traffic is done via Google these days. Even more importantly, most people have skipped the lengthy process of searching through phone books for roofing professionals and, instead, search directly on Google.
For instance, you are more likely to get customers searching “ roofing service near me” in Google than you are via your television or radio advertisements. That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t cut back on those marketing methods. However, it does mean that you need to streamline your digital marketing as much as possible, and working with – instead of against – Google is critical in this step. Just a few ways it can help includes:
- Free Business Promotion: Google My Business is free, allowing you to create a simple platform for enhancing your roofing presence and creating the kind of high-quality traffic that your website needs to convert leads.
- Consistency: Create a consistent web presence by utilizing accurate information on your Google My Business site. It often takes other websites weeks or months to update changed business information, making it critical to use GMB and other sources.
- Enhance SEO Strategy: As a roofer, you likely focus on mostly local business traffic. GMB allows you to focus your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) strategy on these local markets, ensuring that you reach people who will hire you and not somebody on the other side of the world.
- Boost Your Review Presence: Online reviews can help drive a lot of your business and create the kind of high-quality reputation you deserve. You can highlight specific reviews and downplay negative ones by replying to them and offering help with their needs.
Each of these steps helps to enhance your online presence and is quickly done in a GMB environment. Ensure that you sign up for an account as soon as possible and adjust your profile to be accurate, allowing you a more significant adjustment of your online presence and a more substantial SEO presence.
Step Three: Publish Positive Reviews
Reviews are a common element of online business, and they can do a lot to help your business. If you have positive reviews on various websites, you should collect these and highlight them on your website. Doing so will help show people that you are a high-quality roofing team and do what you can to ensure customer satisfaction. Always copy these reviews verbatim to avoid mistakes.
Now, what if you don’t have a lot of reviews yet or are relatively new to the roofing repair world? Are you automatically going to be drowned in positive reviews for other roofing company options? Not necessarily – you can always contact content creation companies and create fake reviews. This option is not recommended because it is not precisely ethical and may give your company a bad reputation if discovered.
But if you are desperate, you can buy a few false reviews and then start taking them down once you start getting honest reviews from real customers. Try to highlight all of your positive reviews on your website. For example, you can use running text banners to highlight these reviews or create an upbeat review section where customers can engage with these reviews and see what you have to offer.
What about situations in which you get negative reviews? Should you automatically suppress these and never publish them? There are a few different schools of thought on this approach. Some roofing services will keep these negative reviews off of their website and do nothing to address them. The idea here is comparable to the old sayings: “no news is good news” and “ignorance is bliss.”
Other businesses will instead publish negative reviews but keep them in a separate section of the site. For example, you can include them in a site called “How We Handle Our Mistakes” and show your customer service professionals interacting positively with those who left a negative review. You can then highlight updates to the assessment based on how well you handled the complaint and problem.
Whatever approach you take, you can focus your business needs in a streamlined manner and create the high-quality strategy that your site deserves. Just make sure that you always approve reviews before posting them: you may end up with some messaging issues if you aren’t careful.
Step Four: Create and Maintain a Blog on Your Site
Did you know that most people check out a business’ blog before they visit any other area on their site? That’s because blogs are usually the most commonly updated sites on a webpage and provide a stream of helpful information and tips that can be used in various contexts. You may have seen many other roofing companies in your area using blogs to connect with their customers in this way.
A blog’s benefits are diverse and are worth checking out if you are interested in this process. First of all, a blog allows you to connect with your customers in a more personal and engaging manner. You can get comments from them on the blog, reply directly to them, and create a constant interaction that helps make this process more beneficial. Blogs also provide you an outlet for:
- Positive Reviews: Highlight a few positive reviews on your blog and, if possible, interview the person who left the review. Doing so creates a more coherent and engaging website and allows you to showcase your connection to your customers in more detail and depth.
- Interesting News: Create updates on your business by posting news updates and press releases in your blog. Highlight good things that you do for your community, such as volunteering at soup kitchens or other steps that make you stand out as a local legend among your customers.
- Share Funny Stories: A good blog is a place where you – or someone writing as you – can “be themselves” and let their hair down. Use your blog to share fun stories and personal aspects of your business. Doing so humanizes your approach and makes it more efficient.
Ensure that you reach out to marketing teams who specialize in roofing contractors if you want to start up your blog. Though it is possible to find someone on your team who feels comfortable writing blogs – or even yourself if you want to take complete control over this process – getting a group of strong writers from a content creation website will help you stand out among your competitors.
Just as importantly, it is a good idea to make sure that you use only a handful of writers who you can trust to get your specific business tone down in the writing. It is essential to balance out your expectations in this way, focusing on experts who you can trust to create the most high-quality level of professionalism on your site. Focusing on a few writers also helps produce a unified voice.
Step Five: Use PPC to Advertise Your Services
Pay-per-click advertising or PPC has become one of the essential types of marketing tools on the market today. Many roofing professionals utilize this option, especially if they have a reasonably low digital advertising budget. It works by creating ads that are distributed through various social media outlets. When clicked, they send customers directly to your website.
You’ve probably seen these types of ads before on Facebook and clicked on them without even realizing what they were and how they worked. And if you’ve ever purchased off of one of these advertisements, you know that they work for your needs. Just a few benefits that you can get from high-quality PPC advertising includes how it:
- Focuses advertisements only on people searching for roof repair services
- Sends customers directly to your site
- Increases traffic to important spots
- Enhances your SEO ranking
- Produces an easy-to-track marketing method
- Creates an inexpensive marketing option
This last benefit is significant to highlight here. PPC advertising only costs you something when customers click on it. As a result, you can cut back significantly on your marketing costs by paying just for the ads that work for you. And since you can track the number of clicks that each ad gets, you can tweak your approach to focus more on those who want roof installation services and other options.
As a result, PPC is one of the best ways to break into digital marketing and can be used to keep your conversion numbers high on your website. Though PPC does have limitations – such as being effective only where it is directly spread – it is still an excellent supplemental option for more long-term and extensive advertising campaigns, allowing you the luxury of changing up your approach from time to time.