Why Is My Roofing Website Not Ranking Well on Google? 7 Mistakes You’re Making Right Now

You’ve been applying SEO strategies for months and nothing has changed (apart from the sore neck you get from sitting in front of the laptop reading hundreds of SEO articles). It feels like you’ve wasted your time, but don’t throw in the towel yet.

Whether you’re handling your own SEO, or having an agency working for you, there are valid reasons why your rankings are tanking. Read on to discover the 7 most common reasons your roofing site is stuck in neutral.

Write great content. Create individual service pages. Share content on social media.

These are the type of SEO tips you’ve been hearing – and applying – but so far, there have been zero improvements.

Your website isn’t getting any extra clicks. There’s no spike in leads. And your calendar is still empty. So, should you give up on SEO and try Google Ads? Not yet.

The tips you find in most ‘SEO for Roofers’ articles are generic and vague. ‘Write great content’ is like saying, ‘Clean your roof once a year’. They’re both true, but they lack any genuine detail to be valuable.

If you’ve been trying to boost your rankings on Google without luck, make sure you’re not committing any of the following 7 SEO sins.

Oh, and don’t stress if your website is making mistakes. We’ve included simple, jargon-free tips to help you solve your problems and start climbing up the rankings.

Any roofer can apply SEO strategies thanks to the rise of SEO-friendly articles and videos on Google and YouTube.

These guides are packed full of tips and tricks, but they don’t always include the possible downsides of DIY SEO. Just as an article on re-tiling your own roof won’t have a section on ‘what to do if you shoot a nail through your palm’.

Unfortunately, this leads plenty of roofers into the common trap of making changes then getting frustrated when they don’t see their rankings improve. Generic tips like ‘write content’ and ‘create individual service pages’ are correct – but lacking nuance.

If you’ve been applying SEO strategies but your roofing website isn’t ranking well, watch out for the following 7 SEO mistakes – plus our simple tips to correct them.

Mobile devices account for close to 2 out of every 3 minutes spent online.

Suppose your roofing site isn’t responsive – meaning it adjusts to suit any screen size. In that case you risk delivering an awkward and frustrating browsing experience to the majority of people. If someone is looking to browse your roofing gallery to see what your terracotta tile installation looks like, they’ll get frustrated if the images don’t load.

This doesn’t just annoy that one customer either. If a high number of people bounce back to Google after feeling let down by your site on their phone or tablet, your bounce rate goes up. And higher bounce rates are a factor Google considers when weighting your SEO results.

TRADIE DIGITAL SOLUTION: It’s simple, make sure your website is responsive. Use a free tool like Responsinator to test your website, and if the results are poor it’s best to speak to a web design agency to sort out the problem ASAP.

Image walking into a hardware store and there are no signs above the aisles telling you what you’ll find. There are no prices on any of the products. And there’s no one behind the counter to answer any of your questions.

You’d leave and find a new hardware store.

A roofing site without simple navigation drives people away in the exact same way.

Navigation is crucial to your SEO because it lets people move from page to page and quickly find the info they need. When a website is hard to use, people will head back to Google (where there’s no shortage of other roofers). As they “bounce” back to look at other sites, this sends a message to Google that says “hey, people aren’t finding what they want here, it might be time to decrease this site’s rankings.”

TRADIE DIGITAL SOLUTION: Keep it simple. Limit the number of clickable items in your top menu to seven. For example, Home | About Us | Roofing Services | Project Gallery | Testimonials | Blog | Contact Us.

Those seven options tell people what they’ll find, so it’s easy to browse that site. Consider adding a ‘search bar’ to help people find specific info too.

Whether you run a residential or commercial roofing company, you’re in the business of trust.

You’ll only be able to sell your services when people trust you enough to work on and in their homes. And content that’s written to solve problems (as opposed to content that exists to sell yourself) is the #1 way you build trust.

It’s easy to spot a roofing company that cares more about its bottom line than helping its customers. Their content reads like a sales pitch, and lacks any tips or advice that a homeowner could use to better understand their roof.

TRADIE DIGITAL SOLUTION: Your content should address a reader’s biggest pains, concerns and problems. Does your content revolve around why you’re the best roofer and how valuable a free estimate would be? Or, are you offering unbiased opinions and strategies that people can use whether they hire you or not?

The more your content can solve problems without asking for anything in return, the more people will want to read it. These people spend longer on your website, share your content with their friends, and check out other articles. These signals all send a message to Google that says “this content is super helpful, we love it, we think other people will love it too”.

All customers use keywords. But not all keywords are used by customers.

You can optimize your website around the wrong keyword and end up with 0 monthly traffic, even if you’ve done everything perfectly.

For example, a page that’s been optimized for the keyword ‘emergency storm damage near me’ might get everything right. Your keyword is in your page title, it’s in your URL, it’s used in the first paragraph of your blog, all the on-page SEO tweaks you need to rank.

But if you run your roofing company in an area where there hasn’t been a damaging storm for 10 years, no one will search for that keyword.

TRADIE DIGITAL SOLUTION: You need to target the correct type of keywords, and they are:

• Long-Tail Keywords
• Location Keywords

The right keywords will have enough monthly volume to make them worth your while. Ranking in the top spot for ‘heritage cottage roof painting services’ looks great on paper. But if no one is searching for that keyword, you’ll have wasted time and energy optimizing your pages.

Keen to learn how to rank for Long Tail Keywords that drive sales (aka ‘Money Keywords’)?

Learn how to use keywords to outrank ANY roofer (no matter how big they are)

Your on-page SEO refers to the changes you make on each page, and it’s easy to let these slip through the cracks.

You might have written a valuable blog about DIY roofing hacks, or created a service page exclusively for your slate roofing maintenance services. Still, you need to focus on a range of on-page optimization strategies to help that content rank.

• Have you found relevant keywords to create content around or are you writing about random topics?
• Are those keywords being used in your URL, Page Title and Header?
• Have you used related keywords in your sub-headers (H2, H3 etc) and throughout your text?
• Have you written a catchy meta description to drive clicks from Google?
• Have you added images to make your content easier to consume?
• Have you added alt tags to help Google understand what those images are about?

Most roofers know enough about SEO to write 100% original content around keywords. Still, to take your content and keywords and tick multiple on-page boxes (like we listed above) takes time and effort.

TRADIE DIGITAL SOLUTION: If your website isn’t ranking, make sure each page is fully optimized. You can use free on-page analyzer tools like SEObility and SiteChecker to get a baseline of your results.

If your site takes too long to load, you’ll have people heading back to Google to click on another result. This is known as your ‘Bounce Rate’.

A high bounce rate tells Google that people aren’t finding your pages helpful. When this happens, Google will decrease your rankings and boost another roofing site’s SEO instead.

And a primary reason people exit your website? When it loads slooooooooow.

1 in 4 people will abandon a website that takes more than 4 seconds to load. But the average load time for websites in 2021 is over 10 seconds. If you’re not giving people what they want fast enough, you’ll lose them AND your shot at ranking on Google.

TRADIE DIGITAL SOLUTION: Use a free online tool like Google’s PageSpeed Insights to check your speed and access speed optimization tips. Much of the time a slow roofing site comes down to the large file size of images, which look great, but take longer to load. Try resizing your image files with a free tool like Image Compressor or Tiny PNG.

You’ve got your website and your content sorted, but you still need to “prove” that you’re worthy of ranking over other roofers – and backlinks provide that proof.

When two roofing sites have similar content and equally strong websites, the number and quality of backlinks they’ve earned can be the difference. This is crucial for relatively new roofing sites, as the age of your website comes into play. Older websites have “proved” their worth to Google over the years, making it harder for newly launched sites to compete.

A perfectly optimized website with perfect on-page SEO and 100% original content will still take time to rank (so don’t stress if the results are slow at first) but you can speed the process up with backlinks.

TRADIE DIGITAL SOLUTION: It’s better to focus on quality, not quantity. As a roofer you want backlinks from sites in related industries, like roofing, construction, home improvement, architecture, etc. Guest posting is one of the most common link building tactics, where you write an article for another site and include a link back to you as thanks, but this takes time.

For fast link building focus on entering your roofing site on directories – think homeadvisor.com and roofing-directory.com. These are known as citations (which are similar to backlinks except they’re not clickable) and can help drive faster SEO results.

Looking for more roofing directories? Access EIGHTY (yep, 80) business directory websites you can access today.

SEO takes time.

If you’ve hired an SEO freelancer or SEO agency and it’s been one or two months without results, there’s no need for alarm bells.

The speed of results could come down to the competition you’re facing in your area, or for specific keywords. You may be up against ranked websites with more relevant backlinks, or the roofing sites above you may have super high-quality content that takes time to overtake.

In short, slow results aren’t the same as no results.

Be on the lookout for SEO agencies who bring on roofing clients with exciting promises, only to leave you with no results and a monthly hit to your credit card?

Absolutely.

Keep an eye out for the following SEO agency red flags to tell the difference between slowly working strategies and an agency that’s ripping you off.

A better question to ask is “how do I get more leads through my roofing website?”.

If you follow our recommendations you’ll be setting your roofing site up for better rankings, but more importantly, you’ll be creating a site that’s engineered to bring in leads.

Top rankings look great on paper, but roofers who can turn their sites into fast, easy-to-use, helpful information hubs are the ones who’ll get quote requests and call-outs.

With enough SEO theory to last you a lifetime, you’ve got two options in front of you…

Option A: Compare DIY SEO vs. Hiring an agency to find out how to get the strongest results

Option B: Claim a consultation with a Tradie Digital expert and walk away with a FREE SEO blueprint [valued at $495]

Here’s to better rankings and better ROI.