The short answer
Most roofing enquiries are won in the map pack, and Google fills those three slots on relevance, distance and prominence rather than on workmanship. A complete Google Business Profile, a real page for each service you want, and steadily arriving reviews are what move it, and that work has to be done before storm season.
Key takeaways
- Roofing is four search markets, repair, emergency, replacement and everything around the roof, and one page cannot answer all four.
- The map pack picks its three on relevance, distance and prominence, so a well kept profile regularly beats better workmanship.
- Google ranks pages, not businesses, so each service you want more of needs a page of its own rather than a line on a list.
- Location pages copied town by town are doorway pages; three to five genuine ones are worth more than forty duplicates.
- Whatever ranking you hold on the night a storm lands was decided months earlier, which makes the quiet season the time to invest.
Every roofer knows they should be on the first page of Google. Far fewer have ever been told how local search actually picks the three businesses a homeowner sees when their ceiling is dripping. This is that explanation, written for owners rather than marketers, with a twenty minute audit you can run on your own business today.
What UK homeowners actually search when they need a roofer
Four distinct intents sit behind roofing searches, and each one needs its own page to answer it properly.
Roofing is not one market. It is four or five separate ones that happen to share a van, and homeowners use very different words for each of them.
Repair, emergency, replacement and everything around the roof are four different intents at four different levels of urgency. One page on your website cannot answer all four.
Repair: the steady bucket, and the most contested
People type roof repair, roof repairs near me, roofer plus their town, slipped tile, ridge tile repair. This is the bread and butter work, it runs all year, and it is the most contested because every roofer in your area wants exactly the same jobs.
Emergency: short wording, no shortlist
Roof leaking. Emergency roof repair. Roofer out today. Water coming through ceiling. These searches are shorter, they get typed one handed on a phone while a bucket fills up, and more and more of them are spoken rather than typed.
Nobody in this bucket is collecting three quotes. They are calling the first business that looks competent and picks up.
Replacement: researched over days or weeks
Flat roof replacement, new roof cost, EPDM against felt, how long does a roof last. These get researched slowly, usually with a partner, and the person searching wants to understand the job before they let anyone near their property. Fewer people search these terms than search for repairs, but each one is worth many times a repair call out.
Everything around the roof: small jobs, thin competition
Guttering repair, gutter cleaning, fascias and soffits, chimney flashing, lead flashing, moss removal, chimney repointing. Individually these are small jobs. Collectively they are a real share of what a roofing firm invoices, and they are far easier to compete for than roof repair, because most roofers never write a single word about them.
How the map pack decides most roofing enquiries
Three listings take the majority of the attention on a phone, and Google fills them on relevance, distance and prominence.
Search roof repair plus your town on a phone. What appears above everything else is a small map and three business listings with star ratings and a call button, and for local trade searches that block takes the majority of the attention.
Google has been unusually open about how it picks those three. It comes down to relevance, distance and prominence.
- Map pack
- The block of three business listings and a small map that sits above the ordinary blue links on a local search. On a phone it often fills the entire first screen, which means the blue links start below the fold.
Relevance: whether you match what was searched
This is where most roofers lose without ever realising it. If your Google Business Profile has Construction Company as its primary category instead of Roofing Contractor, or you have never listed flat roofing as one of your services, Google has no particular reason to believe you are the right answer to a flat roof query.
Relevance is fed by your website too. If there is no page about chimney flashing anywhere on your site, you are asking Google to guess, and it will usually guess in favour of someone who spelled it out.
Distance: the factor you cannot change
Distance is how far your business is from the person searching, or from the place they named in the search. You cannot move your yard. What you can do is stop expecting to win searches twenty miles away with the same effort it takes to win them in your own postcode. Distance is why the top three changes as a homeowner drives across town, and why a roofer working from one address cannot own an entire county no matter how good the marketing is.
Prominence: slowest to build, most within your control
Prominence is how well known and well regarded the business is, online and off: review count and average rating, how recent those reviews are, how often other websites mention or link to you, and how strong your site is in ordinary organic search. It is the factor you have the most long term control over, and also the slowest to build, which is why it is the one people give up on.
Why the best roofer often loses to the best Google Business Profile
Google ranks the evidence a business supplies rather than the quality of its work, which makes this the most fixable problem in local search.
This is the part that annoys good tradesmen, and it is better said plainly. Google cannot see your work. It has never stood on a scaffold. It cannot tell a properly bedded ridge from one that will lift in the first gale. It has no idea that you have re-roofed half the street and never once been called back.
What it can see is evidence, and the roofer who supplies more evidence wins.
The evidence Google can actually read
- A complete profile in the correct category
- A hundred and forty reviews rather than eleven, arriving steadily rather than in one cluster from 2019
- Photographs of real jobs added regularly
- Questions answered
- A website that loads quickly and contains a page describing the exact job that was searched for
So a competent, well organised firm with a well kept profile will regularly outrank a better roofer whose profile was set up by a nephew in 2016 and never touched again. That is not a judgement on either firm's workmanship. It is a statement about which one has given Google something to go on.
Why this is the most fixable problem you have
The same evidence does double duty, which is the bit most people miss. Everything that persuades Google you are the right answer also persuades the homeowner reading your listing at half past nine at night with a towel on the landing carpet.
Why roofing rankings have to be won in the quiet months
Demand arrives in spikes that rankings cannot react to, so the work that wins storm season has to be finished long before it.
Roofing demand is not a flat line, and that matters more for search than it does for any other trade I work with.
The pattern itself is not the interesting part. The interesting part is that search rankings move far more slowly than the weather does.
How the roofing year runs
Stretch of the year: Autumn and winter storms
- How demand behaves
- Sharp, violent spikes. A named storm crosses on a Tuesday night and by Wednesday morning every roofer in the affected counties has more calls than capacity
- Work that arrives
- Emergency repairs
Stretch of the year: Winter
- How demand behaves
- A steadier stream, as sustained rain finds every weakness
- Work that arrives
- Leaks, damp patches and failed flat roofs
Stretch of the year: Spring
- How demand behaves
- The aftermath, as the weather settles
- Work that arrives
- Jobs people put off, and the beginning of re-roof and flat roof replacement enquiries
Stretch of the year: High summer
- How demand behaves
- Usually the quiet stretch for reactive work
- Work that arrives
- Planned replacements, which is what this season is best for
| Stretch of the year | How demand behaves | Work that arrives |
|---|---|---|
| Autumn and winter storms | Sharp, violent spikes. A named storm crosses on a Tuesday night and by Wednesday morning every roofer in the affected counties has more calls than capacity | Emergency repairs |
| Winter | A steadier stream, as sustained rain finds every weakness | Leaks, damp patches and failed flat roofs |
| Spring | The aftermath, as the weather settles | Jobs people put off, and the beginning of re-roof and flat roof replacement enquiries |
| High summer | Usually the quiet stretch for reactive work | Planned replacements, which is what this season is best for |
Why the storm surge is decided months earlier
Search rankings do not respond quickly, and they certainly do not respond inside the forty eight hours a storm gives you. If you decide in the middle of November that you really ought to do something about Google, that surge has already been spent on whoever did the work in July.
This is the most common timing mistake I see in roofing. The quiet months feel like the wrong moment to invest, because the phone is quieter and money is tighter, and in my experience they are precisely the right moment. Work done in the quiet stretch is what you cash in during the busy one.
I will not tell you how long it takes to move, because nobody honest can. What I will tell you is that starting in the quiet season gives the work a chance to matter by the time it counts.
The roofing service page structure that actually ranks
Google ranks pages rather than businesses, so every service you genuinely want more of needs a page of its own.
Most roofing websites have a single page called Services. It lists nine things in a column, gives each one two sentences, and ranks properly for none of them.
Google ranks pages, not businesses. When somebody searches flat roof replacement, it is looking for the page on the internet that best answers flat roof replacement. A page that mentions flat roofs alongside pitched roofs, guttering, chimneys, fascias, leadwork and moss removal is not that page. A page about flat roof replacement is.
One page for each service you want more of
Build a page for every service you genuinely offer and genuinely want more of. In most roofing businesses that is a list of about seven.
- Roof repair
- Flat roof replacement
- New roofs and re-roofing
- Emergency roof repair
- Guttering, fascias and soffits
- Chimney and leadwork
- Roof cleaning, if you do it properly and not as an afterthought
What belongs on each page, roughly in this order
- The problem in the homeowner's own words, so they know within two seconds they are in the right place
- What the job actually involves, described by somebody who has done it rather than somebody who has read about it
- The options and materials where they exist, so felt against EPDM against GRP on a flat roof, or the honest difference between a patch repair and a re-roof
- How the work is priced and what pushes the number up or down, even where you cannot give a fixed figure
- How long it takes and what disruption to expect
- Photographs of your own work, not stock images of American shingles
- Reviews from customers who had that specific job done
- Two or three of the questions you answer on the phone every single week
- An obvious, unmissable way to get in touch
Service areas done properly, without thin doorway pages
A location page earns its place only by containing things that could be true of nowhere else, which is why three to five beat forty.
The temptation with service areas is obvious. You cover forty towns, so you build forty pages and swap the town name on each one. I have watched roofers do this with a spreadsheet and a find and replace, and I understand why it is tempting.
It does not work, and it has not worked for years. Thin duplicated location pages have a name in Google's own guidance, and it is not a flattering one.
- Doorway page
- A page built mainly to catch a search term rather than to help the person reading it, such as forty town pages that differ only by the town name. Google's guidance is one of the clearer things it publishes: do not build them. At best they sit there achieving nothing. At worst they drag down how the rest of your site is judged.
What a real service area page contains
Done properly, a service area page earns its place by containing things that could only be true of that place.
- The housing stock, because the housing stock dictates the work: Victorian terraces with natural slate and valley gutters, 1930s semis with concrete tiles reaching the end of their life, post war estates full of flat roof extensions and dormers, coastal exposure that strips ridge cement within a decade
- Jobs you have genuinely completed there, with your own photographs
- Reviews from customers in that area
- Anything properly local, such as a conservation area that limits what you are allowed to fit
How many you should actually build
Which means you cannot have forty of them, and you should not want forty. Start with the three to five places where you already do the most work and hold the most reviews, and write pages a local would recognise as written by somebody who actually works there. Add more only when you have something real to say.
This is the part of roofing SEO that takes the most patience, and it is what separates the sites that hold up over years from the ones that quietly get filtered out. There is more detail on how I handle it on the Local SEO for roofers page.
The twenty minute self-audit any roofer can run
Five checks with a phone and a notepad show you who you are really competing with and where enquiries are being lost.
You do not need a tool or a consultant for this. Give it twenty minutes with a phone and a notepad, and do it away from your yard so the results are not skewed by where you are standing.
Search your main town on a mobile
Use a private or incognito window, and search roof repair plus your main town. Write down the three businesses in the map pack, because those are your real competitors in search whatever you happen to think of them on site. Repeat it for flat roof replacement and for emergency roof repair. If the three names change between searches, that tells you a lot about where you are and are not competitive.
Compare review profiles honestly
How many reviews do those three hold against yours, what is the average, and, most importantly, when did the most recent one arrive. A profile with sixty reviews and nothing since last spring reads like a business winding down.
Open your own Google Business Profile
Is the primary category Roofing Contractor. Are your individual services listed, all of them. When was the last photograph added. Are your hours right, including whether you say you handle emergencies. Is your service area set to somewhere you would genuinely drive to today.
Load your website on mobile data
On the phone, not the office wifi. Count the seconds before you can read anything. Find the page for the service you most want more of, and if there isn't one, that is your first job. Check the browser tab title on that page names both the service and the place.
Test what happens when somebody tries to reach you
From a Google search, count the taps to a ringing phone. Then have someone fill in your enquiry form at seven in the evening and time the reply. Ranking is worthless if the enquiry lands in an inbox nobody opens until Monday morning.
When roofing SEO is worth paying for, and when it is not
A full diary and word of mouth means the free work is enough; paid work earns its place when the pipeline depends on somebody else.
I would rather you decided this honestly than bought something you did not need.
If you are booked twelve weeks out, content with the size of the business, and every job arrives by word of mouth in a village where everybody knows you, search is not urgent. Do the free things well, keep the profile current, keep asking for reviews, and spend your money somewhere else.
When it becomes worth doing
In my experience it becomes worth doing when one of these is true.
- You would struggle to fill February
- Most of your work depends on one builder's merchant, one Facebook group or one lead site
- You are trying to move up from repairs into re-roofs and flat roof replacements, which are searched for rather than stumbled into
- A newer, less experienced firm has appeared above you in the map pack and you cannot work out how they did it
The one thing I would not do
What I would not do is buy leads. Paying per enquiry for a contact that has been sold to three other roofers puts you in a price war on somebody else's platform, and the day you stop paying you own nothing. I do not sell leads and I do not buy them. The whole point of this work is that the asset ends up being yours.
What I do, and what it costs
Practically, I do two things. A conversion focused website at a fixed £1,995, and Local SEO from £495 a month. The Local SEO for roofers page sets out exactly what that monthly work covers and what it does not.
If you want to know where you actually stand before you spend anything, take the free audit. I review it personally, you get it back within three working days, and there is no sales call. Get My Free Roofing SEO Audit.
The bottom line
Roofing enquiries are won in the map pack, and the map pack is decided by relevance, distance and prominence rather than by workmanship. Fix the profile, build a real page for each service you want, write service area pages only where you genuinely work, and do it in the quiet months so the ranking is already there when the storm arrives.
Where to go next
Sources
- Google Business Profile Help Google's own account of how local results are ranked on relevance, distance and prominence, and how categories and services work.
- Google Search Central documentation Google's guidance on doorway pages, including thin location pages built to catch a search term.
Written by James Tandy
James builds high-converting websites and runs local SEO for UK home-service businesses, with ten years spent turning local search into booked jobs. More about James →