Marketing for roofers, built by someone who only works with trades
Marketing for roofers in the UK comes down to two things, and I do both: build the website and run the local search side. No bought enquiries, no account managers, and nothing handed to anyone else.
- Websites at a fixed £1,995, Local SEO from £495 a month
- Every part of it delivered by one person, James Tandy
- Free audit, reviewed personally, back within 3 working days
Why roofing enquiries never arrive evenly
Most trades have a busy season. Roofing has weather.
A wet fortnight in October fills your voicemail with leaks. A dry, settled spring fills it with people finally getting round to the replacement they have been putting off for two years. February can be dead. Then a named storm arrives on a Tuesday and you take a month of calls in three days, most of them from people you cannot physically get to.
That makes roofing different from plumbing or electrical work in one way that matters commercially: your enquiry flow is driven by something you do not control, and missing a good month is expensive because your jobs are big. A small repair going elsewhere is annoying. A replacement going elsewhere is a fortnight of graft for the whole crew.
There is a second split underneath it. Your customers divide in two. Someone with water coming through a bedroom ceiling behaves nothing like someone planning a new roof for the spring. The first is not comparing anybody, they are ringing whoever answers and can come out today. The second will look at four companies over a fortnight, read the reviews, study your finished jobs, and want to know what happens if it leaks in year three. Marketing built for one of those buyers quietly loses the other.
The weather sets the calendar
Demand spikes with storms and flattens in dry spells. You cannot smooth that out, but you can make sure that when it spikes, you are one of the companies being found.
Big jobs, so losses hurt
Roofing carries one of the highest average job values in domestic trades. Missing a handful of replacement enquiries a year is serious turnover, not a rounding error.
Two buyers, two behaviours
Emergency repairs are won on being findable and answering the phone. Replacements are won on proof, presentation and reassurance about the guarantee.
The quiet months still cost you
Vans, wages and overheads carry on through February. Jobs that only arrive when it rains are a cash flow problem as much as a marketing one.
Where UK roofing enquiries actually come from
Ask ten roofing company owners where the work comes from and you get roughly the same list: repeat customers and referrals, a platform they pay per enquiry, a directory listing, a bit of Facebook, and Google.
Referrals are the best work you get. They are also the least controllable thing in your business. You cannot decide to have more of them in March.
Bought leads are the tap most roofing firms reach for, because they are the only tap with a switch on it. That is precisely why they cost what they cost, and why the same enquiry usually lands with three or four of you at once.
Google is where the rest of it sits, and it is the part most roofing firms have never seriously worked on. When customers have a leak, or have decided this is the year for the new roof, they search. They search for the job and the place: roof repair, flat roof replacement, roofer near me. What comes back is a map with three companies in it, then a list of websites. If you are not in that map, and your website looks a decade old, the enquiry goes to whoever is and whose does not.
Referrals and repeat work
The highest quality and the least predictable. Worth protecting, impossible to scale on demand, and the first thing to dry up in a quiet quarter.
Lead platforms
Instant and controllable. Also shared, price driven, and gone the moment you stop paying. Nothing you buy there accumulates.
Directories and social
Useful as supporting proof, rarely the origin of a large job. Homeowners often check a directory profile after finding you somewhere else.
Google search and Maps
Where the intent is. Customers typing emergency roof repair, or asking what a new one costs, have already decided to spend money. The only question is whose number they see.
Two marketing routes, and how to tell which you need first
There are only two things I sell, and both exist to do the same job: turn customers who are already looking for a roofer into enquiries that reach you instead of a competitor.
The website converts. Local search gets you seen. A good website nobody finds earns nothing. Good visibility pointing at a website that looks abandoned earns very little either, and it wastes the visibility you paid for.
Most roofing companies do not need both services at once. I would rather tell you which one matters first than sell you both and hope.
Start with the website
You are already being found, through referrals, ads, bought leads or some existing ranking, but the enquiries are not converting. Or the site is dated, slow, has no gallery and no page for half of what you do. Fix the destination first and every other bit of marketing you do works harder.
Start with Local SEO
Your website is decent and reasonably quick, but you are nowhere in the map for roof repair in your own town. The site is not the problem. Being found is.
Do the website, then the SEO
There is no site worth ranking and no visibility to build on. The site goes first and the SEO starts once it is live, because spending months ranking a website that is about to be replaced wastes most of that work.
Do neither yet
If you are booked four months out and turning work away, keep your money and spend it on another van and a second team. Generating jobs you cannot deliver just creates unhappy homeowners and bad reviews.
Why buying roofing leads is a treadmill
Buying enquiries works. That is the honest starting point, and it is why so many roofing firms use them. You pay, the phone rings, you quote. When the diary needs filling next week, nothing else moves that fast.
The problem is what you are left holding when you stop paying. Every enquiry you buy is rented. The same enquiry usually goes out to several roofing firms at once, so you end up quoting against three companies who all know they are quoting against three companies, and the conversation slides towards price. You pay for enquiries that were never real jobs. You pay again for the same postcode next month. None of it accumulates, and the day you turn off the spend the enquiries stop that week.
Do your own sum before you take my word for any of that. Take what you spent on bought leads over the last twelve months, count the jobs that genuinely came from it, and divide. Then set that against what a website and a year of search work would have cost. For plenty of roofing firms the cost per job is not wildly different. The difference is ownership: one is rent, the other is an asset that keeps working after you stop paying for it.
I do not sell leads and I do not buy them, and I have no interest in owning the relationship with your customers. Your website, your pages, your Google Business Profile and your reviews stay yours.
How is this different from what the lead companies sell me?
A lead company rents you an enquiry it also rents to your competitors. I build things you own: your website, your service pages, your Google Business Profile, your reviews. When you stop paying me, all of it stays yours and carries on working. It is slower, and it will not fill next week's diary. It also stops you paying for the same postcode forever.
Right: you need work in the next fortnight
Search work compounds, it does not sprint. If the diary is empty in ten days, buy leads or run ads. That is exactly what they are for and there is no shame in it.
Right: you are brand new
No reviews, no history and nothing for Google to rank yet. Paid enquiries can buy your first jobs and your first reviews while the slower side builds underneath.
Right: you are testing a new area
Before you invest in pages and presence in a town you have never worked, paying for a handful of leads there tells you whether the jobs and the prices are what you assumed.
Wrong: as a permanent plan
Five years of lead spend leaves you with nothing you own and a cost per enquiry set by someone else. That is the point at which it stops being a tactic and starts being a tax.
The marketing that works for roofers, ranked
Strip the jargon out of roofing marketing and you are left with a short list, and the order matters more than the budget. First: Google, in both its forms, the map and the results, because that is where customers with money already in hand go looking. Second: reviews, because they are marketing that compounds and costs nothing but the asking. Third: the website, because every other channel sends people to it and it either converts them or wastes them. Fourth, and a long way down: paid ads. Google Ads can fill a quiet fortnight for emergency work, but ads stop the moment the spending stops, which makes them a tap rather than an asset. Fifth: social media. For most roofers, social media is proof you exist rather than a source of work. A tidy Facebook page with recent jobs reassures; it rarely generates.
What about the rest of the digital marketing menu? Email marketing earns its keep for maintenance plans and little else in this trade. Content marketing, meaning guides and blog posts, supports the search work rather than replacing it, and the same content feeds your social media without any extra effort. Marketing strategies built around branding budgets belong to companies with showrooms. The honest summary for a roofing business: two thirds of your marketing return lives in Google and reviews, the website decides how much of it you keep, and everything else is seasoning.
That ranking is also the answer to how much to spend. Marketing services that start with the expensive seasoning, ads, social media, video, before the fundamentals are in place are selling backwards. Get the digital foundations right first: the profile, the reviews, the website, the local search visibility. Then, if the diary still has room, buy the seasoning with the profit those customers brought in, not with the budget that should have bought the fundamentals. Done in that order, marketing for roofers stops being a monthly bill and starts being an asset. Roofers who follow it stop needing to buy roofing leads at all, which is the quiet goal of all of it.
Winter is quiet. Can I pause everything until spring?
You can pause the monthly work, but be clear about what that costs. The quiet months are when the work gets done that pays off in the busy ones, and nothing is restored to you in March because you were away. Building visibility in October for October does not work. Building it in February for October does. If cash flow makes a pause necessary, tell me and we will plan around it rather than pretend it is free.
Do I need the website or the search work first?
If you are being found but not converting, the website. If your site is decent and you are invisible in the map for roof repair in your own town, the search work. If the site is genuinely dated, do the site first, because ranking a website that is about to be replaced wastes months. The free audit answers this for your business specifically, and sometimes the answer is neither, yet.
What working with me on your marketing looks like
You deal with me. James Tandy. Both marketing services on this page are delivered by the same pair of hands: I do the research, write the copy, build the site, do the search work and send the report. There is no account manager, no junior and nothing outsourced. When you email, I reply, and I already know what your business does.
Roofing is the trade I know best, and that matters more than it sounds. A lot of the roofing marketing advice you will find online is American, written for a market built around storm claims and insurance restoration. It does not translate to a homeowner in a Victorian terrace with a slipped slate and a builder's estimate on the kitchen table.
I am also the same person for both halves of the job, which is an unusual combination. Most providers do websites or search, not both. If the site and the search work come from one person, the site is built to rank from day one and the search side is not fighting a structure somebody else chose two years ago.
The prices are fixed and published. A website is £1,995, live in three to four weeks, up to eight pages, two rounds of revisions, thirty days of support after launch, and you own it outright. The monthly search services start at £495 with no long contract and a report you can actually read.
Everything starts with a free audit. I look at your website, your Google Business Profile, your reviews and the roofing firms currently beating you in your own towns, then send you what I find within three working days. There is no sales call, and if the answer is that you do not need me yet, I will say so.
The questions roofers ask first.
Possibly not. If your diary is full twelve months a year on referrals, keep your money. The reason to do anything is that referrals cannot be turned up when you need them, and they thin out in exactly the months you can least afford it. Search demand is there every week whether you are visible in it or not. The question is whose name comes up when somebody two streets away has water coming in and no roofer to ring.
There is no honest industry percentage I can quote you, and anyone who offers one is guessing at your business. Work it backwards instead. Take your average job value and roughly how many quotes you convert, then decide how many extra jobs a year would genuinely change things. If two extra replacement roofs cover a year of marketing for roofers, the decision gets a lot simpler than a percentage does.
No. Nobody can, and anybody who does is selling. What I can do is tell you exactly what I will do, why it is in that order, and report on it every month in plain English. If after six months you cannot see what you have paid for, that is my failure, and there is nothing in a contract stopping you leaving.
Where most roofers start.
Pick the piece that matches where your roofing business is now. If you're not sure, the free audit will tell you which one earns its keep first.
See exactly where your roofing business is losing work online.
Request a free audit. I'll review your website, your Google Business Profile and the competitors ranking above you, then send a prioritised plan. If nothing needs fixing yet, I'll tell you that instead.
Get My Free Roofing AuditFree · reviewed personally by James · within 3 working days · no sales call