Roofing is the trade where buying leads hurts most. A roofing lead costs around forty pounds, it gets sold to three or four firms, and you end up quoting against people who took the same phone call an hour earlier. Ranking for the work yourself costs more to start and nothing at all per job after that.
01The trade Why roofing searches work differently.
Three things about roofing change how the search side has to be built, and none of them apply to a plumber or a joiner.
The weather sets your calendar. Most trades are steady. Roofing spikes violently for two or three days after a named storm, then goes quiet. That means the pages have to be sitting there in advance, because nobody ranks something published the morning after the wind.
The customer never sees what they bought. A kitchen fitter's work is inspected daily for ten years. Your work is thirty feet up and nobody will ever look at it. That makes roofing an unusually high-trust purchase, and it is why reviews and photographs of finished jobs do more heavy lifting here than in almost any other trade.
The job values are miles apart. A slipped tile is a hundred and fifty quid. A full strip and re-tile is eight to twelve thousand. Those two customers search completely differently, and a site that treats them as one audience converts neither properly.
02The levers What actually moves the needle for a roofer.
In this order, and the order matters more than the list:
- The map pack, before anything else A leak is searched on a phone, in the rain, and the three map results take most of the calls. Categories, service area, photos and review count decide who is in those three. For a roofer this pays back before the website does.
- Reviews, and how recent they are Roofing is the one trade where the customer never sees what they paid for. They cannot climb up and check. Reviews are the only evidence they have, and Google weights recent ones, a steady trickle beats forty from 2023.
- A page for each type of roof work Flat roofing, tiling, leadwork, chimney and emergency repair are searched separately and by different people. One "services" page competes for none of them properly.
- Storm-ready content, published before the weather Search for storm damage spikes for about seventy-two hours after a named storm. A page that already exists ranks. A page written the morning after does not.
Most roofing sites I look at have this back to front, a smart-looking home page and a Google Business Profile with the wrong category and eleven reviews. The profile is where the emergency money is.
03The map pack Local SEO for roofers, and why it comes first.
Someone with water coming through a bedroom ceiling does not scroll. They tap one of the three map results and ring it. If you are fourth, you may as well be fortieth for that job.
Getting into those three is mostly unglamorous: the right primary category, a service area that matches where you actually go, photographs added regularly rather than once, and reviews that keep arriving. It is the fastest-moving part of the whole thing, profile work can shift inside a month, where the website side takes three to six.
04The site Roofing website design, and the accreditations that belong on it.
Searches for roofing website design have gone up sharply over the last year, and it is not hard to see why: a lot of roofing sites are five years old and unreadable on a phone. The build itself is the same one every client gets, ten to twenty pages, fast, the phone number reachable from every screen.
What is roofing-specific is what goes near the top. NFRC membership and CompetentRoofer both belong in the first screen, with your insurance figure next to them, because a homeowner about to spend nine thousand pounds is looking for a reason to trust you and those are the two they recognise. TrustMark if you have it.
Then photographs. Real ones, of real roofs, ideally before and after on the same job. A roofing site without them is asking for money on the strength of a stock photo.
07700 900412
Mobile
Included, and it runs on its own
A missed call still becomes a job.
This is the same system every site here is wired into. The text goes out whether you remember or not.
- It fires in about eight seconds Before they have scrolled to the next name in the results.
- They reply while it is still in their head And it is waiting for you when you come down off the job.
- You do nothing at all Evenings, weekends, and the days you leave your phone in the van.
05The price What it costs, and what you get.
£297 a month. The website, missed-call text-back for the calls you take on a roof, a review funnel that fires when a job is signed off, follow-up on every enquiry, one inbox on your phone and a business number that is not your mobile.
No build fee, no minimum term, and one price whether you are a one-man band or running four vans. The full breakdown is on the pricing page.
Missed-call text-back is worth singling out for roofers specifically. You cannot answer a phone with both hands on a ladder, and the caller with a leak rings the next firm about ninety seconds later. That one feature probably pays for the month on its own.
06The awkward ones Common questions from roofers.
01 How long does SEO for roofers take to work?
The text-back and the follow-up start earning the week they go live, because they catch the calls you are already missing. The website side is three to six months before it does much in Google. Anyone promising page one in a fortnight is selling you something else.
02 Is it better than buying roofing leads?
A bought roofing lead runs £40 or more and is sold to three or four of you, so you are quoting against people who got the same call. Your own rankings cost more to start and nothing per lead after. The honest answer is that most roofers should do both for the first six months, then wean off the bought ones.
03 What about storm season, can you get me ready?
That is exactly the right question and the answer is that the work has to happen before. Storm searches last a few days and rank whatever already exists. Build the emergency and storm damage pages in summer and they are there in November.
04 Does NFRC membership actually help my rankings?
Not directly, but the member listing is a real link from a trusted roofing site, and the badge on your own pages affects whether somebody rings. CompetentRoofer works the same way. Worth having for both reasons.
05 I mostly do insurance work. Does this still apply?
Yes, and the search terms are different, people look for help with a claim as much as for a roofer. Those pages are quieter but the jobs are larger and there is far less competition for them, so they are often the best value pages on a roofing site.
06 Do I need photographs of my own roofs?
Yes, and it is the single biggest thing you can hand me. Before and after on a real job beats anything I can write. Phone photographs are fine, what matters is that they are yours and the customer can see the address is a street like theirs.
Anything I have not covered, ask me on a call. If your patch is already carved up by two firms with four hundred reviews each, I will tell you that rather than take your money. Other trades are here if you have landed on the wrong page.
If you want me to look at your roofing business against the two firms you'd most like to outrank, that's twenty minutes and it costs you nothing. Book a call. Tell me what's going on.