Roofing
The storm brings the traffic. Somebody else is catching it.
Residential and commercial roofing. Thirty years in search, and a diagnosis before I ask you for a monthly retainer.
Two weeks. Yours to keep whatever you decide to do next — including hiring someone else.
Call types
Not every phone call is the same job.
When I say home services SEO, most owners picture one thing: ranking for “plumber near me.” But your revenue doesn’t arrive as one kind of call — it arrives as three, and they behave nothing alike. Emergency work decides in minutes and pays you for being findable and answerable. Replacement work — the new water heater, the re-roof, the panel upgrade — decides over days of comparison shopping, and pays you for having the page that answers the homeowner’s real questions before your competitor does. Maintenance work decides seasonally and pays whoever showed up before the season did.
This split is the first thing I map in a home services audit, because it changes what you build. A site optimized only for emergencies leaves the fat replacement jobs to whoever wrote the honest “what a water heater costs in 2026” page. A site optimized only for browsing leaves the 2 a.m. calls to whoever answers. The audit tells you which of the three you’re currently losing — in most audits it’s two of three.
The calendar
Demand has a calendar. Your website should too.
Every home services trade has a season, and every owner knows theirs by heart — the July compressor rush, the first-freeze week, the spring roofing surge after storm season. What almost nobody does is run the website on that calendar. The tune-up offer goes up the week the phones are already ringing. The “furnace not igniting” page gets written in January, three months after it should have started ranking.
Pages rank on a lag. Google has to find a new page, crawl it, and watch it earn engagement before it ranks — which takes weeks you don’t have once the season starts. The contractors who own the July results published in April. The shoulder months everyone dreads are not the off-season; they’re the publishing season, and they’re also when maintenance-plan content converts the customers who smooth your revenue out for the rest of the year.
Rented vs. earned
Every rented lead is shared with three competitors.
When I said you’re renting leads you might be able to earn, here’s the arithmetic behind it. Aggregators and lead services charge per lead, forever, at a price that rises with competition — and the same homeowner is sold to two or three of your competitors at the same time, so you’re also paying for a race. The day you stop paying, the leads stop. You’re not building anything; you’re subletting someone else’s rankings.
I’m not religious about this — rented leads have a place, especially while your own pages climb. What I object to is renting instead of building, for years, in a market where the searches already exist with your name nowhere on them. The audit prices both sides for your market: what you’re paying per booked job today, and what the same job would cost from a ranking you own. The crossover usually lands earlier than owners expect.
What happens next
The first 90 days, in priority order.
Owners always ask what the work actually looks like after the audit, so here it is. Nothing below is exotic — the leverage is in the order. Measurement comes before anything else, because until calls are tracked, every other decision is a guess. The Business Profile and the two worst leaks come next, because they pay back in weeks. Service pages ship suburb by suburb after that — and the review ritual starts on day one of the first job, because prominence compounds and can’t be rushed later.
By day 90 you have tracking that ties rankings to booked jobs, a Business Profile that’s working instead of coasting, and the first service pages earning their spots. What you do next — keep building with me or run the plan yourself — is genuinely your call, because everything above is yours to keep. That’s the point of starting with the Revenue Audit instead of a retainer.
The cold read
I already know three things about your website.
I haven’t seen it yet. I’m still usually right.
One: you have no financing page, and most roofs are financed.
A residential roof is a five-figure unplanned purchase. A large share of homeowners finance it, and “roof financing” plus your city is a real search with real intent — a buyer who has already accepted they need the roof. Most roofers have that information buried on a PDF or mentioned in a sentence on the contact page.
Two: your storm content goes live after the storm.
Pages take weeks to index and earn position. Publishing hail-damage content the week the hail arrives means you rank for it about the time the neighborhood has already signed with somebody. The pages that win storm season were published in the quiet months.
Three: an aggregator is renting you your own town.
Type your main service and your city. If a lead marketplace sits above you, you are paying per lead for a position you might be able to own. Whether that is winnable depends on the market — but almost nobody checks before accepting it as a cost of doing business.
Roofing is not a traffic problem. It is a timing and trust problem, and both are fixable.
The part nobody audits
Insurance language is doing more damage than your rankings are.
Half the roofing sites I look at are written for the contractor, not the homeowner. They talk about supplements, scopes, adjusters and Xactimate. A homeowner with a leak wants to know three things: can you come out, will insurance cover it, and what does it cost if they don’t.
That is not an SEO finding. It is a clarity finding, and it is the kind of thing thirty years in marketing catches and a crawler never will. It usually moves conversion faster than any ranking change I can buy you.
The math
What this has to be worth.
At an average residential job, one extra roof a month covers the engagement several times over. Commercial changes the math entirely — one won bid can pay for a year.
That is the whole argument. If your close rate and job value do not clear it, the audit will show it and I will say so.
Straight answers
What roofers ask me.
Storm work is the spike. Replacement, repair, inspection and financing searches run all year and are far less competitive, because everyone else is fighting over the spike. The steady months are where the cheap wins are.
You might not need both, and that is worth finding out. Bought leads are shared, expensive and permanent. If you can rank for the same terms, the cost curve inverts within about a year. The audit tells you whether that is realistic in your specific market.
Very, in the metro core. Considerably less so in the outlying municipalities where you already do work and have no page. That gap is usually where I start, because it is the cheapest real money on the table.
Find out what’s actually wrong.
Two weeks. $3,500. SEO, AI visibility, conversion, and the brand and product friction nobody else looks at.
Start with me within 60 days and half the fee comes off your first month. I work with three companies at a time.