Are you marketing your roofing company effectively online?

It’s hard to deny that most potential customers in the roofing business (and most other home improvement businesses these days) start their research online. Knowing this, it’s important to give your own online presence the occasional check-up to see if you’re doing the right things and positioning yourself well against other roofing contractors. Since our roofing cost estimating software is so popular, we spend a lot of time talking to roofing contractors and we know this is a priority item for many in the industry. With that in mind, we’re going to look at a company in one of the country’s most competitive markets and address some items they are doing well and some areas of improvement.

Case Study: Chicago

One of the biggest markets in the country, it’s safe to say if a roofing company is doing well in Chicago they’re definitely doing something right. First off, we did a search for “roofing company Chicago” to see who was the first of Google’s organic search results – the first result under the four ads. The winner? Lindholm Roofing.

The good news for Lindholm Roofing is that they have the number one map listing. Better yet, once you get below the map listings, their standard listing is the first actual business that shows up after directory listings from Yelp and Thumbtack.

So, while they’re dominating the map listings, they have two listings on the first page of Google where they can gain free clicks from potential customers. So why exactly does Lindholm Roofing do so well in search?

1. Location. They’re within the Chicago city limits, which makes things a lot easier than trying to rank out for a location based keyword when you’re technically in another town or suburb. Fortunately, they’ve got differnet neighborhoods, suburbs and surrounding areas covered as well with 10 other satellite offices all with physical addresses and unique local phone numbers. That provides hyperlocal coverage throughout the greater Chicagoland area.




2. Domain name. Lindholm Roofing was smart enough to get a URL that matches their name – meaning they have “roofing” in their actual URL. This is a good sign to Google that your website and business are going to be very relevant when people do a search for “roofing”.




3. An active Google+ page. Lindholm keeps their Google+ page up to date and active. They post regularly on roofing related topics, an extensive list of videos from their YouTube channel, several photos and a number of reviews which helps signal to Google that consumers are utilizing the company’s services.




4. Quality site content. If you visit lindholmroofing.com you’ll notice that they have a lot of in depth detail on every page of the site. Whether you want to learn about the company, roofing options or their other services, every page has a lot of quality content utilizing a lot of relevant keywords. Their home page, you’ll notice mentions “roofing” throughout and uses the exact phrase “Chicago Roofing Contractors” in the first few paragraphs. They don’t overdo it, but they make sure to use the keywords they want to rank out for.




5. Strong inbound link profile and citation network. Getting sites to link to you is one of the best ways to rank well in Google and Lindholm has (knowingly or not) established a high number of quality inbound links to their site. Majestic SEO, a tool that measures a site’s backlinks shows 1,078 inbound links from 96 separate domains. Citations are the number of times a company’s name, address and phone number are listed across the web, and using Whitespark’s business citation tool shows that Lindholm has 155 citations for their main office address and phone number.

Outside of ranking well on Google, Lindholm Roofing is doing several other things well from a website marketing standpoint, too:

1. Credibility building. Within the sidebar and footer of the site Lindholm does a great job of building credibility and linking out to things like their Better Business Bureau listing as well as to the various roofing and building association sites they are members of. While the outbound links might only provide a little boost in Google rankings, it certainly builds trust in visitors compared to a site that doesn’t appear to have any professional associations. On top of the professional associations shown on the site, they also have a long list of testimonials from happy customers, another way to help win over prospective customers.




2. Third party reviews. While doing well on Google is nice, if you’re a roofing company there are many other ways that people can find you. Lindholm does a nice job getting coverage on major contractor websites and local directories like Angie’s List, Yelp, and the Yellow Pages. Even better, if these sites are the avenue where you first here about Lindholm’s services, they’ve done a good job acquiring reviews from these sites to build instant credibility with customers experiencing their brand for the first time. As examples, the Yellow Pages listing has 19 reviews and Yelp has 27 listings. When comparing that to a company that hasn’t actively pursued reviews, a potential customer is probably going to have more trust reaching out to a company that obviously does a lot of business and has positive overall feedback.




3. Ease of contact. As soon as you land on the Lindholm site you’re greeted with a banner with their 1-800 number and a prominent call to action to request a quote. One would assume that this form also feeds their mailing list. So, this serves two purposes – reducing friction for potential customers who prefer to send an email over giving a phone call while helping to build a database for future marketing efforts.
   

So that’s the good, but where can this company improve?

Obviously, Lindholm is doing a bunch of things well, but there are still some pretty clear areas of improvement that will help them out in the long haul, here are some low hanging fruit:

1. Condense page titles. Lindholm’s page titles on their website go against SEO best practices by being WAY too long. This doesn’t seem to be impacting them now, but it certainly looks a little spammy and if they want their search results to always look clean it’s best to trim these down to a maximum of 65 or 70 characters. Right now most of their pages have a really long title like their home page that’s crammed full of keywords. I think you’ll agree, this seems a bit excessive: <title>Chicago Roofing Contractors | Chicago Roof Repairs | Chicago Roof Installation | Tile Roofing | Slate Roofing | Gutter Repair | Chicagoland Commercial Roofers | Residential Roof Repairs | Best Roofing Experts | Lindholm Roofing</title> 




2. Add schema markup. Utilizing schema data, particularly when a company has multiple locations helps to eliminate any confusion Google may have about location data for your business.




3. Add better file names and alt tags to images. It appears many of the images on the site aren’t optimized for SEO either. Optimizing images can be a great way to get an extra boost for individual pages’ rankings and also to rank out in Google image search. A quick look at the file on their home page shows that the image file of the group in and around the truck has a file name of: wp-content/uploads/2012/04/DSC_20574-e1337004607904.jpg and no alt tag. This doesn’t give Google any clues as to what the image contains. A better file name and al attribute would be something like: wp-content/uploads/2012/04/lindholm-roofing-staff-and-truck” alt=”Lindholm Roofing staff near truck”Google’s crawlers can’t “see” your images, they rely on the file name and alt attribute to know what the picture contains, so being descriptive and using your keywords sensibly can also be a nice boost for a site’s SEO.

In the grand scheme of things it’s a relatively short list of things to improve for Lindholm Roofing, and if you’re a roofing contractor looking to have better results with your online marketing, you could do a lot worse than emulating one of the more successful roofing companies in Chicago.