Roofer SEO Explained By Roofing Marketing Pros
Today we sit down with two of the experts at Roofing Marketing Pros, Marketing Manager Sofia Danese, and SEO Director Rans Urbina. Today’s topic in question; How to use AI for roofer SEO. The bigger theme within this conversation – how to use it correctly, and effectively for a roofer SEO campaign. Focused specific to roofers and contractors, their process was broken down step by step on how you can use AI to enhance your roofing SEO strategies. Let’s get started!
Understanding the Concept – Getting Started
It is important to understand the very foundation of what AI is. Artificial intelligence is all but the latest rage – a unique tool that can create content for you, but the real trick is using it correctly so that you stand out against your competitor in today’s market. AI can publish blog articles for you, create on page content, generate images for your designs, and more, but if you do not train the AI model for what your objective is, the outcome will look great but the results will be subpar. There’s is a big difference between pushing a blog article with content, and pushing an article with valued content. Remember, Google is all about their reputation, their credibility, and their focus is providing online users with valued content. They will not promote your content organically if you create content just for the sake of creating content.
Whether it’s ChatGPT, Claude AI, Jasper, or even Gemini, the content produced by the AI model is only going to be as good as the information you feed it. It is important to understand that the information given to the AI model is what will make a difference in outcome of your content. The more the AI model understands your objective of the task, the more information it has to use as a reference, the more productive the outcome, the better the results.
Step 1: Market Research – Gather All of the Information to Train The AI Model
Prior to creating any content through the AI model, regardless of whether it’s going to be used on the website, Google My Business profile, social media, or any ads campaign, you need to do a little homework. This step is crucial in the process, as all of this information is going to help both you and the AI model understand your target audience. What is “market research”? The process of running market research is looking at different variables such as average age, demographics, and financial income for a targeted area. In this case, we take it a step further in the process – you are going to also look at housing data, keyword use for online searches, online search trends, weather patterns and storms, and geographical elements. All of this information will be used within the AI model to touch on USP (Unique Selling Points) for your target audience within your targeted area. From the research of this information you’ll be able to decide and create on your online persona and how you want to promote your content online.
The Value of The Information
• Age: Determine who lives in your area. If your business is focused on residential roofing, then age does play a huge factor into your sales and your exposure online. Statistically, the “younger” generation, ranging from ages 25 – 39, are buying new homes that are usually new builds, or are looking for homes with a strong foundation that does not involve major fixes. The “older” crowd, ranging from ages 40+ are already committed to their homes, and have a higher chance of converting for roof replacements or higher ticket projects. Knowing the age group of your target area determines HOW your online content will be digested. The younger crowd will prefer something more modern, relatable, and engaging. The older generation will have more time invested into their homes therefore they are looking for more professional content, and trustworthy.
• Demographics: How important is the demographics information of an area? Extremely important! Knowing the statistical data on the groups that reside in that area can tell you plenty; product and service alignment, customer experience for digesting content, market expectations in terms of user traffic, how to relate your content so that you target specific groups when creating the visuals, but above all, this will provide predictive insights. Predict insights will tell you about their online behavior, as well as provide the ability to forecast trends so that you can create content calendars unique to your target audience.
• Financial Income: Knowing the average financial income of your targeted audience and area will allow you to serve a dual purpose; not only will it allow you to determine if this area is the right area for you to target your roofing services, but also will be used to train the AI model to your persona. If the area is low income, then the chances of you selling a roof replacement paid out of pocket is lower than a homeowner proceeding with a roof replacement through financing options. Do you have financing options? We’ll talk more about offers in this content. For lower income areas, you can still sell roof replacements, especially with easy financing options, but you should also expect more roof repairs, and roof maintenance projects from the area.
This data also relays into your content so that you can train your AI model to generate content with the tone of “easy going, friendly, and approachable”, or you could train the AI model to make your roofing business sound like you’re going to come over with camera, HGTV behind your with cameras rolling, and are providing a lavish and luxurious home remodeling or renovation. The choice is really on what tone you want your roofing business to come off as online. The whole point here is that one piece of data can make a big difference in how the AI model generates your content.
If you already have an existing website for your roofing business, tools such as SEMrush allow you to look into your existing target market, traffic share, and do a complete competitor analysis. If you’re looking for a competitive edge against your competition, and want to dominate the local rankings, continue to follow this gameplan, just like our client Stellar Roofing who dominates their local market in Rochester, NY.
The more traffic share your brand occupies, the more your site is promoted by Google. Remember, leads that come from organic SEO are FREE leads. Unlike paid media campaigns, organic leads are leads that come directly from being promoted online by Google without having to spend a single penny. As of July 5th, 2024, all of these sites listed on the image above are all within the top 10 search results of Google for the localized keyword “roofing rochester”. Think about what you could do with 52% of online traffic coming your way from one keyword. Follow the game plan here, and the results will blow your mind.
Why The Extra Research Query?
So why are we doing more market research for the AI model if AI is supposed to be the “great big thinker” for us? Unfortunately, while AI models carry a large database of information, some of them are not connected to the internet, or cannot connect to the internet, therefore it cannot verify information to be factual. Certain AI models are limited in their AI database and only carry information as far as 2021 so the information is not up to date. It is important to remember that Google is not concerned with who or what is producing the content, what Google cares about is that the content contains actual value to the user. Doing proper market research ensures that your AI model is properly trained with facts, statements, research, and a foundation specific to your target audience. This ensures quality, and accuracy of the final content. If you’re working on your roofer SEO, is it essential to do your research and continue to feed as much information to the AI model in order to get the best value for your content, otherwise you’ll sound just like every other AI content in the digital landscape.
Housing Data: Personally, we at Roofing Marketing Pros like to review this statistic in detail. We’re looking for how many homes are in the area, which zones are heavily populated, and of course, if your business provides commercial roofing, then we look at areas that are filled with commercial properties so that your content can take advantage of these zones as well. There is no sense in marketing an area on your website that has a handful of homes. More homes equals more users searching online, which equals more opportunities to sell your roofing or contracting services.
Weather Patterns: In most areas, weather patterns are both unique and unpredictable. But each area has their own seasons, and weather patterns that you as a roofer can capitalize on. For example, if your roofing company services the Minnesota area, a heavy snow state, you know that ice dams form really easily. How this information comes to play is when you are using your AI model to write content in the fall regarding ice dam prevention. Writing content in the fall will allow your content enough time to generate value with Google, and by the time winter rolls in, your website will populate in the search results for “ice dam prevention”. There is a time and a place for when certain content should be released into the digital landscape so that it generates the best results. Understanding an area’s weather patterns both localizes the content and keywords, but also allows you to create content with ample time so that when the search term is at peak search volume, you are one of the options on the search results.
Geographical Elements: What makes your target area unique? Is it high in the mountains? Is the area prone to earthquakes, hurricanes, tornados, or hail storms? Being a Florida native, primarily residing in the city of Miami, we know that hurricane season starts in January, and ends with november. A lot of things can happen during that time frame, namely flying shingles, damaged roofs, and a perfect time for storm damage restoration. Whatever makes your area unique, is what will help drive the conversional elements on your content that will touch on the pain points of your potential clients, which lead to your content being localized through the use of keywords, and will also lead to more organic leads at the right time.
Step 2: Training the AI Model specific for Roofer SEO
Select your AI model, and the first thing you want to do is set up your first prompt with all of the information you provided. You want to ensure that you give the AI model as much detailed information as possible from the market research. Only tell the AI model that you are going to feed it information to store into its memory bank to use when writing or generating the content. Once you submit the information into the memory bank, the next prompt to ensure we are creating an effective roofer SEO AI model, you are going to train the model to understand what SEO is. Not all AI models understand the latest features of SEO, the latest Google Algorithm changes, and again, some of the AI models have outdated information banks from 2021. Years later now in 2024, AI models sound very similar, therefore you have to train the AI model to think in terms of the latest SEO trends, and how to incorporate it into the content generation.
Roofer SEO Requirements – Understanding SEO
This part is our bread and butter at Roofing Marketing Pros. If you get stuck here, feel free to reach out to the team at any point and we can guide you through the process, or answer any roofer SEO questions. While you’re here, let’s talk about SEO and what components the AI models needs to learn to provide effective content. Remember, Google doesn’t care that the AI model wrote the content, Google cares that the content has value and follows the E-E-A-T criteria.
E-E-A-T Explained Through Our Client Legacy Roofing
E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. It’s a concept used by Google to evaluate the quality of content and its creators. This criteria heavily influences how Google will rank your content. The intent of your secondary prompt is to train the AI model on thinking like an SEO expert. There’s no point in doing roofer SEO if the AI model just throws out content without SEO intent. The most crucial component is that the AI model understands how to generate the content with both marketing, and SEO intent in mind. Let’s cover what each letter in the E-E-A-T acronym stands for.
Experience
Experience refers to the firsthand or direct knowledge of a content creator on the topic they are discussing. This involves showcasing practical insights or real-life examples to demonstrate that the creator has a solid grasp of the subject matter through personal involvement. The best example on how this works to benefit your campaign is by writing a brief paragraph or two, indicating your experience in the roofing industry, whether it’s 20+ years as a roofing company, hold plenty of certificates from roofing manufacturers, or explaining your timeline on how your business was created and the projects you have undertaken. Other examples that can help you show experience through your content is by explaining telling the AI model a specific scenario, specific to roofing or contracting, indicating the problem, the customer’s concerns, addressing the solution, giving facts and details on how your company fixed it, and the resolution of the entire situation. You can ask AI models to provide content with “value”, but nobody provides value like real life work ethic, hence you.
Expertise
Expertise highlights the skill level and knowledge of the content creator in their specific field. This can be demonstrated through credentials, professional background, and the quality of the information provided, ensuring that the content is accurate and valuable. This one is very much like an autobiography, so talk about yourself, talk about your company. Tell the AI model who you are, what your company offers, how your company offers solutions, what are your specialties, details on your company policies, business ethics, or procedures. The more information about you being an expert in the roofing industry, the more expertise your content will resonate.
Authoritativeness
Authoritativeness measures the credibility of the content creator or the website. It involves recognition by others in the industry, such as mentions, backlinks from reputable sites, and a strong reputation within the niche, indicating that the creator is a trusted source of information. Have a certificate in GAF shingles? Promote it! Google relies heavily on credibility, so think of backlinks or mentions from other sites as a co-signer on your content. It’s your co-signer’s way of saying “I vouch for this company.” If GAF has given you one of their certificates, they will have given you a digital badge that has a link to their site. This backlink tells Google that GAF is supporting your cause as a provider in the roofing industry, which generates trust and authority in the roofing space.
Trustworthiness
Trustworthiness focuses on the reliability and integrity of the content and its creator. It encompasses transparency, such as providing clear sources, accurate information, and honest intentions, ensuring that the audience can trust the content and the site it is published on. Simply put, don’t come off as a sleazy sales rep – trust me, not only can Google tell, but so can your audience. AI models will push out content that sounds very similar. And you can tell which online presence is using AI by recognizing keywords that AI models use very commonly such as “delve, explore, dive in, ultimate, demystify, tailored, unique, premiere”, and this one is a fan favorite that is ALWAYS found on AI generated content – “top notch”. All of those words are giveaways as to the content being written by machine learning artificial intelligence, rather than a “human”. The whole point of this entire process is to convince Google that the AI generated content was written by a human because it carries value and generates trust. Trust is created with the client when all of the content is properly written with expertise, experience and authority in mind.
Ensuring that the AI model knows what E-E-A-T is about and how it works for Google is the final step on setting up the foundation for creating content for you site. You now have all of the components needed to begin creating your content. Now it’s time to define the type of content you want AI to make.
Did you catch our most recent webinar? Roofing Marketing Pros CEO, Founder, and Marketing Expert gave a masterful explanation on how to utilize Google My Business to generate over 100+ roofing leads…….FREE! In case you missed the webinar, you can watch it here.
Step 3: Defining Persona – Training your AI to Sound Like You
The final step in training the AI model to produce effective SEO content for online use is make it sound like you. You’re going to define things such as the persona your online presence is going to take on, the tone of the content, the type of keywords you are targeting and how it should be used, and the conversion funnel. In this last step, your AI model will not only be trained to sound like you, but it’ll also be trained to create content that hits all the selling points towards your target audience, as well as deliver content that is SEO rich so that Google will want to promote it! This is where you can start getting excited to see a rise in your roofing leads, without spending a single penny.
Tone: Are you approachable, or expert like?
Define how you want your content to read. Based on your market research, age of the target audience, and demographics, is your target audience wanting more of a “modern, approachable, community based” roofer who takes on any kind of roofing jobs? Are you the roofer who is more selective about their roofing jobs and chooses a tone that sounds more “professional, authoritative, high-end”? The choice is yours on what tone to take, but consider that your tone will have an impact on the users that will read your site. The way the content reads will have a big influence on whether a user picks up their phone and calls you.
These are sample tones we have used for various clients with different personas:
• Informative, Assuring and Professional: balanced – brought in good lead count, good lead quality.
• Conversational, Informative, and Expert-like: brought in higher lead count, but lower ticket projects
• Informative and engaging: brought in a very high quantity of leads, but lower quality projects.
• Informative, Relatable, and appealing: balanced – high quantity leads, balanced quality projects
• Informative, Reassuring, lavish: brought in very low quantity leads, but VERY high quality projects.
Now that the AI model has the tone in the memory bank, the AI model is trained to sound and think like you. At Roofing Marketing Pros, we provide all of our clients with a a brief (form) to fill out which contains questions that will help us better understand the objectives and desires of our client, so that we can train our AI model unique to that client’s persona. You can find our SEO brief here.
Content Type: Where is the Content Going?
Where is the content going? Is the content being promoted on social media channels, Google My Business, or on a website. Each platform carries their own criteria for the actual content. But ALL platforms carry one criteria that is the same; all of the content must be relevant to all aspects of the criteria. For example, if the content being created is for a website, the meta description, page title, keyword use, and on page content must all contain relevancy through the use of the primary keyword. The primary keyword MUST be found on all components in order to have effective SEO, so that Google can crawl the content, digest it, index it, and then know what it should rank for. You are to inform the AI model what the intent is with the content you want it to generate so it takes into consideration length, style, and keyword use count.
Keyword Use: Knowing HOW to Use Keywords for Roofer SEO
Choosing a keyword for your content is very important. You always have to tell the AI model what keyword you want to content to rank for. Do not give the content multiple different keywords, but rather, break it down into giving the AI model 1 primary keyword, and no more than 5 secondary keywords. Primary keywords are the focus keyword. It’s the keyword that will have the heaviest impact in search volume and difficulty rating. Secondary keywords do carry their own difficulty rating and search volume, but they serve as supporting keywords to the primary keyword.
Make sure to use common SEO tools such as Moz, ahrefs, or SEMrush to see the search intent of the keyword. The search intent of the keyword is very important and should be relayed to the AI model so that the model understands HOW to use that keyword within the content. AI models generate content all the time but do not take into consideration the keyword search intent therefore the use of the keyword is wrong. Think of it this way, if someone is searching for “roof maintenance tips”, the user is looking for information online. They may not be looking to buy anything, therefore Google will promote content that contains information, not conversion based content.
Keyword Intent Defined:
1. Informational Intent
Informational intent refers to search queries where the user is seeking information or answers to questions. These queries are typically used when users want to learn something or find detailed explanations. Roofing-related examples include “how to repair a roof,” “types of roofing materials,” “benefits of metal roofing,” “roof maintenance tips,” and “what causes roof leaks.”
2. Navigational Intent
Navigational intent is when a user is looking to find a specific website or web page. These searches are often branded and indicate that the user knows exactly where they want to go online. Examples in the roofing context are “GAF roofing website,” “Owens Corning roofing products,” “CertainTeed roof shingles,” “local roofing companies directory,” and “HomeAdvisor roofing reviews.”
3. Transactional Intent
Transactional intent indicates that the user is ready to make a purchase or take a specific action, such as signing up for a service. These queries often include terms that imply commercial intent. Roofing examples include “buy roof shingles online,” “roof repair service near me,” “schedule a roof inspection,” “get a roofing quote,” and “hire roofing contractor.”
4. Commercial Investigation Intent
Commercial investigation intent involves users who are considering a purchase but are still researching their options. They are looking for comparisons, reviews, and other information that will help them make a decision. Roofing-related examples are “best roofing contractors,” “metal roof vs asphalt shingles,” “roofing contractor reviews,” “top-rated roofing materials,” and “cost comparison of roof repair services.”
Conversional Funnel: Offers, Guarantees, and Selling Points
This last part is VERY underrated, but a game changer if you pay attention to this part. What makes you stand out? As a roofer, the common offer found online is “$1,000 off your roof replacement”. But think of it this way; if 10 roofers are offering the same discount online, then users have 9 other companies to call apart from your company. If the offer is the same, then what will finish the sale with the customer are any unique selling points or guarantees that you mention on your content. Training the AI model in what makes your roofing company unique will allow the AI model to use that unique selling proposition at the right time in the content. Hint: the AI must be told to use a catch-hook, or an offer within the first section of the content. Remember, you only have one shot to keep the attention of the user, so the first thing they see on the screen should have an offer, guarantee, or unique selling point.
Case Studies: How Long for the Process To Generate Results?
How do we know this entire process works? Easy! We use this process day in, and day out. Clients reach out to us because they have one goal in mind, and that is to increase brand exposure online, which leads to more traffic, which leads to more user engagement, which leads to more conversions and leads. Remember, SEO is not like paid media campaigns – when you stop paying the budget for a paid media campaign, the results of that campaign stop immediately. With SEO, the benefit to this type of campaign is that you are laying out a strong foundation for an online persona, which will generate value with search engines, which will NOT fail after you stop posting or writing content. The purpose of SEO is that Google finds you information credible that it wants to promote you, therefore you dominate the rankings free of charge because you took the time to setup SEO on your website correctly.
If you’ve done everything correctly up until this point, you can start seeing a major difference in your online performance very quickly. Below are case studies of real clients who are actively with us, and with real metrics.
Imperial Roofing
Imperial Roofing was struggling with their online presence before joining Roofing Marketing Pros. Their website launched May 2nd, 2024. You can see on their Google Search Console that almost immediately after the launch of their new site, which contained brand new on page written content, new keyword structure, and market research intent based content, you can see that both their impressions and clicks are rising. If you notice, before their time at Roofing Marketing Pros, their campaign was flat and was not showing much traction. Now their phones are ringing, and the leads are starting to flow.
Hippo Roofing
Just like Imperial Roofing, prior to joining with Roofing Marketing Pros, their campaign was very stagnant and flat. The lead quality was not showing, and the lead count was not showing any improvements. The launch date of Hippo’s new website, which again, contained all the goodies mentioned above, was April 10th, 2024. Almost immediately they saw an increase in their organic growth, and increase in their leads and more importantly and increase in their lead quality.
Weather Built Homes
Let’s take a look at a much longer timeline. Here is Weather Built Homes, a client who we have been doing this exact same process of AI driven SEO for the past 6 months. As soon as our first piece of content was altered with this process, you can see a spike in their metrics. And the most important part, you see steady growth. The value of SEO is that your online persona is consistently growing, which means your leads are growing, therefore your business is growing.
Rinaldi Roofing
Look at Rinaldi Roofing go! This client has been with us for a little over a year now, and we are proud to say that they are increasing metrics, traffic, user count, but above all, lead count, on a day to day basis. The true way to scale your business online is through effective SEO, and if you follow the process outlined here, not only will you see close to immediate results, but you will see growth, and your graphs/reports will look exactly like Rinaldi Roofing, if not better.
A Name You Can Trust: Roofing Marketing Pros
Follow the instructions on this guide if you’re looking to generate better results for your roofing business. You now have the tools and the knowledge to use AI effectively for roofer SEO. When done correctly, content that is generated through AI can have major impacts on your business. One thing to consider is that SEO heavily relies on informational based keywords, and commercial based keywords. These keyword types are keywords where the user does not exactly know what they are looking for, therefore SEO brings you NEW user traffic, which leads to new customers. If you’re looking to scale your business, follow the steps on this guide. If you’re looking to grow your business online, are in need of an expert opinion, or would like assistance with your campaign, feel free to schedule a time with one of our team members who can help you with this process. We’d love to hear from you!
