We’re sharing our system to set up Google Ads for roofing companies proven to give a 5-10x return on investment for your advertising spend.
One of the most powerful tools you can implement in your marketing plan is Google AdWords for roofing ad campaigns. Whether you already have an AdWords account or want to take your digital advertising to the next level, do you know how to market your business using Google’s top advertising tool effectively?
Using Google AdWords for roofing leads can help you grow your contracting company quickly through targeted marketing to find potential customers who need a roofer right now. Your competitors are already using Google Ads to direct traffic to their roofing websites. Can you hope to catch up? Yes!
By following this guide, you can:
- Set up high-performing ad campaigns using every tip and trick we know
- Spend smarter to maximize ROI for each marketing dollar you spend
You can’t just run ad campaigns on Google Ads and expect a stream of new leads immediately. You need to understand the platform and its tools to take advantage of Google’s algorithms and ranking factors. This guide breaks down how to use keyword planning, landing pages, and copywriting to rank your ads higher and get more conversions than your competitors.
Let’s get started!
What Is Google AdWords?
Google AdWords, now called Google Ads, is Google’s proprietary advertising tool where businesses can bid to show ads, services, products, or videos in response to user searches on Google. Google Ads displays pay-per-click ads in their own search results and on affiliate websites with available ad space.
Google displays your ad above organic (unpaid) results to users searching for products and services. An effective Google Ads campaign strategy can help your roofing company rank over your competitors and get quality leads from relevant keyword searches on Google.
How Effective Are Google Ad Campaigns for Roofing Contractors?
Understanding how to create, monitor, and analyze an ad campaign on Google Ads is the key to getting high-quality leads. Other advertising platforms can get you leads, so what makes leads from Google more desirable for your business? A high-quality lead:
- Needs their roof repaired or replaced soon
- Qualifies for an insurance damage claim or preferred financing
- Is local within your service area
With Google Ads, you can target certain locations, different display options for your ad, and unique combinations of keyword matching. As you test various combinations of keyword and location targeting, you can determine which are the most effective in getting quality leads for your roofing business.
What Roofing Keywords Will Get Clicks on Your Google Ads Campaign?
When setting up your Google AdWords for your roofing company, you select which keywords you want to target and bid against other roofers for the coveted top result on Google’s search results page. But how do you know which keywords to include in your campaigns and bid on for the best return on investment?
While you should always include some common keywords, like “roof replacement contractor,” “metal roofing in (city, state),” and “free roof inspection,” every one of your competitors is bidding on those same search terms.
You need to plan for several Google Ad campaigns to strategically implement ad groups for similar keywords that combine a strong mix of your targeted keyword, long-tail keywords, and negative keywords. We’ll explain how to do that in a bit.
Each Google Ads campaign should tie an ad group to a relevant page on your website called a “landing page” to convert leads to potential customers.
Ad Group Planning
An ad group is exactly that, a group of ads that share a theme or target. You should develop your ad groups to target a specific set of roofing services. For example, if you want one campaign to target roof repairs, you should create an ad group with similar keyword strategies, like:
- roof repair
- shingle roof repair
- roof leak repair near me
- roof repair in (city, state)
Speaking of location targeting, each city in your service area needs its own ad group. While your Google Ads campaign manages the budget and daily spend goal, your ad group manages your cost per click bids, targeting, ad placement, and location settings.
Does your roofing company offer both residential and commercial roofing services or specialize just in a particular area, like residential asphalt shingle roofing, commercial flat roofs, or high-end metal or tile roofing? If you offer residential and commercial roofing, target your ad groups to represent each type of potential customer for your roofing services.
For example, if you offer both residential and commercial metal roofing, you should create an ad group for “residential metal roofing” and one for “commercial metal roofing.” Each ad group should direct potential customers to a different landing page on your website, one for your residential metal roofing services and one for your commercial metal roofing services.
But how do you select which keywords to target in your ad groups?
Main Keywords
You want each ad group to target approximately five keywords, with a maximum of ten keywords per ad group.
Proven marketing strategies include narrowly defining your ad group to use just phrase match and exact match when establishing your bids. What does that mean? Google Ads allows four levels of keyword matching, including:
- Broad Match. Example: +roofer +Orlando +shingle. A broad match will show your relevant ad if a user uses any of the included words or variations, including plural or singular versions of key search terms, like in a search for “I need asphalt shingle roofers in Orlando.”
- Broad Match Identifier. Example: “Orlando shingle roofer”. A broad match identifier will show the ad in search results for any combination of the words included, like a search for “who is the best Orlando shingle roofer?”
- Phrase Match. Example: “Orlando shingle roofer”. A phrase match will show ad results for any search containing the exact keyword phrase in order. It will also show your ad if the search contains additional words before or after the phrase, like “shingle roofer in Orlando.”
- Exact Match. Example: “Orlando shingle roofer”. An exact match will only show your ad in search results if a user searches for the exact phrase or similar terms, such as singular or plural versions.
Restricting your ad display settings to phrase match and exact match gets you relevant leads for people looking for roofing services now. These are your best options for your most popular keywords because they increase the value of each click. Overusing broad match keyword matching would allow anyone to click on your ads, so you’d end up paying more in ad costs for low-quality leads.
Long-Tail Keywords
Long-tail keywords are search phrases that tend to have more words with specific search intent. Examples of long-tail keywords could include:
- how to get a leaky roof repaired
- how to find water intrusion on a roof
- who is the best roofing contractor in (your city or county)
Because the phrasing for long-tail keywords can reorder or feature similar terms in a singular or plural form, keep your long-tail keywords in a separate ad group where you can change the distribution settings to include broad match or broad match identifier and expand your reach for those keywords.
While long-tail keywords often don’t bring the same amount of traffic as common keywords, you won’t need to bid as much in your cost per click if you’re the only one trying to rank for those phrases.
Be aware that search volume on long-tail keywords is often low and could negatively affect your ad group for clicks. You may need to pause certain keywords and test another variation to get a higher response.
Long-tail keywords to consider include any kind of do-it-yourself search terms, search terms for specific issues that people might notice around their homes, and specific questions potential customers might ask. Users may search for the best roofer, roofing contractors that offer financing, or the best roof warranty in your service area.
Negative Keywords
You should also tell Google which keywords you don’t want to rank for in the search results. You can set negative keywords to turn off your ads for searches that contain certain keywords, such as the name of a competitor, a local materials supplier, and job-related search terms roofing contractors might use to search for job opportunities.
Be aware that many of your competitors may have certain terms in their names that you want to rank for, including “roofing,” “roofers,” “contractors,” and similar terms. Don’t let these terms fall under your negative keywords list.
You may also want to omit terms that have a negative connotation, such as “cheapest,” “worst,” “rip off,” and “scam.” While Google seems to ignore the bad terms in the search just to return local roofing companies in its search results, some terms may return news results like, “roofing scams drive homeowner’s insurance premiums ever higher.”
When you set up your Google AdWords for roofing ad campaign, we suggest listing these as negative keywords:
- Home Depot
- Lowes
- Craigslist
- Indeed
- Careerbuilder
- Monster
- Handyman
- Competitor keywords (don’t include terms you want to rank for)
- Services you don’t offer (metal roofing, commercial roofs, siding, windows, doors, gutters, etc.)
Reduce your overall ad buy when you turn on negative keywords to prevent clicks for terms you don’t want.
How to Get Your Roofing Business Ads Showing
Google displays your ads based on the quality score and cost per click (CPC) bidding. Even if you are the highest bidder for certain search terms, Google may determine that your ads aren’t as relevant for those terms as a competitor’s, and your ads may show up below theirs if your quality score is lower.
A high quality score can reduce your cost per click so you can hold the top spot for a keyword at a lower cost than your competitors. Google considers both factors when determining your ad’s ranking among your competitors’ ads for the same search terms.
Quality Score
Google bases its quality score on several factors, including:
- Click-through rate (CTR) of users who see your ad vs. those who actually click on your ad
- Search relevance for each keyword in the ad group
- Ad copy relevance to the search terms
- Historical performance of your ad campaigns
- Landing page relevance
Google multiplies your quality score by your cost per click bid to get your ad rank score. The advertiser with the highest ad rank gets the best position on the search results page—and you want that to be your company. But what do each of these parts of the quality score mean, and how do they factor into the final score?
The click-through rate is how often a user clicks your ad compared to the total number of times Google shows your ad. Although Google hasn’t released the formula for how each contributing factor affects the quality score, the CTR is likely a heavy contributor to the overall score.
Google’s goal is to provide users with relevant answers to their queries. Better search relevance leads to a higher CTR—users will click on an ad that answers the question in their search.
If users frequently click your ad for “free roof inspection in Seattle” when searching for “fix a leaky roof in Seattle,” Google knows that your ad is relevant to users with that query.
Google also reads the words in your ad to determine your ad’s relevance to a user’s search terms. While your ad title for “free roof inspection in Seattle” didn’t mention a leaky roof, it could be a relevant term in the rest of your ad copy.
If you’ve had your Google Ads account for a while and consistently rank highly for terms related to roofing in your service area, Google is more likely to continue to rank your roofing business highly. So the sooner you master Google AdWords for roofing keywords, the better long-term payoff you’ll see.
Finally, your quality score also depends on the relevance of the roofing websites your ads direct users to when they click on your ads. If your landing pages don’t contain keywords relevant to the search and ad keywords, Google ranks the landing page relevance lower.
Each of these factors is important in calculating the final quality score. As your ads gain traction and warrant a higher quality score, Google will lower your overall costs per click.
Cost Per Click Bidding
You can bid to show your ads more often than your competitors’ ads by increasing your cost per click when trying to win the auction for certain common keywords. Even in small towns, “roofing contractor in (your city, state)” is a highly competitive keyword that every roofer within 100 miles wants top placement for in Google’s ad positioning.
Google built its brand on delivering relevant results to users across the globe looking for answers to their problems. There’s even the saying, “if it isn’t on the first page of Google, it doesn’t exist.” Because of Google’s drive to deliver the most relevant results to users, Google won’t let an advertiser simply buy their way to first place in the ad positioning.
Your roofing company might only be third in the cost per click bidding, but if you have the highest quality score, you may win the top spot on Google’s ad results.
How to Write Ad Copy for Roofing Companies with an Effective Call to Action
Your ads must be relevant for your target keywords and readable for human Google users. You can’t just dump all the keywords for an ad group onto an ad and expect it to rank highly for those terms.
Google Ads include three main components:
- Headline: The ad title. Your headline should include your main keyword, the keyword you want most to rank highly in the Google Ad results. Keep it short and sweet, and use the keyword at the beginning of your ad headline.
- Display path: The webpage that the ad takes users to. Users may be wary of clicking on ads that don’t show the destination location where the ad will take them. Including the optional display path can improve your click-through rate.
Description: The body content of your ad. The description is where you put information about your roofing business, including services, competitive benefits, and your call to action statement, like “schedule your free inspection!”
Google My Business
With a Google My Business profile, you’ll be able to add ad extensions to improve your click-through rate on your Google Ads campaign.
Google My Business is a management tool to control your Google Business profile, including location(s), photos, responses to reviews, phone numbers, operating hours, and more. You need to have a Google My Business account to manage your ad extensions on your Google Ads campaigns.
Ad Extensions
Ad Extensions increase the functionality of your pay-per-click (PPC) ads on Google. Google offers several kinds of extensions for each ad group, including:
- Location extensions. When you claim your business through your Google My Business profile and establish a physical address and service locations, you can use location extensions to rank above the organic Google Maps results with your ad.
- Call extensions. Users on mobile devices can quickly call your business with a tracked Google phone number, so you know exactly which ad got the lead.
- Callout extensions. You can list your unique selling propsitions, competitive advantages, special offers, warranties, and other details that give your business the edge over other roofing companies. When the space in the description isn’t long enough, hit your key selling points with the callout extension.
- Sitelink extensions. Add links to related landing pages directly in your ad. If you’re advertising for flat roofs, link to your residential flat roof page, your commercial flat roof page, your flat roof waterproofing page, and your general commercial roofing services page.
- Structured snippets. Include related categories for your roofing services without links. Structured snippets are a great tool to list the types of roofing you offer, from asphalt shingles to slate tiles.
With ad extensions, your Google Ads become much more effective, getting you the right lead traffic to each relevant landing page, no matter what potential customers are looking for.
Creating a Landing Page to Make Conversions for Multiple Roofing Services
A landing page should be a single page on your roofing website that details the benefits of a specific roofing service. Don’t just link to your homepage! If a user clicked on an ad for “roof storm damage,” you should direct them to that service’s landing page on your site.
You can develop ad campaigns that tie to each landing page for the relevant service. Don’t forget that Google looks at the destination for each ad and assesses the relevance of that page content to user queries to calculate an ad’s quality score.
Each landing page should target specific keywords in the ad group with those keywords featured in the page content. So how many landing pages should you have?
- A page for each service offered in each location you serve. If you provide metal roofing repair in the greater Memphis area, you want a page for metal roofing in Memphis, East Memphis, Germantown, Lakeland, Egypt, Woodstock, and any towns served across the Arkansas or Mississippi border.
- A page for each type of roofing you offer. If you offer repair, replacement, or installation for asphalt shingles, wood shake or shingles, TPO, BUR, EPDM, modified bitumen, metal roofing, ceramic or concrete tile, or slate roofing, build a page for each type of roof. Include what services you offer for each, and don’t forget to advertise your special deals, like free inspections.
- A page for separate residential or commercial services. Does your roofing business offer flat roofing services for both residential and commercial buildings? Ensure that any overlapping services that cover both residential and commercial customers have their own pages.
What type of content should an effective landing page feature to inform customers about your services and convert quality leads?
Simple One-Page Navigation
A landing page should direct a visitor’s attention to the call to action, where they can fill out a contact form or make a phone call to your business. Don’t send visitors to your main website to click around 37 pages and never make the decision to call. Instead, the landing page is a simple design for answering common questions about a specific service and directing visitors to take the next step to contact you.
Eye-Catching Headline with Main Keyword
The headline needs to include the main keyword that you want your ads showing for on Google’s search results pages. Additionally, the keyword needs to fit in the context of your heading. So instead of just “roofing contractor in San Jose, CA,” try instead “top-rated commercial roofing contractor in San Jose, CA.”
Benefits and Advantages for Potential Customers
Directly under your headline, list the reasons a customer should choose you over a competitor. Do you offer the best material and labor guarantee in the area? Are you certified by GAF, Atlas, Owens Corning, or another shingle brand? Have you been in business the longest of any roofer in the area?
Ensure that visitors on your landing page understand the benefits of choosing your roofing business. Will you help them navigate an insurance claim? Do you keep a warehouse full of materials to deter supply chain interruptions? Do you offer financing for both residential and commercial customers?
Keep a list of potential unique selling propositions to add to your landing pages. For example, on a page about residential shingle roofing, you wouldn’t need to mention commercial roof financing, but you might want to include that your company offers the widest range of available shingle colors from multiple brands.
Testimonials and Reviews
You can claim that you’re the #1 roofing contractor in your area as much as you like, but without reviews to back it up, no visitor will ever believe you. Include reviews and testimonials for your services from real customers on your landing page. While not every customer will mention what type of roof your company worked on, include relevant reviews and omit irrelevant reviews.
For example, if Betty from Houston said your company did a great job of replacing her damaged roof after a storm, you could use that on any landing page. But if she says anything about shingles, only show that review on your shingle and emergency storm service landing pages.
Trust Seals
Potential customers who click on your ad want to know that they can trust your services before they call to schedule an inspection. Include trust seals from consumer reporting and service review sites like the BBB, Angi, the Google 5-star reviews icon, as well as any roofing manufacturer certification icons.
If you’re an AtlasPro® Contractor, GAF® Certified Contractor, or Owens Corning® Preferred Contractor, make sure to include those trust seals on your landing pages. Don’t forget your MCA Certification as a metal roofing contractor.
Testing the Best Google Ads for Roofers
Once you know the keywords you want to use in each ad group and have set up your landing pages and ad extensions, you can test your Google Ads campaign results to determine which keyword strategies get you the best results.
A/B Testing with Single Keyword Groups
When using Google AdWords for roofing ads, you can test different ad headlines and messages to determine which is the most effective for quality leads. You can create experiments under the “optimize account” settings and select “A/B test” to compare the efficiency of different headlines, messages, and landing pages.
Optimizing with Dynamic Text Replacement
Tools like Unbounce and ClickFunnels offer dynamic text replacement programming (DTR)that allows you to embed code in your landing pages that will adjust the text displayed depending on the actual search terms used to find your ad and that landing page.
With dynamic text replacement, you won’t need as many separate landing pages to get traffic from your target keywords. This can be useful when someone might search for a “roofing contractor,” “roofing business,” or “roofing company.” If you design your landing page for “roofing contractor,” you can use dynamic text replacement to replace the word “contractor” with “business” or “company” based on a user’s exact search.
Depending on the search terms, you can also use DTR to replace button text. The only buttons on your landing pages should be the call-to-action buttons. Alternate button text between options like “call now,” “schedule a free inspection,” and “get a free estimate.”
Because the coding for DTR updates your landing page content according to user searches, there’s no want to test which page phrasing affects your ad ranking and quality score. DTR can help your page appear more frequently as an ad result.
Analysis with Keyword Conversion Groups
You can track calls from Google Ads to determine which keywords give you quality leads and which keywords produce the highest level of customer sales. Once you know which keywords give you not just lots of calls, but help you make sales, you can optimize those sales keywords.
What’s the difference between a conversion and a sale? When a user calls you from your ad or landing page, that’s a conversion. Not every call results in a contract and work order, though.
When a customer goes from making the initial inquiry through the process of inspection, estimating, scheduling work on their roof, and having the work done, that’s a sale.
Tracking a lead’s source through the sale’s end is essential in any business, but especially in roofing, where it can take months from the first call from a customer to completing the job, particularly when there’s an insurance claim. Do you have an effective customer relationship management (CRM) tool to know which specific ad brought you each customer?
You should be able to test different ad group keywords within a few weeks of launching a new Google Ads campaign to determine which are the most effective in making sales. You can then bid higher on those keywords in cost per click auctions for higher ad rankings.
How to Set Up the Best Roofing PPC Strategy
Developing a Google Ads campaign from start to finish is a complex series of data sourcing, research, landing page design, tracking and analysis, and responsive keyword adjustment to get the best return on investment for your ad campaigns.
1. Conduct Keyword Research
Start designing your next Google AdWords for roofing campaign by researching popular keywords and phrases other roofing companies use in your service area. Who are your top competitors? What terms do they use most often in their Google Ads?
You need a good balance of common, long-tail, and negative keywords to ensure that your ad dollars are earning the best return possible.
2. Develop Your Landing Pages
You can’t create ads until you have a destination for users who click on your ads. Create appropriate landing pages for your services. Start with a few core services that make up the bulk of your customer requests. Where do you earn the most in your service offerings?
More than likely, your top sales come from your asphalt shingle services, emergency roof repair, and insurance claims if you offer insurance claim assistance. Develop these pages for your first wave of Google Ad campaigns. You can use revenue from your initial campaigns to reinvest in second and third waves of advertising to expand to the rest of your services.
Consider whether to use dynamic text replacement on your landing pages to match user search terms better. Remember that tracking specific ad keywords could be more difficult when using DTR. However, the higher relevance for certain terms usually makes DTR tools worth the investment for a better return on your ad spend.
3. Set Up Cost Per Click Bids
Cost per click bidding is the upper limit you set for your pay-per-click (PPC) ads. For common roofing keywords, such as “shingle roofer in (your city, state),” you will likely have a lot of competition and have to bid more for ad ranking to win a good position in Google’s search results.
For less common keywords, you may not face the same competition, and you can potentially earn a higher return for these keywords with a lower cost per click. Google offers several tools to help you determine how much you want to bid, including:
- Keyword Planner. The keyword planner shows how often users search for specific keywords and offers cost estimates for cost per click bidding.
- Bid Simulator. This tool simulates scenarios, such as how many additional impressions you would have received in the previous week if you had bid $1.05 more per click. These simulations can help you determine whether to increase or decrease a bid on a certain keyword.
- First-Page Bid Estimates. See estimates of how much to bid to get onto Google’s first page of results with your ad for different keywords.
Decide how much to spend for each keyword or ad group. You can place different cost per click bids for each keyword or set a default maximum cost per click for the entire ad group.
4. Launch Your Roofing Services Google Ads Campaign
Create effective ad copy with direct ad headlines, useful descriptive copy, and ad extensions to increase the reach and effectiveness of your roofing PPC ads. If you often have customer foot-traffic in-office, make sure you use location extensions on your ads to appear in Google Maps results.
5. Analyze Campaign Results and Adjust
Once your campaign is live, monitor the response you get from each ad.
When you receive a phone call or email from a customer who saw your Google Ad, you should track where the lead came from. Did they fill out the contact form on your landing page? Did they call from the landing page after clicking your ad? Or did they call from the phone number listed in your ad rather than clicking through to your landing page?
After a few weeks of tracking your customer responses, you should know which keywords and sources yield calls, which make sales, and which aren’t performing well enough to justify the cost.
You can stop certain keywords, cancel active bids to return those funds to your account, and reinvest in higher-performing keywords. You may want to consider whether to continue bidding on common, high-competition keywords. If your long-tail or less common keywords are performing well, you may be able to omit some common roofing keywords from your cost per click bid.
Don't Do It Yourself. Call the Roofing Marketing Pros for Roofing PPC Services!
Busy roofing contractors often don’t have time to manage their own Google Ad campaigns. The reporting, bidding, and payment systems can be complex to learn as a business owner. If you want to use dynamic text replacement, are you going to learn how to insert the code into your landing pages yourself?
The answer likely is “no,” and as a roofing contractor, you would probably rather manage work orders, crew dispatch, and invoicing than manage your roofing PPC ads on Google.
At Roofing Marketing Pros, we focus on proven marketing strategies in Google Ads for roofers. We target a specific marketing focus to put roofing companies in front of high-quality leads who need to get their roof repaired or replaced.
Let us manage your ad campaigns with our roofing PPC services. Each of our service packages offers our customers several essential features, including:
- Exclusive Lead Generation
- Lead Nurturing
- Custom Landing Page Design
- Inbound/Outbound Call Center Management
- Optimization for Google, Facebook, and YouTube
- Lead to Sales Funneling
We offer a full suite of services to manage your digital marketing strategy. Let us build your website and develop rich content for your site that helps your roofing company’s site reach the top of Google’s search results organically. We can integrate your organic content strategy with search engine optimization (SEO) to help you show up in Google’s first page results.
Contact us today at Roofing Marketing Pros to manage your Google AdWords for roofing contractors. Call us at 305-676-7359 or contact us online to inquire about our roofing PPC services for your roofing business.
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