We have been doing SEO for about 10 years and know what it takes to bring results for your business. Some of the things you’ll learn about in this guide includes:

• How to rank top in Google Maps and organic search results.
• How to dominate your market and be ahead of competitions.
• How to generate more leads and website traffic

How Long Does SEO Take For Good Results To Show?

SEO doesn’t produce overnight results. It takes a little time (about 3 months) for most your business to start seeing the results depending on your site’s starting point and the competition you are up against. The reason for this long time frame is that search engines need to understand the changes that your site is undergoing, and that takes time.

SEO campaigns usually yield better results, often we find, some business owners can be too impatient to wait, not wanting to wait three months or more. This is the reason we use roofing SEO as only a part of our online marketing strategy. Methods like PPC can produce instant results and make up the other part of our online marketing strategy.

How To Measure Your SEO Campaign’s Success.

Besides knowing how to do search engine optimization, you must measure the progress of your SEO campaign as well. We employ Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to determine the efficiency of the work done. Your business KPIs should be in tune with your business budgets, goals, and timeline of expectations. The primary purpose of these KPIs is to know what works and what doesn’t for your business so you can make necessary adjustments.

Below is a list of things we report and measure on:

• Organic Search Ranking – Are the rankings for your keywords changing overtime or not?
• Organic traffic – the number of traffic generated from users that click on your sites from SERPs.
• New Leads – the number of people contacting you through phones or contact form requesting more information.
•  Time on site/ Bounce Rate – Are your visitors spending time on your website, or are they leaving immediately they land on your site. It is an important metric to note.

Don’t Be Invisible

With our SEO expert campaigns, your small business can become an authority online in your area. That’s our goal. That’s our work, and that’s the result we strive to provide!

How Search Engine Results Work

For this example we are going to use a roofing company. We want to write content with keywords like “your city roofing company,” “roofing contractor your city,” “roof replacement,” and so on.

For best results, we will brainstorm the keywords your customers are using to find you with based on your services and then we use some specialized SEO tools to help us validate those keywords will help generate traffic for your website.

Before continuing, you should understand the results you get when you use googles search engine.

Three sections of listings are displayed when you search Google, these includes:

1. Paid Google Ads Listings – These generally pop up at the top of a Google search result with the word “ad” at the top left of each listing. Here you can pay Google to display ads for your roofing business based on keywords you provide. And you only get to pay when a visitor clicks on your listing. Hence it is called pay per click.
2. Google Map Listings: This is the biggest lead generator as your business will rank in the 3 pack of Google maps that usually shows up in results for local searches. For instance, if a visitor types “roofer in Minneapolis,” three businesses that Google considers important enough to fit into that description pops up. Listings in these positions get unlimited traffic. You cannot pay for placement ads on Google Maps. It has to be earned. We, however, know how to sneak in an ad into those spots (that’s a topic for another day).  
3. Organic Search Listings: This section is displayed just below the map listing for local searches. These are not paid ads. You would have to work your way up Google listings to appear here to generate traffic for your site. This is where SEO comes in.

To get the best results, we emphasize focusing on showing up in Google Maps. For most of our clients they get roughly 60% of their organic traffic from it. Most customers are savvy and will skip the paid listings for the Google Maps listing.

Choosing Your Keywords For Your Business (Again we are going to use a roofing company as an example.)

The first step to choosing your keywords is to find out what people are searching for on the internet relating to what you do – the service that they look for information on more.

Some obvious keywords you would use include:

• “Your city” roofing contractors
• “Your city” roofing
• “Your city” roofing companies

The not-so-obvious keywords include:

• Metal roof installation.
• Roof replacement service.
• Commercial roofing contractor.
• Emergency roof repair
• Asphalt shingle roofing companies

Some other keywords that reflect services you may want to show up for:

• Gutter installation
• Storm damage restoration contractor
• Window replacement
• Siding contractor
• Insulation contractor

The best way to get the most out of these keywords is to map out the top 20 keywords people type when searching for your services. And then categorize them into services and sub-services.

The 2 Aspects of search Engine Optimization

For you to rank top in those organic and map listings, your website must be strategically and efficiently optimized. To accomplish this, you would have to carry out on-page and off-page SEO.

• On-Page SEO: You cannot rank in Google maps listings without on-page optimization. Google needs to understand the type of service you offer and where the service is being provided. You achieved this by creating pages of content optimized for strategic keywords and cities where you do business.
• Off-Page SEO: Google needs to know that your site is trustworthy, powerful, and authoritative, and that’s what off-page SEO accomplishes. To do this, you need to get high-quality links from other websites linking back to you (your business website, that is). Your business also has to be listed on major directories as well as local sites. If this is accomplished, Google will rank you higher.

Note: Off-Page SEO isn’t the most important for Google ranking, contrary to what most SEO experts believe. While this can be true for organic listings, it is not for Google map search.

On-Page SEO is much more critical for local SEO, i.e., local searches which appear in Google map listings.

We found out that what works for a successful local roofing business is 70% on-page and 30% off-page.

How To Optimize On-Site SEO For Your Roofing Business

You must optimize every page on your website for the cities and services you are targeting. Map these search terms to specific pages. For example,

Keyword > mapped to which page

Roofers your city > home page

Roofing companies > your city           home page

Metal roofing > metal roofing page

Roof repair > roof repair page

Roof replacement > roof replacement page

If keywords represent the same service, they should all be on the same page. For example, keywords such as “roofing” and “roofing contractor” can be mapped to your homepage.

After mapping out all the pages, find ways to optimize and write valuable content on your site. Below are some steps to guide you.

Step 1: Build Out Your Pages Of Content On Your Website.

To dominate your competition and become an authority for your small business, you’d have to do more than create just a Home page, contact us page, service page, or about page on your website. 

Most of the websites we have built over time have had dozens of pages with quality information in them.

To use roofers as an example again. Most roofing contractors also offer other roofing-related services such as siding, insulations, gutters, and so on. Google will get to notice your site if you create different pages for the various services you offer and the city where it is provided.

Below is an example of a contractor’s site that offers different services:

• Homepage –About us – Services – Contact Us – Reviews – Insurance Claims.
• Main Service Page – Roofing (homepage), roof replacement/ repairs, metal roofing, asphalt roofing, residential roofing, commercial roofing, EPDM rubber roofs, TPO roofing, Built-Up Roofing.
• Secondary Service Page – Siding, vinyl siding, LP SmartSide, metal siding, James Hardie siding.
• Secondary Service Page – Gutters, seamless gutters, copper gutters, gutter guards.
• Secondary Service Page –Damage Restoration, fire damage restoration, water damage restoration, Storm damage restoration.
• Secondary Service Page – insulation.

Step 2 – Optimize Each Page for Proper Search Engine Optimization

Once the content has been built for each service page, On-Page SEO work is ready to be conducted. It is a crucial part of your roofing business success story.

Some critical items you need to take care of for on-page SEO includes:

• Title tags, which should be made up of your keywords and city. Your brand name should be in your title tag on your homepage.
• Meta description is a description of what your page is about. Use good copy and numbers to get clicks from search results.
• H1 Header tag tells what your service page is all about.
• Your subpages URLs shouldn’t look spammy but should contain your primary keywords.
• You should embed YouTube videos that relate to your services.
• You should also include
•  internal links connecting pages.
• Content should be sub-divided into H2 and H3 to make it easy for visitors to read and search engines to understand.

Optimizing Title Tags

Metal tags are essential parts of every page, and it needs to be optimized for the keywords you want to rank for. It describes to Google what the page is about, and is what visitors see before clicking on your site. Examples of an optimized title tag for a roofing company in Chicago would be:

Emergency Roof Repair Service Chicago, IL | Call 773-333-333 Now!

This title tag includes in it the main keywords and the city as well as a call to action to enable people to call immediately. This trick works all the time.

Optimizing Meta Descriptions

Meta descriptions come up directly under the title tag in Google search results. It often gets ignored by most website owners, so Google fills in whatever they feel like in that space.

Meta descriptions aren’t direct ranking factors and don’t pass on any message to Google about your page, but it would help visitors learn about your web page. If properly optimized, your click-through rate would increase. There’s a good example shown below.

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H1 Tags

This is the headline on a page. There should be only one per page.

The idea behind it is to just repeat the main keywords in the form of a sentence, such as “Chicago’s #1 Rated Roofing Company”.

H2-H3 Tags

No one is excited about reading a wall of text on a page, and so each page’s content should be divided into subheaders. This enables users to skim through your page to find what they want with ease. It also allows you to incorporate other synonym keywords in headers to help with on-page SEO. So long it is reasonable, you can have multiple H2 and H3 tags on one page.

Examples include, “Read our 5 Star Reviews”, “We Offer an Industry Leading 50 year Roof Warranty”, and so on.

Keyword in URL of Page

Your keywords should be in your URL if it is a service page. To rank up for roof repair, your URL should be either website.com/services/roof-repair or website.com/roof-repair/. This is greatly dependent, however, on how your page is structured.

Images and Videos

Relevant images (preferably, images from previous jobs you have done) should be included in your page’s content. The alt tag describes your images to search engines. Ensure you’re not spammy with your keywords when you include them in it. Yes, you should include your keywords.

Videos from services should also be uploaded on YouTube and embed on your page. Rakings increase most times by having related videos inserted on pages since Google owns YouTube.

Quality and Well Written Content is Key

Your content needs to be remarkable and well written if you want it to convince readers on your page. Your visitor needs to be convinced of why you are the best option for the job.

If you must rank for roof repairs in your locality, then you have to create a specific page for it on your website with the inclusion of images, proper headings, title tags, and so much more.

Location pages

Some business lack storefronts because they are service area businesses that go to their customers. If you want a chance to rank in google search results outside of your business location’s city, you should create additional pages such as “location pages” or “city pages.”

Just be sure you don’t repeat content on any of your pages. Changing the name of the city in your pages while repeating the content will harm your efforts. Google is smart enough to know.

SEO for Small Businesses: The Best Way to Make Your Business Visible Online

A SEO campaign that is expertly executed generates lots of traffic and adds to the growth of your business from the internet. It helps make your brand an authority in the roofing business. It increases the number of customers that contact you.

SEO campaigns do take some time to produce results, but the wait is worth your while. At Pegas Digital, our team of expert SEOs don’t just work on your campaigns, but they know how to handle your competitors. We know the roofing business like we know the back of our palms.

You get a free Audit and Strategy Session when you contact us. We also provide you with a blueprint of how our system would make your brand rank at the top of Google for your local area.