Brad Strawbridge grew Capital City Roofing from zero to $3 million in his first year. Now he’s targeting $10 million. His Google Business Profile has 4.9 stars with nearly 150 reviews. His website scores a 47 on Google PageSpeed and ranks on almost nothing.
I sat down with Brad and his COO Edward to do a live audit. Here’s what we found and how to fix it.
The GBP is strong but the website carries nothing
Capital City Roofing’s Google Business Profile is doing the heavy lifting. If you killed the website tomorrow, the GBP would function at 95% of where it is now. That tells you how weak the website is relative to the profile.
The site has a domain rating of 32.
Most of the 181 backlinks carry no real power.
The Better Business Bureau link is solid, and a few industry memberships help, but everything else is noise.
None of the pages rank on anything meaningful.
Location service pages are the core problem
The site has almost no location service pages.
The ones that exist have no authorship, no experience, no EEAT signals.
Google’s quality rater guidelines are clear on this. Every page needs to show who wrote it, why they’re qualified, and proof they’ve actually done the work.
Even if Brad built out all the missing pages for Alpharetta, Sandy Springs, Nashville, and every other service area, they still wouldn’t rank without trust flowing into them. The pages need real content: crew photos from job sites, reviews from homeowners in those cities, examples of actual roofing work done in those neighborhoods.
I know people all over Atlanta. Personal injury attorneys like Ali Awad and Darryl Isaacs.
I’ve been on CNN multiple times to debate Zuckerberg. There’s a lot of real Atlanta connections that can generate legitimate links for Capital City Roofing.
The fix is to repurpose what’s already strong. Take the GBP reviews, the job site photos, the crew videos, and push all of that into the location service pages. That’s not AI-generated content. That’s real experience from real jobs.
Site speed is killing everything
Google gave Capital City Roofing a mobile PageSpeed score of 47.
Desktop scored 44, which is unusual since desktop normally scores higher.
The site takes nine seconds to fully load. 93 get requests. Almost 16 megabytes of payload. Broken scripts in the code.
I would bet that just fixing the site speed would make a significant impact on search rankings. If someone types “Alpharetta roof replacement” and clicks on your result, but the page takes nine seconds to load, they click back and go to the next roofer. That sends a penalty signal to Google. No amount of content or links overcomes a slow site.
Online quote tools also help with SEO signals. Google can see real consumers coming in, answering questions about their home, and spending time on the site.
Tommy Melo and Lance are both investing in HVAC Quote, an instant quote tool we’ve put on over a hundred HVAC companies in the last hundred days.
The same principle applies to roofing. When real people in real cities engage with your site, Google notices.
Building links through real relationships
Brad knows people in the roofing industry. He’s going to IRE in Vegas. He’s a member of the Roofing Technology Think Tank.
He’s a brand ambassador for Roof R. He knows Atlanta businesses, restaurants, nonprofits, little league organizations.
Every one of those connections is a potential link. Not bought links. Not reciprocal link schemes. Real relationships documented through short Zoom calls, podcast interviews, or one-minute videos at conferences. Those create legitimate EEAT signals that Google values.
The formula is simple: Roofing plus Atlanta. Links from Atlanta businesses and organizations establish Capital City Roofing as a real Atlanta company. Links from roofing industry people establish Brad as a real roofer. Both signals flow to the site and down to the location service pages.
AI agents doing the work live
During the audit, I demonstrated how AI agents can write and publish articles in real time. I spoke to the agent, gave it context from our conversation, and told it to write an article about Brad on dennisyu.com.
It logged into WordPress, wrote the article, and linked to Capital City Roofing, Brad’s personal brand site, and his nonprofit Feeding the Future.
The agent got 70-80% of the way there. A human still needs to review and refine. That’s the last mile problem. But the key insight is this: I didn’t type anything. I spoke to it. When you speak to AI, you naturally give better context. And better context produces better output.
This isn’t ghostwritten content. It’s repurposed from a real conversation between real people about a real business. There’s a difference between generating content and repurposing content. We repurpose. I told the agent to pretend it’s me, Dan Leibrandt, and Darren Shaw, and just go implement based on the expertise.
And you can even have AI agents assist you with your weekly marketing tasks, which we teach in our program.
The chef matters more than the knife
Brad ran his own audit through ChatGPT before our call. It found some things I didn’t, and I found things it didn’t. But the quality of the output depends entirely on the quality of the input. A chef is more important than the knife. And the ingredients are more important than the chef.
Give AI high-quality raw ingredients, real reviews, real job site photos, real podcast conversations, and it produces high-quality output. Feed it nothing and you get AI-generated filler that Google can spot and penalize.
Brad is a dabbler. He claimed his Google Knowledge Panel from watching my YouTube channel. He experiments with AI tools. He’s not afraid of technology. That’s exactly the kind of person who wins, because the tool doesn’t matter as much as the person using it.
Personal brand and knowledge panel
Brad has two knowledge panels, one tied to his Capital City Roofing email and one to his personal email. They need to be merged.
His LinkedIn is currently ranking number one on his name, which means his personal brand site isn’t strong enough to be the hub.
The fix: connect everything back to bradstrawbridge.com. Every podcast, every social profile, every conference appearance should link to the personal brand site. YouTube and Twitter carry the most weight for personal brand sites. Then that hub reinforces the knowledge panel and establishes Brad as the entity Google associates with roofing and AI innovation.
Brad built his personal site only a month or two ago, so the lack of strength is expected. But the strategy is the same as the business: repurpose real content, build real links, and let the signals compound over time.
Next steps
My buddy Anthony Hilb of Anthony’s Lawn Care in Bloomington, Indiana is doing a similar model to what Brad is building. His young adults start in the home office, grow up, and become GMs in new cities. Same principle: find loyal people, train them on the SOPs, and let compound interest do the rest.
That’s exactly what our AI Apprentice Program is designed for. A young adult dedicates five to six hours a week, follows the SOPs, submits a weekly MAA to track progress, and makes steady improvements. The SOP is the same whether it’s a roofing company, HVAC, landscaping, or any local service business. Fix the location service pages. Speed up the site. Repurpose GBP content. Build real links through real relationships. Let the compound interest of consistent execution do the rest.
This analysis applies the SEO Audit framework to a real roofing company — assessing Digital Plumbing health, content architecture, and authority signals. The recommended next steps include building a Content Factory for ongoing production and running Dollar a Day campaigns to amplify the best-performing content across the SEO Tree.
Dennis Yu
Dennis Yu is the CEO of Local Service Spotlight, a platform that amplifies the reputations of contractors and local service businesses using the Content Factory process. He is a former search engine engineer who has spent a billion dollars on Google and Facebook ads for Nike, Quiznos, Ashley Furniture, Red Bull, State Farm, and other brands.
Dennis has achieved 25% of his goal of creating a million digital marketing jobs by partnering with universities, professional organizations, and agencies. Through Local Service Spotlight, he teaches the Dollar a Day strategy and Content Factory training to help local service businesses enhance their existing local reputation and make the phone ring.
Dennis coaches young adult agency owners serving plumbers, AC technicians, landscapers, roofers, electricians, and believes there should be a standard in measuring local marketing efforts, much like doctors and plumbers must be certified.