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Sylas Smith runs Guarantee Roofing and Fencing, a roofing and fencing company based in Terre Haute, Indiana. Sylas recently reached out to us for help with digital marketing and getting more calls in from his local service area.
Guarantee Roofing has a very long history in Terre Haute, serving clients for over 101 years in Western Indiana. They’re perhaps one of the oldest local service businesses we’ve had the pleasure of working with in terms of local reputation.
But with such a rich history, they should be getting so many more calls than they’re currently getting at the moment.
One of the reasons Guarantee Roofing reached out to us was because their Google PPC and Facebook Ads campaigns have been falling short. After viewing their campaigns, they were spending upwards of $5,000 a month with very little to show for it.
In addition to getting more qualified leads in the short-term, they also want to expand their online presence with SEO and by consolidating their many services under a single domain.
In this article, we’ll give a written audit of the current state of digital marketing for Guarantee Roofing’s digital marketing, SEO, and website more broadly. Thankfully for local service businesses, it’s almost always the same components that make businesses succeed.
What’s Guarantee Roofing’s SEO Like?
Before looking at the SEO of Guarantee Roofing, we have to decide which website we want to prioritize. Recently, a web developer built another website under a different domain name.
Because we want to consolidate and make sure our focus is going to the right domain so as not to compete with ourselves, we’ll be looking at guaranteefencing.co.
Starting with our backlinks profile, we have 267 backlinks already added to our main site. Yet despite this, we only have a DR of 2 and are ranking on only 115 keywords.
The reason why is because our links are not relevant to the business itself.
In between the few paid backlinks (which is never a good idea to do), our backlink profile is mainly composed of our other domain linking to us. This means that even though we have an excellent local reputation, other local businesses or authoritative websites aren’t sharing our own site.
What we want to do here is have other local service businesses in Indiana like Bloomington Landscaping and Star Heating & Cooling share links to us on their website or in blog posts.
The local signal from these businesses within 50 miles means that they can increase their SEO, since Google is looking for these markers. The same would apply for other roofing or fencing companies around the country but outside of Indiana, so as not to compete with us. This is another reason for consolidating under a single domain – so that we don’t compete with ourselves by accident.
Another example of relevant backlinks would be from articles like this one, from authoritative websites like BlitzMetrics. As long as it’s done in a relevant way, which it is since we’re reviewing their business online.
These are the local and authoritative signals Google is looking for, and it’s a massive difference between spending $200 to buy crappy links from websites.
For our keywords, we’re listed in position 1 for our name and are getting a substantial amount of organic traffic as a result.
This was the 2nd important reason why we should prioritize this domain over the others, since that’s where all of our traffic is going anyway. I particularly like how we’re ranked in the first position on variations of our name, as well as towards the top of the first page for “terre haute roofing”.
Over time with a more fleshed out website and greater domain authority, we would expect to get into the first position for these terms and capture even more organic traffic.
The fundamentals are already in place with such high organic traffic. Meaning that expanding these terms with relevant links wouldn’t be too hard to do since we already have proof we do a great job in our local service area.
We also have great news from our GMB (Google Business Profile).
Businesses that have almost 200 reviews and above a 4.7 ranking are wonderful to work with, since the reputation is already established. There’s also dozens of images on our GMB which have proof of contractors in the field.
The most important thing with ranking on GMBs outside of the total number of reviews, is the number of recent positive reviews. This makes sense because Google wants to make sure that the business is still operational and still providing great work in the local service area.
For example, imagine you had a 5 star restaurant which was amazing with hundreds of positive reviews. Then you decided to sell it to someone who did a poor job and reduced the customer experience and food quality… You’d trust the recent reviews more than the total in this case, no?
The same applies here.
Even though we’ve had a positive review yesterday at the time of writing, the reviews in general are spaced out. With the one before coming in 3 weeks ago. Ideally, we’d want at least 1-2 positive reviews a week to show Google we’re still doing a great job in Terre Haute.
Getting more consistent positive reviews and continuing to upload images and videos of contractors in the field will increase our presence massively. The good news as we mentioned earlier, is that the components for this already exist through Guarantee Roofing’s stellar reputation in their local service area.
Using our map tool LocalFalcon, we can see where our GMB is ranked for the term “roofing contractor” within 20 miles of our location.
The good news is that we’re ranking between 1-2 in downtown Terre Haute for the keyword “roofing contractor”, but the bad news is that ranking starts to dissipate as we go further out, especially towards the north of our location.
This isn’t a terrible thing (we’ve seen businesses with a higher review count do much worse), but we can certainly improve our presence north of our location by Twelve Points and Staunton. One of the ways we’ll do that is by adding local service pages.
What can be improved on Guarantee Roofing’s website?
Before we get into the content of the site, we need to add a favicon for our website. Right now when you enter “guarantee roofing” the site comes up first, but there’s no logo or indication that the website is real.
For the homepage, we always want to make sure it’s super obvious where we serve and what we do. I like how we have “Wabash Valley”, but mentioning Terre Haute in here would be excellent as well.
There’s no need to start from scratch as the website itself is decent and has a bunch of the pages we recommend for local service businesses. Guarantee Roofing has local service pages, a solid about us page, and a page on roof services they offer.
The biggest piece of the puzzle that the website is missing is E-E-A-T content. E-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authority, and trust. The more we can demonstrate we do an excellent job in our local service area, the more Google will reward us and the higher we will rank.
On the homepage alone, we should have many more images of work being completed instead of a single GIF video showing a woman selecting roof color.
There should also be examples of PAA questions being answered on the site. PAA (People Also Ask) are the questions which appear on Google for related topics.
For example, if you were to type into Google and say “roofing companies”, you’d also see related questions.
Answers to these questions can be recorded in one minute videos and repurposed to live on the website. To find these questions, we can use ChatGPT.
Answering questions like “How often should a roof be replaced?” fulfills the expertise in E-E-A-T as just one example.
For our local service pages, I like how we already have 5, but we should aim for at-least 8 to increase our rankings.
On these pages, we should have real images and videos taken by contractors in the field in these locations. In other words, instead of copying the same page 5 different times, we have unique content for each of these pages, which fulfills the trust in E-E-A-T.
For the website in general, we should be linking and connecting our GMB so we can maximize our reach. Since our GMB is already contributing to most of our new customers at the moment, anything we can do to amplify it should be done.
In general – all we’re doing on the website is to maximize the proof that we do a good job in our local service area. The more we differentiate ourselves from companies using stock art, the better. That’s because all Google is looking for is abundant evidence of our success in Terre Haute.
What can we do to get qualified calls now?
SEO is a long term game. The earlier we get started on it the better, but in the short-term we should be focusing on digital marketing. The easiest levers to pull would be LSA (local service ads) and Google PPC.
Sylas mentioned before how LSA was great for Guarantee Roofing since the leads are generally qualified. So we should be doing everything we can to maximize them.
So far this month we’ve only spent $89.66 for 5 leads in total. We should aim to continue to increase this over time.
The easiest way to get our LSA spending more would be by adding more images and increasing our weekly budget to more than $170, which it’s currently set to from the time of writing.
The reason for this is the same as adding more images and videos to our website – we’ll let Google know that we continue to do a great job in Terre Haute and deserve as many impressions as we can.
And since we’re already getting quality leads under $20, increasing our ad budget to even $500/week at the least should have a powerful impact over time.
For PPC the issue is more tracking for qualified calls.
The good news is that we already have enough data where we simply need to tweak what’s already working and confirm the metrics here, since a lead might not necessarily be qualified.
Luckily, we have a team member whose sole job is to audit PPC campaigns and make improvements so we can level up our performance. In the coming week’s we’d expect the number of qualified leads to improve in our local service area.
What’s the future look like for Guarantee Roofing?
The great news from working with established local service businesses like Guarantee Roofing is that we’re not starting from scratch. They’ve built up a treasure trove of quality reviews, images, and videos of contractors in the field.
They also have a built-in reputation in Terre Haute for their outstanding work.
Our job is to help repurpose these existing trust signals in a way which increases our quality call volume over time. The starting blocks to all of this is quality content from jobs, which is more than half the battle.
We’d expect Guarantee Roofing to see a large increase in SEO power and a steady rise of qualified calls over the next few weeks, and we’re so excited to watch them grow!