Emergency, right now
Leak, storm damage, missing shingles. These searches happen on a phone, often outside business hours, and the first company that answers usually wins. Ranking is worth little if nobody picks up.
Trades
Roofing marketing built around the job, not the click
A roof repair might be a few hundred dollars and a full replacement tens of thousands, and both arrive through searches that look almost identical. Most contractor sites run one campaign and one page for both. That is why roofing leads come in at a cost per lead that looks fine and a cost per profitable job that does not.
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Marketing does not behave the same way here.
Roofing demand is not steady. It is event-driven. A storm produces a spike in emergency searches that lasts days, and a business set up only for planned replacement work misses it entirely.
At the same time the job value range is enormous. A repair might be a few hundred dollars and a full replacement tens of thousands, and both arrive through search terms that look superficially similar. Add insurance-funded work, where the buying process involves an adjuster and a timeline the homeowner does not control, and there are three quite different customers being served by one website and usually one Google Ads campaign.
That is why so many roofing accounts produce plenty of enquiries at a cost per lead that looks fine and a cost per profitable job that does not. The fix is structural: separate pages, separate campaigns, separate budgets, and a follow-up sequence that survives the weeks a replacement quote or an insurance claim takes to decide.
How your customers actually search.
Planned replacement, researched over weeks
Cost, material comparison, lifespan, financing. These people search repeatedly over a long period and read a great deal before they call. Content matters here in a way it does not for emergency work.
Insurance claim, driven by an event
Searches about claims, adjusters and what is covered. The intent is high but the timeline belongs to the insurer, and the follow-up has to survive weeks of waiting.
How an enquiry becomes a customer.
Different intents take different routes. Serving all of them with one page is the most common structural mistake in this industry.
- Emergency: search, click, call within minutes. Phone answering is the conversion mechanism, not the form.
- Replacement: several visits over weeks, an inspection booking, then a quote that needs chasing.
- Insurance: enquiry, then a long gap while the claim moves, then a decision that depends entirely on whether you stayed in touch.
- One page covering repair, replacement and insurance work, so it ranks well for nothing and converts badly for all three.
- Service area pages built by swapping a town name, which is the doorway pattern Google names in its spam policies and which regularly gets these sites filtered.
- No content at all on cost, which is the single most searched question in the category and the one most contractors refuse to answer publicly.
- A Google Business Profile with the wrong primary category, which caps map visibility regardless of how good the website is.
- Split emergency and replacement into separate campaigns with separate budgets, because their value, urgency and landing page needs have nothing in common.
- Negative keywords against DIY, materials-only, supply, careers and training searches, which consume real budget in the roofing accounts opened here.
- Ad scheduling and a call button on the ads for emergency intent, where a form is the wrong conversion mechanism entirely.
- Bid separately on insurance and storm terms, which spike sharply and are worth being present for even at a higher cost per click.
- Quote follow-up, because a roofing quote is expensive to produce and is routinely sent once into silence.
- Insurance claim nurture across the weeks while the claim moves, which is where most of that work is quietly lost.
- Annual inspection reminders to past customers, which produce repair work at close to zero cost.
What the report should lead with.
- Booked jobs, split by repair and replacement
- Average job value from marketing enquiries
- Cost per booked job, not cost per lead
- Quote to win rate and time to first response
- Missed call rate during and outside business hours
Proof
The closest accounts we have published.
Not accounts in this trade. Two service businesses that sell through enquiries and calls, which is the same way this trade sells.
Google Ads, lead generationMedia buying
2.41Kconversions
- £19.21cost per conversion
- £0.57average cost per click
- £46.3Kspend managed
Meta, lead generationMedia buying
£2.68cost per lead
- 2,631leads delivered
- £0.77best ad set cost per lead
- 205Kpeople reached
Proof
Numbers from comparable accounts.
Google Ads
6.74x
return on ad spend
£31.4K conversion value from £4.66K spend, at £15.87 per conversion.
Google Ads
2,410
conversions at £19.21 each
£46.3K spend at a £0.57 average cost per click.
Real accounts, anonymised by client agreement. Currency as recorded in the account. Movement varies by market, budget and starting position.
On camera
Four clients on camera, in their own words.
Four clients, four industries, one thing in common: the number moved and they said so on camera.
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It is the best long-term investment we have made in the company, full stop.
Ahmed · Business owner · SEO
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The cost per lead from organic is a fraction of what we pay on ads, and that math gets better every month.
Sandra · Founder · SEO
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People can book a table without calling during the dinner rush. My host actually thanked me.
Aaliyah · Restaurant owner · Website
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These tech geeks know the Facebook analytics and the data and the pixels and all that stuff that makes a musician’s head explode.
David · The Wankers · Social ads
Read next, if you run a business like this.
Local Services Ads vs Google Ads: which one is cheaper for a Texas home service business?
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Read the postThe 30 places your enquiries are leaking
The 30 things we check when a page gets traffic and produces nothing: intent match, the next step, the form, proof and quiet costs, each with a pass test.
Read the post
Your website is not ranking. Here is how to find out why.
Work through the causes in order, from indexation to intent mismatch. Each one you can check yourself, most in under ten minutes.
Read the postQuestions
Questions from this industry.
01 We get roofing leads but they are all small repairs. Can that change?
Usually, yes. It generally means one campaign is serving both repair and replacement intent, and the broader keywords are matching the cheaper searches. Separating them and adding negatives lowers the lead count and raises the average job value, which normally raises profit even as the lead number falls.
02 Should a roofing company publish its prices?
A range with the variables explained works better than either silence or a single number. Cost is the most searched question in the category. Refusing to address it sends the researcher to a competitor who did, and a range with honest caveats qualifies people before they take up your time.
03 Is it worth building a page for every town we serve?
Only where there is genuinely something local to say: permit rules, common roof types, storm history, work you have done there. A page whose only difference is the town name is a doorway page, and it puts the whole site at risk rather than only that page.
04 How much do missed calls cost a roofing business?
On emergency work, most of it. That intent does not wait and does not leave a voicemail. Before spending anything on marketing, measure your missed call rate, because it is usually the cheapest thing on this page to fix.
05 How long does roofing SEO take to produce jobs?
Profile and page fixes can change map visibility inside the first month. Replacement rankings take a quarter to settle, and the work has to be done before storm season to pay during it. Paid search moves inside the first month, which is why the two run together on most roofing accounts.