12 Steps to Rank Your Roofing Business Higher on Google Maps
Put your roofing business on the map, get discovered by clients, outrank your competitors, and secure more clients- all for free. Follow these top 10 ways to improve your visibility on Google Maps.
Let’s imagine…
You are looking for a roofing contractor in your area, and you need them for a leaking roof.
Where do YOU begin your search?
If you answered Google Maps, you are not alone.
These days, many people are turning to Google Maps to discover local service businesses like roofing, heating & air, or plumbing and make more informed purchasing decisions.
So how can your local roofing company rank higher in the place prospects are increasingly searching to book your roofing services?
Your Google Maps listing is an important roofing marketing tool for your company.
It can assist you in getting discovered by new clients, generate more business and stand out above the competitors for FREE. But these advantages are only achievable if your listing has great visibility, and just because your roofing company is listed in a specific service area does not imply that Google will instantly rank it higher for organic searches in that area.
In fact, proximity is only one of the numerous factors that Google Maps uses when ranking your business listing. In this article, we are going to discuss 10 strategies/tactics to get your roofing business Google Maps listing to rank higher in organic results and reap all the advantages.
We are going to teach you on:
- How to claim, verify and optimize your Google Maps listing if you have not already done so,
- How to offer supplemental information that increases your rank and boosts your rank.
- Additional action steps you can do on your roofing website to further boost the rank of your Google Maps listing.
Without further ado, let us dive in!
Why is Ranking Higher on Google Maps Crucial for Your Roofing Business?
These days, Google is the go-to for local searches, and with more than 50% of all searchers having a local intent, your roofing company needs to appear in Google Maps searches.
To outrank other roofers in such a competitive environment, you can have your listing through the Google Business Profile (formerly known as Google My Business).
This will ensure that when prospects look for “roofing companies near me,” they see only the relevant details about the roofers, including availability and address, amongst others.
Optimizing your Google Business Profile will give you a competitive edge over other roofing companies and help you close more sales. Many advantages come along with ranking your roofing business higher on Google Maps.
Ranking Higher On Google Maps Increases Your Visibility Online
Research shows that Google Maps is the most preferred navigation app for more than 60% of internet users. And with users rarely searching past the first few results when searching for a place to go, it is important to ensure that your Google Maps listing is claimed, verified, and optimized to appear for relevant organic searches.
Google Maps listings provide an effective way to get your roofing business in front of ‘wallet out prospects’ or clients. The initial things that appear are Google Ads advertisements and local 3-pack, followed by organic results for the searched roofing service or product.
When you create a roofing Google Business Profile, it will improve your company’s visibility online.
You stand a great chance of obtaining more roofing leads by ranking higher on the maps.
Your roofing business will be perceived as an expert in the field because it is ‘preferred by Google. This will incline prospects searching for new roofs are likely to come across your website or business.
Listing Your Roofing Company on Google Maps Helps You Share Crucial Information with Your Prospects
Your roofing Google Maps listing is crucial for remaining in touch with your customers and updating them on the latest news.
You can share essential information about your roofing company, such as contact details, address, or working hours, to help potential clients learn more when they look online! More so, they will be able to call you if there are any concerns or problems around their home remodeling project.
Ranking Higher on Google Maps Will Help Your Roofing Business Earn Trust from Customers
It is a challenging job being the roofer of choice for customers, and you should win them and establish sufficient trust before they choose to work with your roofing company, which can be hard when there are so many other roofers out there.
From the time a prospect first contacts your business, you should earn that trust and prove to them that their roofing needs are priority enough for you to take care of.
Outranking the Competition
Your roofing Google Maps listing gives you a chance to stand out from other roofers in the industry. It offers a brief description that will help prospects identify what roofing services you provide, which may be vital for them if they have been searching all over the internet.
The last reason why you need to rank higher on Google Maps is that it will improve the quality of your listing and include several ways for clients to engage with your roofing business. With 86% of clients utilizing Google Maps to search for a local service business like plumbing or roofing, this opens a lot of opportunities to increase your engagement.
A Google Maps Listing for roofers has multiple advantages worth noting. Don’t let this chance slip away, so ensure it is correctly set up before another person captures it.
How to Get Your Roofing Business Listing Rank Higher on Google Maps
So how do you get your roofing company to show up higher in Google Maps?
Just like there are off-page and on-page optimizations for local roofing SEO, there are off-listing and on-listing factors for Google Maps.
But first, you need to have your roofing business listed on Google Maps and claim your listing, which we will be discussing below.
1. Add Your Roofing Business to Google Maps
Of course, you can’t perform a successful roofing Google Maps marketing or rank higher if you don’t have an existing Google Maps listing somewhere. If you have an existing listing already, you can skip this part.
However, if you don’t have a listing, follow the crucial steps below to add your roofing company to Google Maps:
- Head over to Google.com/maps or go to the Google Maps app on your phone and look for your roofing business name.
- If your business shows up in the drop-down menu with a location alongside it, then your company is already listed. Head over to the next section.
- However, if your roofing company doesn’t appear, you will notice an option in the drop-down menu to add a missing place.
After you click on that, a prompt will come up asking you to input your location, category, and name.
Anyone in the world can add a roofing business to Google Maps. So, even if you haven’t claimed your business, we highly recommend that you check to make sure that your company listing doesn’t already exist.
Don’t fret because the person who adds your roofing company to Google Maps doesn’t control the listing. Only the person who claims the Google Maps listing by proving ownership of the company has that control, which leads us to our next point.
2. Claim Your Roofing Google Maps Listing
The second step in getting your roofing company to rank higher on Google Maps is to claim your listing. If you want to reach higher positions in your roofing Google Maps listing, you need to prove to Google that you are the real owner of the business.
When you create the listing, all you will be able to offer is the category, location, and name.
But when you claim your listing, you will be able to provide many more details about your company.
The more details a roofing business listing offers, the higher it will rank on Google Maps.
Plus, you cannot proceed with any other steps in this book if you have not claimed your listing.
Having a free Google Business Profile is a prerequisite to claiming your roofing business on Google Maps.
If you have an existing GBP already, just pull out your Google Maps Business listing, choose the option that says “claim this business” or “Own this roofing business?” and later follow the prompts.
Unclaimed
3. Add Complete Details to Your Roofing Google Map Listings
By now, you have a Google Business Profile and a Google Maps listing attached to it; you are ready and armed to optimize it for higher ranking in local roofing search results.
As we stated earlier on, the more details your listing offers, the higher it will rank in organic search results.
To include more information in your listing, sign in to your Google Business Profile account. (google.com/business)
Here you will come across a dashboard with multiple tabs down the side.
Choose the “info” tab, which includes your category, service area, address, name (where applicable), special hours, website, attributes, description, and phone number.
Here are some strategies for optimizing these Google Business Profile sections to achieve higher rankings on Google Maps:
Use Consistent Name and Address Citations
Google Maps ranks roofing companies it can trust, and one element of your trustworthiness is the consistency of details about your company across the web.
For instance, say you have a business called “North Shore Roofing Company.” Ensure your roofing business name in your Google Business Profile dashboard is precisely that and not a minor variation, like N. Shore Roofing Business or North Shore Roofers ltd.
Also, make sure that your business name is the same (identical) across all your other online properties, such as your roofing website, Facebook profile, Yelp listing, and more. The same applies to your address information (for instance, using “St” vs. “Street”).
Use a Local Phone Number
Google doesn’t pay much attention to toll-free (800 and 877) numbers since these kinds of numbers are regularly utilized for spam.
Use a local phone number together with the area code of your location.
This will assist you in ranking your roofing business higher in Google Maps, and it will also verify for searchers that your roofing business is situated in that area.
Include Your Main and Tracked Number
If you utilize a phone call tracking system, utilize a tracked number for your primary roofing business number and your main number as a secondary number.
This will help you to receive most of your calls coming in through a tracked line so you can understand the efficiency of your listing; however, with the main number available in your listing, Google can later match your number with the other listings and your roofing website.
Keep Your Operating Hours Updated
Google Maps roofing company listing tells browsers if your business is closed, open, closing, or opening soon. (And during the Covid-19 pandemic, whether it is closed temporarily- thus making it a crucial roofing SEO tactic).
Keeping your operational hours properly updated tells Google that you are active and, so, trustworthy, and this will assist you in ranking higher.
This will also prevent clients from driving all the way to your office only to find that it is closed or closing, which can cause them to leave a negative review (which adversely affects your rankings on Google Maps).
Write a Clear Roofing Business Description
The description on your roofing Google Maps listing should offer an overview of your company to assist orient visitors, as well as unique attributes that compel searchers.
You should write your roofing business description in a tone that resonates with your brand to help build a better connection.
Make sure that you include your keywords in the roofing business description, as this will assist your business listing on Google Maps to rank for searches that contain your company name but for searches related to your roofing services and products as well.
Choose the Right Category for Your Roofing Business
When it comes to ranking higher on Google Maps, the category in your roofing business that appears on Google Maps is very crucial.
The primary category is going to be important in ranking your roofing business.
You would want to choose the primary category as the one that accurately describes your roofing business. You can also add secondary business categories as well.
Remember that you cannot add custom categories, but if you start typing your main offering in the box, you will see a drop-down menu of possible categories to select from.
4. Add Photos to Your Google Maps Listing
Adding photos to your Google Maps listing is a great way to show your clients more about your roofing business and show off your roofing services.
Google loves it when you upload quality photos to your map listing.
First, it shows that you are an active listing to rank higher in organic search results.
Second, Google’s photo recognition is progressing, and Google is beginning to show images in the local search engine results.
Thirdly, the roofing SEO rule of thumb is that Google loves what clients love, and clients love photos.
Plus, if you don’t include photos in your map listing, it will display a generic map image like the one below:
So, to enhance your Google Maps ranking, add compelling and high-quality photos to your company listing that catch what it is like to be in your roofing business.
You can do this by heading over to the “photos” tab in your Google Business Profile dashboard and clicking on the blue circle that has a white plus sign. From here, you will be able to drop and drag several videos and or photos at once. Ideally, you should try to add at least one photo daily.
5. Encourage People to Leave Reviews on Google
Google loves what clients love. You should not be surprised that Google Maps gives higher rankings to roofing business listings with stellar reviews on Google.
So, how do I obtain more reviews on Google?
Well, when you create a Google Map listing, this instantly opens your roofing business up to Google reviews.
But that doesn’t imply that you will receive them.
As a roofer, you will need to be proactive in requesting reviews, and you will also be required to respond to them.
Responding promptly to Google reviews encourages more of them and reduces the damage of less-than-stellar reviews. Plus, your responses show other potential clients how attentive you are to clients and how well you resolve problems.
Google reviews can be scary, but unless your roofing service is atrocious, negative reviews tend to be far and few between. Plus, as long as you answer properly, you can reverse and mitigate the damage of a negative review.
6. Consolidate Your Duplicate Google Maps Listing
Whatever you do, you don’t want several roofing businesses listed on Google Business Profile for the same phone number, location, and other details.
Google will discredit businesses with multiple locations or phone numbers listed for one real business.
When this occurs, you are impacting your organic rankings negatively for all these related map listings, as it is confusing to both your customers and Google.
Weed out duplicate roofing Google Maps listings and superfluous details to make sure your one real listing will rank.
7. Regularly Publish Quality Posts to Your Google Maps Listing
Like Facebook, you can create and publish quality content that shows up right on your Google Maps company listing.
Regular posts like this tell Google that you manage your listing proactively, which is a major factor they look at when awarding rankings.
In addition, when clients are on search engines like Google, they have high intent, so via Google posts, you can obtain offers in front of a ready-to-engage target audience.
How to Use Your Roofing Website Rank Higher on Google Maps
Apart from taking action directly from your Roofing Maps listing, there are some optimizations you can perform on your website to rank higher on Google Maps.
8. Make Sure Your Roofing Website is Responsive
The first step is to ensure that your roofing website is responsive, which implies that it operates optimally across any screen size or device.
This is because Google Maps listing has a link to your roofing website, and more than 60% of Google searches take place on mobile devices.
So if your listing directs searchers to a roofing website that needs zooming and pinching, has lots of broken links, or loads at a tortoise pace, your roofing Google Maps listings will be adversely impacted.
9. Optimize Your Web Presence by Using Local Keywords
If you want to rank higher on Google Maps, you should make sure that your online presence, including your external content and roofing website, is optimized for your local target market. Of course, this will assist your roofing website to rank higher in Google’s organic search, but it will also affect how high or low your Google Maps listing ranks.
So make sure that you include location-specific keywords on the major pages of your website, like the about us page, contact us page, blog posts, and even service pages- not just on the title of your pages, but also on the body text, image tags, captions, URLs and headings.
This shows Google that your roofing website is well known or prominent in your local service area, which can make the giant search engine feel more obliged to rank your company higher on Google Maps for that specific area as well.
10. Embed the Google Map on Your Roofing Website
Another way to rank higher on Google Maps is to embed a Google map on your roofing website, which most roofers do on the contact us page.
Adding a Google Map right on your roofing website is a great way to help Google connect your company with the location.
This is another way of telling Google that your company is actually situated where your listing says it is.
Utilize the same address that you have on your Google Maps roofing business listing.
To add a Google Map to your roofing website, look for your business name in Google Maps. Click on “share” in your listing and choose the “Embed a map” tab. Copy and paste the link on your roofing business’s contact us page.
11. Use Local Roofing Business Schema
When it comes to structuring your roofing website content, and particularly business details, Google and Bing prefer standardization- which has led to the invention of schema.
Local Schema helps roofing businesses to wrap code around the content to make it easier for Google to index and crawl your website.
The local roofing business schema covers most of the same company details captured in a Google Business profile, which will be cross-referenced by Google.
The easier it is for Google or Bing to validate your business location, the more likely your roofing business is to rank prominently in Google Maps.
12. Create Local Backlinks
Inbound links or backlinks are regarded as an extension of your NAP strategy, whereby you search for relevant, local third-party websites that link to your roofing website pages.
Backlinks can validate your roofing business from both service and local perspectives. If you maintain listings with links in local business directories, you will want to make sure those listings are in the good categories if category options are provided.
Generally, these links to your roofing website are “follow” links, which implies Google will recognize and follow the source of the link to your website content.
Most online business directories understand the importance of “follow” links and so charge for inclusion, but you should search for opportunities to get links from other non-paid sources such as service organization sites or industry-relevant partners.
Leverage the Advantages of Ranking Higher on Google Maps
We bombarded you with a lot in this article, so let us recap on how to rank higher in Google Maps:
- Create and claim your roofing Google Maps business listing
- Complete each section of your Google Business Profile dashboard
- Keep your NAP (Name, Address, and local Phone number) consistent on the web.
- Properly categorize and describe your roofing business.
- Add posts and photos to your Google Maps listing
- Obtain more Google reviews
- Consolidate duplicate listings
- Make your roofing website responsive
- Target your roofing website for local keywords
- Add a Google Map to your roofing website
- Use local business schema
- Build local backlinks
Roofing business listings on Google Maps are slowly becoming more advanced, helping clients to instantly obtain the information they require and make educated buying decisions.
Follow the tactics in this book to get your roofing business showing up higher on Google Maps, and you will get the increased engagement, revenue, and visibility that comes along with it.