Internet Lead Generation For Roofers – 3 Things To Remember

Maybe you remember a long-ago Saturday Night Live skit starring Jon Lovitz, where he plays a pathological liar. His infamous line was always “Yeah – that’s the ticket.”  When I talk to roofers about internet lead generation, that line pops into my head regularly.

But why? Well because many of the people who offer leads to roofers don’t know what they’re doing, so the services they provide don’t work. When cornered about the lack of performance they’ll often lie to you.

One I heard recently was about Google AdWords. The marketing company told their client that the reason why they couldn’t see their ads running was that “Google blocks the IP address of your offices so that you don’t mistakenly click on your ads which you’d have to pay for.”

Yeah – that’s the ticket.

No actually, it’s total BS. Not, as I said here, a Belief System, either.  Unless that belief is that you’re a fool and it’s ok to lie to you. Instead, the explanation was entirely made up. They just weren’t running the ads the roofer was paying for.

Things To Remember About Internet Lead Generation For Roofers

1) There are three primary places you’ll want your business to be visible to people who are searching for a solution to a problem with their roof.

• Google AdWords (the four ads at the top of the search results page)
• The Local SEO/Maps (the three businesses listed in the box with the map)
• Organic SEO (the ten blue links at the bottom)

Some companies want total domination of their marketplace – and to help them we provide “triple-optimization” of their online properties. This results in massive visibility for your business in the places where your customers are searching online and a lot of traffic to your website.

Other roofing contractors need to take it a bit slower, and so with a much lower investment, they are only focused on dominating one of the three areas.

The point is that each requires a different set of actions – a different skill-set. Most SEO-types don’t have those skills. When you hire them, you’re setting the stage for a problem.

2) What people do when they visit your site is critical to your success. You see, if you are highly visible in search engines and people click on your site and visit, you NEED to convert a percentage of them into leads. That should be obvious, right? We want people to call or in some way inquire about our services.

But if you look at as many roofing websites as I do, you’d find that many fail this step miserably. Your prospect needs to be told how to respond. If you don’t tell them, they might get confused and visit your competitor’s site.

At the very least make sure your phone number is prominent (best place in the top right corner of the page) and be clear that you want them to call now to schedule a roof inspection and estimate. Say it plainly and watch how many more people respond.

3) The page you send them to from search is hugely important too. Using Google AdWords again as an example, the most expensive mistake roofers (and too often, their marketing “experts”) make is to send someone who clicked your ad directly to your website.

NO – that’s NOT the ticket. If you’re running ads on Google, make sure you send your traffic to a landing page. When you use a landing page, the language is similar to the language in your ad. You can “pay off” the promise you made in your ad on the lander they visit.

When you send them directly to your site, often the language doesn’t pay off on the promise you made, or they can’t find the answer they’re looking for (the one that made them click), so they leave. Google gets to pocket your fee, and you got nothing besides the warm feeling of a visitor.

I do often make light of the “stories” roofers are told by marketers, SEO’s and other experts but in reality, these things can lead to devastation. The company I talked about earlier asked their agency “why aren’t we showing up in search results?” The response was “We’re puzzled too – your site is great. Google loves your site; it scores “A+” on their rating system.”

Yeah – that’s the ticket.

This is another outrageous lie. See, getting the visibility in Google you crave comes from having the right content on the page (no thin or duplicate content). Then optimizing everything, so Google knows what (the keyword) you want that page to rank for. Finally, they compare your site to others who are trying to rank for those terms too and put them in order for the searcher to see. No hocus-pocus needed.

Truth or Fiction – You Get To Choose

Let me finish by saying that finding someone who will tell you the truth about online lead generation is the all-important key to your success. Choosing to work with someone who will offer you strong written guarantees of performance helps too.

If you’ve thought: “It’s time to take internet lead generation seriously”, then let’s schedule 15 minutes for a call. My programs are not right for everyone, and they may not be a fit for you, but neither of us knows that until we talk.