Industries
Websites and marketing for roofing contractors
Can you come and look at it, and will you deal with my insurer. A roofing site that answers those two in the first screen beats a prettier one that makes somebody ring to find out.
Roofing is bought under pressure, usually in the week after a storm or a leak, and often while an insurance claim is open. The site that gets the call is the one that proves it is licensed and insured in the first screen and says plainly whether it works with insurers.
How customers actually find a roofer
Something happened. A ceiling stain, a storm, a letter from an adjuster, or a neighbour having a roof done. Most of them search on a phone within a day or two, check credentials before anything else, and ring two or three firms in the same hour. Almost nobody is browsing.
What they type
- roof repair near me
- roof leak [town]
- storm damage roof repair [town]
- roof replacement cost [town]
- roofing contractor that works with insurance
Bracketed parts are wherever you are and whatever you sell. These are phrasings, not a keyword list to stuff into a page.
Four things roofing contractors get wrong online
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The licence number is not on the page
Illinois licenses roofing contractors at state level, which is unusual and which customers here know about, partly because the storm-chasing crews that follow hail are exactly what the licence exists to filter. Printing the number beats printing the word "licensed", and it is the first thing a careful homeowner checks.
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Nothing about insurance claims
A large share of roofing work is paid for by an insurer, and the homeowner is halfway through a process they do not understand. A site that says plainly whether you deal with adjusters, and what you need from them to start, answers the question they rang to ask.
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No photographs of your own roofs
Stock photographs of a roof are worthless, because every roof looks like a roof. What works is your work on houses that look like theirs, ideally with the street visible, and a line saying what was done and roughly when.
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Repair and replacement are not separated
These are different purchases with different urgency and different money. Somebody with a leak wants to know you will come out this week. Somebody with a twenty-year-old roof wants to know whether it can be patched at all. One page for both answers neither.
If you have no website at all
If you have no website at all, none of that applies to you yet, and you are in the majority of roofers we meet. The first version is one page: your name, the Illinois licence number, that you are insured, the towns you cover, whether you deal with insurers, and a phone number somebody can tap. That is enough to be checkable the week after a storm, which is the only thing this trade needs a site for. Everything else can wait until it is earning.
Worth reading before you spend anything: word of mouth works, so do you need a website. It includes the cases where the honest answer is no.
If you change one thing
Burying the credentials. In a trade where the customer has been warned about door-knockers after a storm, the licence number, the insurance position and how long you have been trading belong above the fold, not on an about page.
What we would work on
- Local visibility & lead generation Help nearby customers find you, trust you, and call you.
- Website design & development Turn visitors into calls, leads and customers.
- Paid advertising Immediate visibility, measured properly.
In that order, for this trade. The pricing is the same whatever sector you are in — a site of up to eight pages is $249 to build and $399 a year to keep running.
Have we done this before
Not in this trade yet. The work we have done is here, and the four problems above hold whichever trade the last client was in.
Straight answers
Questions from roofing contractors
If you do, yes, and plainly. A homeowner mid-claim is trying to work out whether hiring you makes the claim harder. One honest paragraph about how you handle adjusters removes most of that doubt, and the firms that say nothing are the ones that get rung second.
Yes, and it is probably the strongest thing you can put on a roofing website. Every homeowner has heard that somebody was sold a full replacement they did not need, and most of them are carrying that suspicion into the call with you. A short paragraph saying you will tell them when it is a repair costs you the occasional larger job and wins you the ones decided on trust alone, which in this trade is most of them. It is the same reason this page tells you when you do not need a website at all.
A range and the things that move it. Square footage, pitch, how many layers are coming off, and whether there is decking to replace. Nobody expects a fixed price for a roof, but a page that refuses to say anything at all sends people to the one that did.
By being checkable. They are usually not local, not licensed here, and not findable afterwards. A site with your Illinois licence number, your years in business and photographs of local work is the contrast, and it costs nothing to make.
Yes, because it is one of the few claims a customer can verify independently, and on most systems it is what allows you to offer the longer warranty. Say which certification, with the manufacturer, rather than a row of logos.
Up to eight pages is $249 to build with us and $399 a year to keep online, hosted, backed up and monitored, with the domain in your name. That is enough for repair, replacement, storm and insurance work, your service area and your record.
No, and be wary of anyone who claims to specialise in 14 industries at once. What we have is a way of working that suits small businesses — fast sites, clear pricing, no contracts — and enough time spent on roofer problems to know which of them are worth money. Where we have not done work in a sector, we say so rather than dressing up somebody else's case study.
With whichever of the four problems above you recognised. Most owners know the answer before they finish reading the list. If none of them landed, the fifteen-minute call is free and we will look at what you have got.
Worth reading first
Before you spend anything on a website for roofing contractors
Complete guides, not teasers. If you follow one and never call us, it worked.
- I get all my work from word of mouth. Do I need a website? Maybe not. If you are at capacity, hiring nobody and taking no new customers, a website is not urgent and anyone telling you otherwise is selling. 9 min read
- Licensed, insured, and able to prove it A customer checks three things before ringing, in roughly the same order every time: are you a real business, are you covered if something goes wrong, and has anybody else used you. 8 min read
- The gmail address is costing you work A free email address does not stop the phone ringing, but it quietly costs you the jobs where somebody is choosing between you and another firm. 7 min read
The other trades
Trade by trade, because the advice differs
All of them sit under contractors and home services, which is the general version of this page.
- Electrical Contractors Are you licensed here, and have you done this exact job before. Everything else on an electrical site is secondary to those two.
- Plumbing Contractors Can you come today, or can you hold a date three weeks out. Which of those two a visitor is asking decides everything else on the page, so the site has to answer both without making either hunt.
- Concrete and Flatwork Why is your quote higher than the other one. Everything on a concrete site should be building the answer to that, because it is the conversation the customer is having with themselves.