Roofing Websites: The Leads You Rent and the Leads You Own

The storm naming list reset at the start of this month. Between now and next August a handful of named systems will cross Scotland, and after each one a lot of people will pick up a phone. The only real question is whose phone, and how much you paid for the privilege.

Most roofers thinking about a website are not really asking for a website. They are asking how to stop paying for leads that three other firms bought at the same time. This is about the difference between demand you rent and demand you own — and about the one piece of content a roofing firm can produce that no competitor and no agency can copy.

Why roofers get targeted harder than any other trade

If you feel like every lead-selling outfit in Britain has your mobile number, that is not paranoia. Three things about roofing make it the most valuable trade on their list:

• The job values are high. A re-roof is a five-figure decision. A lead seller can charge far more for a roofing enquiry than a boiler service, because the job it might turn into is worth many times more.
• A lot of the demand is urgent. Someone with water coming through a ceiling is not going to shop for three days. Urgency compresses the decision, which makes intercepting it at the top of the search results extremely profitable.
• Customers cannot tell you apart. This is the one that really does the damage, and it is the same problem we wrote about on our roofing page: nobody has ever seen their own roof. A householder has no way to judge the work in advance, so they fall back on whatever proxy is in front of them — which is exactly the gap a platform sells itself into.

None of that makes lead platforms worthless. It makes them expensive, and it makes it worth understanding precisely what you are buying.

What a shared lead actually is

On most pay-per-lead models, one householder’s enquiry is sold to several firms at once. Each of you pays. Each of you phones. One of you wins, and the customer — who did not ask to be called four times — now has a small auction running whether they wanted one or not.

Two things follow, and they compound.

The first is that you are competing on speed of dialling rather than quality of work. The firm that answers from the scaffold at 11am beats the firm that returns calls at six, regardless of who is the better roofer. You end up building your working day around a race.

The second is that you are competing on price in the worst possible conditions. Four quotes on one job, arriving within an hour of each other, with nothing to separate them except the number at the bottom. You already know how that ends, because you have been the one who lost it by four hundred pounds to somebody who will be back in two winters.

That is not a scam. It is just what the product is. The problem is that it is the only thing many roofing firms have, so the cost is permanent and the position never improves.

Rented demand and owned demand

The distinction worth holding on to is simple.

Neither one is the right answer on its own. Plenty of good firms use platforms to fill gaps, and there is nothing wrong with that. The mistake is running a business where 100% of the demand is rented, because that is a business with no asset in it — and one pricing change away from a serious problem.

The arithmetic you can do yourself

We are not going to quote you a cost per lead, because the figures vary by platform, region and season, and any number we invented would be wrong by the time you read it. Do it with your own numbers instead. It takes five minutes on the back of a delivery note.

• What you spent on bought leads in the last twelve months.
• How many of those became quoted jobs.
• How many became work.
• Divide: what did one won job actually cost you in lead fees?
• Then ask what the same annual spend would buy if it were put into something you keep.

Most roofers have never done that division. The number is usually the thing that decides the argument, and we would rather you reached it yourself than took our word for it.

Roofing search is two different markets wearing one coat

The person with a leak and the person planning a re-roof are not the same customer, do not search the same way, and should not land on the same page.

• The emergency. Urgent, comparison-light, on a phone, often in bad weather. They want to know you exist, that you cover them, and that you will actually come. A page that opens with a gallery is answering a question they did not ask.
• The planned job. Considered, quote-comparison-driven, often running over weeks. They are trying to work out whether it is a repair or a replacement, what it should cost, and whether you are the sort of firm that will still be trading when the guarantee matters.

Our roofing page goes through what each of them needs to see in far more detail than belongs in a blog post. The SEO point is narrower: these are different searches and they need different pages. One “Roofing Services” page trying to serve both will rank weakly for both and convert neither.

The storm spike, and what being ready actually means

Storms that are likely to cause enough disruption to warrant an amber or red warning get named, by the Met Office together with Met Éireann and the Dutch service KNMI, from a list that runs from early September to late August. The stated purpose is that a single authoritative name “provides a consistent message and aids the communication of approaching severe weather” so that people are “better placed to keep themselves, their property and businesses safe”.

What that means commercially is that the warning arrives before the damage does, and so does the searching. People start looking while the wind is still building.

Being ready for that is not a marketing campaign. It is three unglamorous things:

• A page about storm damage that already exists. Published months ago, indexed, and saying honestly what you will and will not do in high wind — including that nobody sane is going up during the storm itself.
• A site that loads on a phone in bad conditions, with the number reachable without scrolling.
• A decision about what happens to the overflow. A named storm produces more calls in a day than you can attend in a week. Whether that surplus becomes a triaged list or a pile of missed calls is the single biggest difference between firms in that week.

The one thing that does not work is building the page after the storm is named. By then the searching has already happened.

The asset already sitting in your van

Here is the part most roofing firms never act on, and it is the reason this post exists.

Google’s own guidance on creating helpful content asks publishers to assess their own work against a set of questions. One of them is this:

Read that as a roofer. You are on roofs every working day. You open up problems nobody else gets to see. You photograph them because you have to, for the customer and sometimes for an insurer. You already generate, as a by-product of doing the job, exactly the kind of first-hand material that guidance is describing — and almost none of it ever reaches your website.

Meanwhile the agency writing generic roofing copy for your competitor has never been up a ladder. They cannot fake this. That is the whole advantage.

Why the finished-roof gallery does not do it

Our roofing page makes this point about trust; it applies just as squarely to search. A photograph of a completed roof shows a roof. It looks like every other completed roof. It carries no information, answers no question, and is indistinguishable from a stock image or from a job somebody else did.

The valuable photographs are the ones in the middle: the lifted slates, the perished felt, the flashing that was never dressed properly, the batten that had gone. Those show what was actually wrong and what you did about it — which is what the customer is trying to find out, and what no competitor can copy because it happened on your job.

What a job record looks like

Not a case study in the marketing sense. A short, factual account of one job, published as its own page:

• What the customer noticed — in their words. “A damp patch on the landing ceiling after heavy rain” is a phrase real people type into a search box. “Roofing solutions” is not.
• What it turned out to be. The actual cause, named properly.
• What you did, and why that rather than the alternative. This is the part that demonstrates judgement, and judgement is what they are buying.
• Photographs from during the work, not just after.
• Roughly how long it took, and the general area. The town, not the address.
• What it cost, or at least the range. Optional, and we will not pretend it is comfortable — but firms that give a range get called by people who already know they can afford it.

Twenty of those, built up over a year, do several things at once that nothing else does. They answer the exact questions people search. They prove you can diagnose rather than just quote. They give you something true to say about the places you actually work — which is the only honest way to be visible in a town. And they accumulate: job twenty does not make job three stop working.

Two per month. Photographs you already take, fifteen minutes of description. That is the entire commitment.

The trap to avoid

The same guidance asks “is the content primarily made to attract visits from search engines?” and states plainly that “people-first content means content that’s created primarily for people, and not to manipulate search engine rankings”.

So: do not turn job records into a content-farm exercise. Twenty real jobs, honestly written, beat two hundred generated pages — and the second approach is actively dangerous, which brings us to the thing we will not sell you.

What we will not do

Roofing is one of the trades most heavily pitched the location-page tactic: forty pages, one per town, identical but for the name. We set out our position on that recently, with Google’s spam policies quoted in full. Short version: the policies name that exact pattern, and a page that would read identically with the town name removed is a doorway page no matter how sincerely it was sold to you.

We also will not promise you a ranking, because Google states there is “no way to request or pay for a better local ranking”. Anyone guaranteeing position one for “roofer” plus your town is either unaware of that or counting on you being unaware of it.

And we will not tell you to cancel your lead subscriptions on day one. Build the owned side first, watch what it brings in, and let the arithmetic decide when to taper. That order is slower and it is the one that does not leave you with a quiet month.

Where the website fits

None of the above needs an expensive site. It needs a site that can be added to without ringing anybody, loads properly on a phone in the rain, puts the number where a wet thumb can find it, and has somewhere sensible for job records to live.

If you have that already, publish the job records and leave the site alone — we will say so. If what you have is six pages of copy and a gallery from 2019 that nobody can edit, that is the constraint to fix first, and it is what our website design and redesign work is for. Our roofing page goes through the rest of it — quotes, guarantees, insurance claims, storm response, the two customers — in proper detail.

Sources and method

• Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content, Google — the first-hand expertise question and the people-first wording.
• UK Storm Centre, Met Office — the naming criteria, the September-to-August list and the stated purpose.
• Improve your local ranking on Google — that ranking cannot be requested or paid for.
• Google Search spam policies — doorway and scaled content abuse, covered in our earlier post.

What this post does not do. It quotes no lead prices, platform fees or search volumes, because we have no verified current figures for those and an invented one would be worse than none — which is why the arithmetic section asks you to use your own. It names no platform, and takes no view on any particular one. It promises no ranking and no lead volume. And it describes Google’s guidance and the Met Office naming system as they stand today; both get revised, so check the sources rather than this summary.

Questions roofers ask us

Should we stop paying for leads?

Not on day one. Build something you own, measure what it produces, and reduce the rented side as the owned side takes over. Cutting first and building afterwards is how firms end up with a quiet February.

How long before a website brings work in?

Longer than a bought lead, which arrives this afternoon. The difference is that the bought lead is gone by Friday and a job record published today is still being found in two years. Anyone giving you a confident number of weeks is guessing.

We are not writers. Who does the job records?

You take the photographs already. The description can be five minutes talking into a phone on the way back to the yard, written up by someone else. What cannot be outsourced is the judgement about what was wrong and why you did it that way — and that is the part that has value.

Is it worth having a page for every town we cover?

Only for places you genuinely work and can say something specific about. A town page with two real job records from that town is a real page. Twelve identical ones are a liability.

Do reviews matter more than the website?

They matter a great deal in this trade, because the customer cannot inspect the work. Reviews and a website are not alternatives — the reviews get you considered, the site is where they check you are not the outfit that knocked their neighbour’s door.

What about all the storm work we get by word of mouth?

Keep it. Word of mouth is owned demand too, and the best kind. The website’s job is to catch the people who were referred to you and then searched your name to check you out — which is almost all of them.