How Does Google’s Mobile 1st Index Affects Roofing SEO

In March 2018, Google has finally started rolling out it’s complete mobile 1st index roll out, bringing a new dimension to exclusive roofing leads generation, basically what this means is that they’re going to take the results and rank business is based on how they are performing on mobile devices as opposed to desktop. Meaning, if your website is performing for cell phones, the rankings will suffer in both cell phones and desktops.

Quick summary of why this is taking place:

You probably have heard these stats before but it’s worth mentioning once again to make sense of what’s yet to come further down in the reading.

How Does This Change How We Look At Digital Performance Of A Roofing Company?

Now let’s get into the meat and potatoes and talk about how it actually impacts roofing businesses going into 2019. First of all, this change has caused a huge change in the way we report our digital performance. The “roofing contractor + city” search is not as much of a priority any more

For as long as we can think of, whenever you check your roofing seo, you made a search similar to the image above. Even as SEOs, we ourselves are still used to checking who is ranking at the top three positions of maps / organic to gauge the top dogs in a given city. However, time is come where this is no longer going to be the priority. A new metric has taken its place and that is going to be referred to as “activity”.  

Before we go there, lets first take a look at widest changes taking place. Before, even local business rankings were gauged by Google from an one dimensional standpoint. If your ranking at the top three positions for term like “Roofing st louis mo”  it literally means that when homeowners are searching that term in that area around the whole city you are showing up in the top three positions and are going to get that business.

With the mobile index change, things became hyper localized. Google will now look at the exact location of the searcher and show roofing companies that have good optimization but also take into account the exact distance as a factor.

In the above image you can see that a person looking for a roofer in Plumber Road, Jacksonville FL more likely be at a disservice if a company all the way from Southside Jacksonville was to come out to them – As opposed to a company that is in a 5 to 10 mile radius around them.

Now, please bear in mind that I am oversimplifying the way Google chooses to show the company at the top. Obviously just by being close to the homeowner does not guarantee you to be in the top positions, Google is going to definitely take into account all the other factors that dictate your rankings. It’s just that distance is also a big player in that equation.

The point we have to take away from this is that just because a business does not show up at the top positions when you make a search from where you are located – does not equal to them not having good search engine optimization. (Check out Roofing Marketing Expert Guide for more info on this). 

So How Do I Know My SEO Is Improving or Going Well?

Now you might be wondering how you can even track that your search engine optimization is going well.

As we mentioned above, the metric we’re going to go for is: Activity

Here is a roofing contractor in Jacksonville Florida. There are several things we can track, but I’m going to assume that the main thing you want is qualified phone calls and show you the main things to look at in your Google My Business Insights.

As you can see in the first row,  people type in the word “Roofing Jacksonville FL”  before they interacted with our listing. Two rows down,  you can see people typed in “ roofers near me” and then interact with the listing, and so on. This is direct data giving you insight into what people are searching for,  now scroll down to look at what people are doing after they find you:

You can see 37 people visited our website using the Google listing. This is huge because if you have ever ran Adwords, you know a good industry average to get a qualified phone call is every 4-5 clicks, that spells out 37 phone calls just from the website visits. Then leaving best for the last, 78 people called us using the listing. These were direct phone calls which did not even go to the website – they called us from the search page when they found us in the top 3.

This is exactly what you should be looking for. If people are clicking and interacting with your Google my business listing after they have searched for relevant terms related to roofing – Then a good percentage of those people are turning into visits to the website and direct phone calls –  you are in the right direction.

Google not too long ago decided to show us exactly what people have typed into the search before they interacted with our Business listing. While your competitors are busy always over-optimizing for “roofing Jacksonville”, You can have an easy way to get  visibility for words like “roofers near me” (I can guarantee you that 99% of your competitors are optimizing to the beat of the Goole drum). Homeowners are letting you know what are typing into their phones before they choose roofing service, why wouldn’t you realize this data to your advantage?

How Can I Use This To Start Generating More Roofing Leads?

Well let’s start with the basics, first of all make sure that your website is actually responsive on a mobile device. Simply scroll and maneuver through your website going to the main pages that homeowners would travel to that’s available at the menu and make sure every page looks clean and nothing is chopped off. Make sure all the buttons are working and people are able to contact you without having to jump through hoops.

Next,

Take advantage of functionalities that are built for individualized mobile search, such as text messaging right from your google listing.

Take Google Posts Seriously

By looking at roofing seo trends from Google trends, we can see that homeowners are searching for roofing contractors using more “near me” terms as the years go by.  I made a video about it last week here:

by using Google posts to Target the keywords that we know homeowners are searching,  we are exactly in tune with what is currently working.

Make sure your team members have the Google My Business listing so they can take images using it when they’re out on the jobs. (number of bodies you have in your organization can be leveraged to a massive degree) This adds a lot of geographic relevance to your business because your people are literally reporting back to Google showing how active you are in the area.

Last thoughts, in the future, all search results won’t just be generic rankings but individualized results that will differ from person to person depending on the data Google has about their search habits and who they are. It’ll be where two people can be standing in the same position but they will see different results because they are different people.  This is not just about far in the future, we’re pretty much almost already there.

Hope this helps and if you have any questions feel free to reach out to me at shibgac@gmail.com