Directories for Roofing Contractors
Hey! How are you guys doing! Shib here.
Today, I want to talk to you guys about directories. Something that’s been taking a massive shift in the last two years, especially last year, 2017, in how it affects your local business as a local roofing contractor and where you should be listed and giving more emphasis for your business.
So let’s get some things out of the way in the beginning. When we look for roofers right now. Let’s do my area, roofing New Rochelle. It’s an understanding that it is getting exceedingly more and more difficult, well, this is now looked upon as an exception almost nowadays.Getting proper citations is one of the first things a new roofing business should do to lay their foundation for proper roofing contractor marketing. But it is getting exceedingly more and more difficult to outrank organically listings like Home Advisor, Yelp. Porch, going on.
And this has been an uphill battle amongst many SEOs. I mean, most SEO companies in our understanding are not able to even get you on the first page for even low competition keywords. But even amongst decent SEO companies, it has been an uphill battle because people a lot of times still try to organically outrank these top directories.
Now, there are many reasons why that should not be the priority in our campaign. Other than the fact that Google already set it out there that they are going to start getting more relevance to, favor these large directories because it just caters to the user better when somebody searches, roofers in New Rochelle, roofers in Westchester, a lot more often than that, these homeowners are looking for a good way to judge multiple roofing contractors in one interface.
And our website does not do that. Our website is for us. So Google will already, especially organically, cater to these large directories. Home Advisor in Google’s eye does a great job in showing that look, these are the local roofers that are doing good. So they are going to be winning in this race at least for the next, from what I can predict for the next couple of years, until another directory makes massive shifts and they take the lead, they’re going to start dominating a bit more than other especially when they are kind of the owners of most of the top big ones anyways.
Shibga Media
20 Union St New Rochelle, NY 10805
(347) 920-9521
https://shibga.com
So that being said, again, I keep coming back to this too many times but I don’t want to make this video about the maps and stuff. But maps is where we want to go for the main keywords. Make sure that is where our priority is. But that does not mean that we should not be in any of these places. It means that we should be available in every one of them. So if you do some quick search, in like major cities roofing, like who comes in the first page, it is easy that it is the same businesses, the top 10 businesses that comes up is somewhat going to be Home Advisor, Yelp, Angie’s List, BBB, Yellow Pages, Prime Buyers, Porch, Yellow Book, and Houzz.
In my experience, it has been pretty much consistent across the board. So it is our responsibility to have accounts with them. It doesn’t mean you have to be paying customers for them. But it does mean you should take advantage of their free listing to the fullest. Emphasis to the fullest. I am not talking about just going there, getting a listing, and that’s it. And then you just fill out some information. I’m talking put up pictures, make sure if you can, your pictures should be geo coded. Put up descriptions. Unique descriptions. Not just like the casual one you want to put, copy and paste all of them. Unique descriptions. Pictures, descriptions, links, fill them out.Most directories do not allow a lot of keywords, so it is best if you do a solid roofing keyword research before hand so you know which ones to include. Make sure the citations have a link to your roofing website. If that badge is insurance, it has to have slot of what kind of work you do, do you do shingles, do you do that, all that kind of stuff, fill it out exactly what kind of payments you take, all the way through. Furthermore, if you are filling out one of the top roofing directories, then make sure to have a solid plan to generate reviews on it. Getting good roofing directories properly filled is the first step for you to rank in the Google maps 3 pack.
For Home Advisor, it shoots to 100%. Shows a profile how much of it is complete, most people that I talk to, I look into their account, it is 20, 30%, it should be a hundred. It should be 99, 100%. It should be very full. That has a direct relationship on how Home Advisor treats you. They may not say you do, the reception is over the phone may not know they do, but they are a search engine just like Google.com.
Home Advisor is also trying to be a search engine but for contractors. So over time, they’re going to cater to contractors that receive the phone better, that handle leads better, that get better reviews, on and on. I mean, those are part of the top things that the directories care about. But all things being equal, I can bet you over time they are going to care about listing, if they have exactly the same stat, or one has bunch of pictures and they are very descriptive and they’re responsive in listing compared to the other one, they will somehow favor this at least in a search engine value sort of way. They will pass on more juice in Google’s eyes. Long story short, you want to be in these.
Now, to quickly go over some of them. To go through them, first of all, I’ll go through them real quickly and see what’s in each of them at the top of my head and try to give you guys as much value as possible. Home Advisor, most people either love it or hate it because of the way they deal with you with the leads, how they share the leads, some people swear there they need at least 10. So whatever it is, we see mix things coming up all the time but one thing is for sure, that if you can make Home Advisor work, it is going to force your business to have a system that can answer phones promptly, basically if you can be happy with Home Advisor, you’re going to love most other platforms or types of lead because they are pretty hard to deal with in terms of if you’re used to exclusive roofing leads coming from Google and maps and stuff like that, and then you switch to Home Advisor, you’re gonna hate it. But if you come from Home Advisor, they give you a taste of maps, leads, you are just like, wow, it is a breath of fresh air.
Anyways, having that said, we are talking about directories here, definitely, we recommend getting Home Advisor. It’s going to be one of the most powerful platforms out there and they are doing a lot of good stuff. They do a lot of marketing. You have a pretty good chance even from the listing, where you not paying for leads, pretty good chance to be working it out and be right from the directory. So definitely. Just so you guys know, our philosophy, if something is free, but gets you a call even once in the whole year, get it. That is our philosophy. If you are not with that, then, I guess sometimes you can differ, but how we go about it is if something can get you even one or two calls here and there and it’s free then it’s a no brainer almost. That’s how we look at things.
Yelp. Out of all the directories that we talk about right now, it goes to say that these are directories, they’re there for a reason. Anytime you get on them, it is basically somebody’s going to reach out to you either by phone, email, or anything they can to sell you something more. The most caution would go with Yelp because they are relentless. I think they have invested in their sales team more than any other platform out there. They will literally call you four to five times a week on average and be relentless. This is what they do. But we still recommend getting Yelp. And in terms of their paid advertising, I haven’t seen much happen from it to be honest. We’ve tried it with a couple of different areas as well. We didn’t see much of it but people swear that in certain places they are killing it with Yelp, that’s great. But I haven’t seen it so I can’t recommend it in terms of their paid advertising just yet.
But definitely, still would recommend their free listing. But one tip, if you’re using call tracking phone numbers with a third party software where you’re using not you’re direct cellphone, you can ask them to block solicitors, block Yelp. Yelp calls you once and then you can let them know that the number they call from you can block that and potentially over time, they might still be able to reach you through some of the numbers. They are big company. They have other numbers at their disposal but eventually from your area in my understanding, you’re gonna be blocking off all the solicitors. Once you’re sure, you never want to do their paid advertising and sometime in the near future for sure, you can do that.
Alright. Moving on. Angie’s List. Now, Angie’s List changed quite a bit but still is one of the best, I mean, Home Advisor bought them not too long ago. But yeah, we still can say it is one of the best directories to have definitely.
Angie’s List is followed by Thumbtack, which is getting more and more popular. It is a little different as we know but I think it’s more of an upcoming directory that’s being popularized by a bit more of the…But we’ve seen a better renovation type jobs coming compared to repairs and roofing, things like that. But one thing is for sure that whatever they put in the description is not correlating as well as something else you compare it. So somebody puts that they need like roof repair, that person might get a roof replacement. That’s always a good thing. But if it happened vice versa, it’s kind of gets annoying because they charge you more for replacements. But then a lot of times, it’s just the persons meet some kind of thing. It is something that we have seen happened a lot. So definitely still get Thumbtack. It is a great place to be. But beware of their paid bidding system.
BBB, still relevant. It’s a dying one, slowly though. There’s a lot people who trust Better Business Bureau like if you are accredited with them, they just trust you. Okay, that goes back to the statement I just made in the beginning. If it gets you just one customer, like a customer is about to sign up with you and it makes their life easier, meaning, that it makes the decision easier to hire you, just one of them, every couple of months that is still how we look at it. So that’s the point we come from and that’s when we say yes, get accredited with BBB.
Moving on, Yellow Pages, still one of the top in ranks in certain places. Home Buyers Report. Porch is a great one. They are doing some work to get it updated. Yellow Book, again, similar, Houzz. Houzz is great. A lot of people love Houzz, depending on how they work it and it definitely makes it in our top ten list. So those are the top 10 right here we went through. Definitely take the time to fill these out. Use them to the fullest. Use the free listings to their fullest. That’s the number one thing you can do. And that being said, once you are on these top 10, what I would recommend is getting the ones that are ranking for your brand name.
So if your name is Bob’s Roofing, when you type in Bob’s Roofing in Google, once you have these top ten, the ones that are ranking towards the top usually is gonna be Home Advisor, Yelp, and of these other ones. I would recommend starting to do review generation for those. What we’re trying to do is one day when people type in your name, not only do they see the site panel in Google with your reviews but also three four five listings, Home Advisor, Yelp, Angie’s List, also has a good amount of reviews in them. This can seem really tedious but it really isn’t. If you have a proper review generation in place, if you are asking for reviews, every single house you walk into, it can be acquired in less than three four months for all of these.
So thank you for taking time to watch. What I will do is leave a link below to the post on my website on this where we’ll not only go for the top ten but approximately, top 30, maybe even top 50, but probably around top 30 because after top 30, it starts to get a little weird like all kinds of directory. So top 30 will be posted on my website. So if you are interested in getting more directories that that leaves the realm of just getting visibility but enters the realm more into getting you more relevancy for your map listing. That’s definitely something you want to check out.
Thank you for taking time to watch this.If you want to check out more roofing seo tips, then go to our homepage. If you have any questions, shoot me an email. Shibgac@gmail.com. Talk to you guys soon.