2012 Marketing Campaign Planning Tips for Roofing Contractors



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If you haven't already, it is time to begin planning your 2012 marketing campaigns.

One aspect roofing contractors might not always consider is timing. When is the best time to put up a billboard? When is the best time to mail out a postcard? When should you send out email communications?

A tool I always find helpful is Google Insights. This handy offering allows you to dig in to when people search for very specific terms. Whether your campaign is digital or print, knowing when people are interested in what product or service you are offering is extremely valuable. Here's another helpful hint: don't launch marketing campaigns when people get interested - time it to be delivered just before they are so your brand is in their minds when the need arises.

The United States search history over the past 3 years for the term "roofing" demonstrates that people consistently most search for that term during quarters 2 and 3 (April through September). When is the best time to launch your marketing campaigns? I would say February or March, right as the ramp-up of search begins (circled in red).

Go down further in the tool and you'll see geographically where the term is most searched. The middle section of the picture in this post shows that Oklahoma has the highest interest for the term "roofing" (you can drill down to the state(s) you do business in to make this relevant).

Click on your state and you'll see an even more granular geographic detail as well as the top search terms and the search terms that are more recently quickly rising. Are you using these terms as SEO bait on your website, blog, tweets, Facebook posts, etc.? If not, you should be as this is what people in your geographic region type in when trying to find information about roofing.

Feel free to type in any term you want this data for, and specify the timeframe you want to look at (I suggest at least 3 years to get a full sense of the trend). Drill down until you are seeing the relevant data for the region(s) you serve.

If you have any questions about or would like help with marketing campaigns or search insights for your geographic area, please email Chris@RoofPal.com.

Is there a guaranteed way for roofing contractors to be successful using Twitter?

Many business books, blog posts, magazine articles, newspaper articles, television news segments and even tweets themselves have been written about what it takes for individuals and brands to be successful on Twitter.

Here are some of the common recommendations for success on Twitter:

Follow a lot of people. The more people you follow, the more likly it

is for people to not only follow you back, but to acknowledge you and connect.

Follow those who follow you. For many, this is a common courtesy and the smart move. If you follow back everyone that follows you, you wind up meeting lots of new and interesting people. The major debate around this is quantity vs. quality argument (if you follow back everyone, it makes your Twitter stream cluttered). If you only follow back those who are truly interesting to you, it's a better way to curate content and dive deeper into some of the meatier conversations. Both sides to this argument have valid points.

Tweet frequently and consistently. Twitter (like most of the Internet) is a live, real-time environment. If you don't tweet often, there is a likelihood that you (and your content) will get lost in the all the other tweets. If you tweet once a day and most of the people who follow you are not online then, your tweet is rarely seen or acted on. Real-time makes the amount of followers you have not as important as when individuals are actually online, connected, following and reading your tweets.

Tweet original things (not just links). If all you are tweeting is links and you are not spending the time to think of anything original to say, you won't get much attention. Those who are most successful on Twitter are those who create content in a very original way.

Make it personal, and respond to as many people as possible. If you don't respond, acknowledge and discuss things with people following you on Twitter it will be a useless experience. Those who truly have massive audiences and attention are the ones who respond back to anyone and everyone. The people that you respond back to will then feel special and this make them more likely to re-tweet your content and ask their followers to follow you too. Twitter is an online social network... not a broadcasting channel.

Or... do the exact opposite. Everyone has an opinion about why something is successful and why other things fail. Brands and individuals are constantly looking for both best practices and return on investment in social media. What we learn by looking at the commonly-held beliefs and then comparing them to people who do the opposite is that Twitter is simply an open publishing platform - it is a place for people to put content (short, 140 characters worth of text-based content), and that success can often come from not following the rules, but by breaking them.

Why? Just like blogs, podcasts and YouTube channels, Twitter is simply a publishing platform. Twitter and most other social media platforms allow individuals and brands to highlight, share and connect on the things that can't be explained in a traditional advertising campaign or through press releases. As with everything in life, people like real interactions between real human beings, and these channels are most effective when brands and individuals start doing the things that they think are interesting in the hopes that other's feel that way too. Often times, breaking all the "rules" is what it takes to stand out and be successful.

If you have any questions about or would like help using social media for your roofing company, please email Chris@RoofPal.com.

Comments on your Facebook posts are more valuable than Likes

According to a November 2011 analysis from EdgeRank Checker that examined a random sampling of more than 5,500 Facebook pages and over 80,000 posts with links during October 2011, a comment on a Facebook post containing a link results in almost 5 times the amount of clicks of that link than a Like of a comparable post. For every Like a post gets, the link receives on average 3.1 clicks but for every comment a post gets, it receives on average 14.7 clicks. Overall clicks per impression were found to be 0.5%.

Wednesday and Tuesday is best for engagement, Saturday and Friday is worst
When sorting the average clicks and shares by day of the week, Wednesday's had the best share ratio (link shares compared to the number of fans per page) at 0.11%. Wednesday's also had the highest click ratio (link clicks compared to the number of fans per page) at 0.49%. Tuesday followed with a 0.1% share ratio and 0.47% click ratio.

Saturday fared worst for shares ratio (0.8%), while Friday saw the smallest clicks ratio (0.35%).

Smaller pages have more devoted followers
There is a distinct correlation between Facebook page size and fan engagement. Pages with less than 1,000 fans had by far the highest shares and clicks ratios (over 1.1% share ratio and 0.3% click ratio). Following distantly were pages with 1-5,000 fans, with a share ratio of less than 0.4% and a click ratio of less than 0.1%.

In contrast, pages with more than 100,000 fans experienced the lowest share and click ratios. The data suggests that smaller pages are able to create more relevant content for their fans, which may be an indication that large brands should make multiple pages to narrow down their audience.

Social context ads increase conversions
According to November 2011 analysis from TBG Digital, Facebook Likes do have a place in driving conversions. Advertisements that leverage the social interactions that users are comfortable seeing in their Facebook news feeds perform better than those that do not.

The analysis was based on a single client (a popular entertainment brand that spent $60,000 across a 14-day period and accumulated 436 million impressions) that had a 32% improvement in purchasing intent when using social context ads as opposed to non-social context ads.

According to the analysis, social context ads are built with a text and image box with the addition of visible endorsements beneath the ad. The endorsements note the number of friends associated with a user who like the page, group, event, or application.

The cost-per-click remained constant between non-social context and social context ads, but in this study non-social context ads took 132 clicks to achieve a conversion compared to only 99 clicks for social context ads. When factoring in the cost per click, the difference in cost per acquisition equated to $44 when using social context ads. TBG Digital said there are limitations to the social context ad campaigns that are primarily due to the URL structure in the Ads API.

If you have any questions about social media marketing in the roofing industry or would like help improving sales from social media, please email Chris@RoofPal.com.

What skills are needed to be good at social media?

If you, one of your employees or even someone you hire is going to manage your social media accounts or blog for your roofing company, what skills should they have beyond knowing the in's and out's of Twitter, Facebook and search engine optimization (SEO) to generate the results you are looking for? Here is a short list of skills I recommend looking for. They are basics before the basics of digital marketing and social media:

Is the person a good writer?

Writing is the foundation of most content creation. Even things like audio or video often rely on a written script in order to deliver the maximum impact to your audience. Can you communicate ideas clearly? Can you create language that is persuasive? If you can write well, you can apply that skill to nearly every form of content generation.

Is the person a good analyst?

Given a set of information or data, can they extract something of value (insight) from it? They don’t have to be a statistics expert, but they should be able to look at a pile of data and make a chart from it or at least see if there’s some kind of trend because that is the foundation of web and social media metrics.

Is the person a good researcher?

When posed with a question, can they come up with a solution by any legal means necessary? Can they use Google intelligently? Can they put together discrete information sources and find an answer? Can they learn independently without much guidance or hand holding? The ability to find the right answer and the persistence and willingness to get one is also a foundation skill.

The truth is that there really isn’t a lot that is needed to be good at social media content creation (have a command of the English language, be decent at math, and have the ability to perform basic research online), but you do need to be able to use the tools you have with excellence and consistency.

In our constant pursuit of the newest shiny objects we often lose sight of the prerequisite fundamentals that can make us great. While it’s great to have the newest, shiniest, most buzzworthy tools and services at our fingertips, it’s ultimately meaningless if we don’t have mastery of the basic skills to use them properly.

If you have any questions about this blog post or would like assistance with establishing or managing your roofing company's social media accounts, please email Chris@RoofPal.com.

Commercial and residential roofing contractors have success from different online lead generation avenues

What makes the biggest impact on your online potential customer lead generation goals if you are a commercial roofing contractor? What about if you are a residential roofing contractor?

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According to the 2011 State of Digital Marketing Report, business-to-business (B2B) companies like commercial roofing contractors get the most online lead generation from search engine optimization (57%), followed by pay-per-click (25%), and finally social media (18%).

Business-to-consumer (B2C) companies like residential roofing contractors get lead generation in the same order, but with slightly different weighting (41% from SEO, 34% from PPC, and 25% from social media).

B2B companies like commercial roofing contractors are most active in Facebook (35%), Twitter (26%), and LinkedIn (25%). B2C companies like residential roofing contractors are by far primarily active in Facebook (75%), with Twitter (9%) and LinkedIn (6%) being significantly less important when it comes to generating online customer leads.

Of the companies in the study, 55% of companies have actually cosed deals from a social media lead. 41% closed deals from fans or friends on Facebook, 21% closed deals from connections on LinkedIn, and 20%  closed deals from followers on Twitter. There is no guarantee that this reflects the success of roofing contractors, but I would imagine it is directionally accurate.

In terms of digital marketing budgets, B2B companies like commercial roofing contractors spend 33% on SEO, 28% on PPC, 10% on social media, and 29% on other avenues. In contrast, B2C companies like residential roofing contractors spend most of their budgets on PPC (43%), 22% on SEO, 15% on social media, and 20% on other avenues.

2012 digital marketing budgets appear to be planned to increase or at least stay the same from 2011:

• For search engine optimization, 53% said they would increase their budget, 43% said their budget would stay the same, and only 4% said it would decrease.
• For pay-per-click, 40% said they would increase their budget, 51% said their budget would stay the same, and only 9% said it would decrease.
• For social media, 60% said they would increase their budget, 36% said their budget would stay the same, and only 4% said it would decrease.

Finally, the topics that digital marketers said they would most like to learn about include overall cross-promotional digital strategy (62%), followed by social media marketing (46%), then search engine optimization (38%), and finally pay-per-click (29%).

The take-away is that most companies (i.e., your competitors) are spending real money in digital marketing. What did you spend in 2011? What are you planning to spend in 2012? Do you feel you have the right strategy?

If you would like to discuss your digital marketing budget or needs for 2012, please email Chris@RoofPal.com.

If your roofing website is not mobile-optimized, help is on the way!

Good news, roofing contractors - Google is launching a new service called GOMO to make your website optimized for mobile phone devices on-demand! Currently, access to this site is password restricted, but the header image shows a smartphone with the caption "Mobilize your site now." This is definitely a new initiative (on September 1, 2011 Google registered the domains howtogomo.com, howtogomo.net and howtogomo.org).

Mobile advertisements are a big revenue stream for Google, who offers a wide range of free tools to help you mobilize your website. Google has found that businesses are lagging behind on mobile content compared to consumers, and GOMO seems to be directed at solving that problem.  Google currently offers a limited service called Google Mobile Optimizer for crudely converting Web pages to stripped-down, temporary mobile views, but they have a vested interest in building a more impressive, durable mobile site converter which I suspect is GOMO. Google also offers a free mobile website builder for building mobile sites from scratch using a range of templates.

In addition to these free services for mobilizing sites, Google is incentivizing good mobile content with its ad programs and punishing sites that aren't mobile-friendly. Google is rearranging its AdWords program to reward mobile-optimized sites and adding +1 buttons to mobile ads.

The take-away message here is... get a mobile-friendly version of your website up-and-running ASAP if you want to be found online.

If you would like to discuss mobile websites or would like help getting your website mobile-friendly, please email Chris@RoofPal.com.

Idea: Start a Social Media Recap Newsletter

According to a recent report by Sysomos, the average length of a tweet’s effectiveness is about 3 hours, with 92% of re-tweet's happening in the first hour or not at all. What this means is that if those you are connected to on social media don't see what you post soon after you post it, they likely won't. We are simply connected to too many people on social media. So how do you get more value out of all the hard work you put in to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, blogging, etc.? An email newsletter recapping the best of what you've shared over the past week!

First of all, make sure that you are creating and sharing content of value to your audience. Next, use whatever methods you have available to you to aggregate your social media activities. Once you have a selection of content that’s worth sharing again, set up an email newsletter that is devoted solely to sharing this content. And of course you can use a small amount of space in that newsletter for promotion of your other marketing efforts as well.

Weekly may or may not be the right frequency for you. Depending on how much you share valuable content, try daily, weekly, or even monthly — whatever makes sense. The point is that social media attention span is short and continues to diminish. There are days that no matter how valuable your content is, your audience simply isn’t able to pay attention because they are on vacation, busy doing other things, everyone else is over-posting, etc. But using email to close the loop and get them your content in another way is a simple, easy way to maximize the value of the time you are putting in to social media.

If you have any question about this blog post or would like help creating an email newsletter campaign, please email Chris@RoofPal.com.

Your Klout score means nothing - how influential is your roofing company online, really?

As a roofing contractor, virtually everything you tweet or post serves as a means to ultimately increase your revenue. You are either trying to create awareness, build a favorable reputation, establish personal connections with existing and potential customers, demonstrate your competency, or call those you are connected to into a specific desired action. Your ability to increase revenue as a result of your social media activity determines your online influence.

You may be familiar with Klout or similar services that report your social media (online) influence as a single numeric score. I check my Klout score periodically and participate in giving +K's to folks as a means of interaction and goodwill, but the truth is I think current online influence scores available are complete crap and you should pay them no attention.

The True Measure Of Influence
Influence is the ability to get people to do what you want. When you tweet or post a link to some kind of content or offer, you do so in hopes that the people you are connected to will click on that link and take the desired action, then re-tweet or share it with their connections to increase the total potential reach of your message (and ultimately your sales). The higher % of desired actions taken per message you tweet or post, the more influential you are online. But there is no way for a service like Klout to know if the ultimate action you intended actually transacted.

Online influence scores are all based upon algorithms, which should not be confused with formulas. The square footage of a roof is a formula. Your total number of connections along with a certain number link clicks, re-tweets or likes, comments and shares having absolute effect on your online influence score is an algorithm. There is some math used, but there are also many assumptions. These services are trying to determine the quantitative value of the relationship of these individual factors and actions to each other but they will never be able to describe why it happened, let alone predict your ability to initiate desired behavior in the future.

There are three kinds of measures to focus on: descriptive (what happened), diagnostic (why it happened), and predictive (what might happen). Online influence scores are purely descriptive measures (for example, your Klout score purely reflects your social media activity, and particularly on Twitter). But don't confuse activity with influence - I can be extremely active without being successful in getting you to hire me to help you with marketing just as much as I can be fairly inactive but highly successful in earning your business.

Klout is fantastic at understanding what you tweet or post about, but it does not tell you why you have been active, why you have been successful in getting others to take action, and it certainly does not predict how you will get others to take action in the future. And they punish you for taking a few days off by lowering your score, treating reduced activity as declining influence.

Influencers Aren't Social Broadcasters
The more connections you have the more opportunity there is for people to see your message, take action and then share it with their networks. Outside of a few celebrities closely aligned with a particular area of expertise or a natural connection (like Oprah with books that housewives would enjoy), there is an inherent problem with individuals or companies having disproportional amounts of connections because social media doesn’t scale well.

As a roofing company, if you have over 1,000 followers on Twitter, friends on Facebook or connections on LinkedIn, you are going to have an inherently lower amount of individual interaction and activity with your connections than those with less than 1,000. When you get beyond that level, meaningful interaction cannot happen unless there are multiple people actively monitoring your accounts 24/7/365. Unless you are Chipotle, Levis, Apple, or some other mega-brand with built-in awareness and consumer loyalty, it is those real conversations and interactions that help you (the small-medium sized regional business) develop relationships, build trust, earn mentions, re-tweets, Likes, comments, and shares of your posts, and ultimately... new opportunities to bid jobs.

The more connections you have, the more you simply become a broadcaster. Your timeline is cluttered to the point that you’d likely have to actively seek out tweets or posts from a specific person or company in order to guarantee that you saw something they posted and be able to interact with them about it (and let's face it, there are very few if any that you actually do this with). Otherwise you might scroll down to the activity posted in the past hour (at best) and interact with just those you see. It's pure chance they posted during the time you were online. Also, above 1,000 connections there is a diminishing expectation of a reply to comments, questions, Likes, re-tweet's, and direct messages. Worst yet, the more connections you have the more you begin to feel compelled to simply distribute sell-sell-sell messages, which is a complete turn-off to those on the receiving end.

At some level you stop engaging people and become a broadcaster because you have no other choice. If someone with less than 1,000 connections tweets or posts a question, those they are connected to expect that this is an invitation to a conversation. If someone with over 1,000 (and especially 10,000+) connections tweets or posts a question, most people they are connected to realize the question is rhetorical. The number of connections you have becomes a sort of barometer of engagement expectations. If I see that I am one of 2,500 "friends" of yours on Facebook, I assume you could care less about anything I post and just hope that your barrage of sales-focused posts eventually gets me to call you to re-roof my office building.

Recommendation
A couple of weeks ago I went through my entire list of "friends" on Facebook, clicking on every single profile to try to determine the fit to RoofPal. It took a few hours, but shockingly I found that 25% of all of my connections were non-roofing industry related (there were a lot of website developers, "models", SEO specialists, marketers, etc. that had sent me random invitations to connect). I un-friended everyone whom I wouldn't bother interacting with online. Now when I am on Facebook, every single post I see in my News Feed matters. I can Like, comment, share, and message with everything and everyone I see, and it makes sense for my business. I've been pretty good with LinkedIn, so next up is Twitter.

I recommend you streamline your connections in a way that makes sense for your company. Cut out the noise that clutters your ability to interact on a meaningful level with those you are connected to. Show the human side of your company (see my blog post titled "Stop Selling! Social Media is for Creating Relationships Through Communities"). Create awareness of your company, but really work on building a favorable reputation, establishing personal connections with existing and potential customers, mix in demonstration of your competency to roof, and then (sparingly) call your connections to action to hire you. If you do this, your ability to increase revenue as a result of your social media activity will greatly improve your real online influence, regardless of your Klout score.

If you have any questions about online influence or would like help with a roofing social media strategy, please email Chris@RoofPal.com.

How to Properly Measure Social Media Success

There are literally hundreds of metrics on social media, but most of them provide no real value. Who really cares how many followers you have on Twitter, or "friends" or "fans" you have on Facebook? It doesn't matter how many posts per day you put out there. What really matters is everything that happens after you post or tweet.

Did you grab attention? Did you cause people to want to share? Did you initiate a discussion? Did you cause people to take an action? Did your participation deliver economic value? These are the outcomes you want from social media, and below are three recommendations from RoofPal on how to measure your real success online, regardless of the social media site(s) you participate on.

Conversation Rate
Simply, this is the number of comments or replies per post. You want to create a virtual water cooler so you can have meaningful conversations with your audience. I am not proposing that you just be provocative and say ridiculous things just to get people to comment - you want large volumes of people adding to the conversation, asking follow-up questions, and participating in adding new value.

Amplification Rate
This is the rate at which your connections share your content with their network. On Twitter, this is the number of re-tweets per tweet. On Facebook and Google Plus, this is the number of shares per post. On your blog or YouTube, this is the number of share clicks per post or video. You want to give your audience content they consider to be of such value and interest that they want to share it.

It is also important to understand what types of content causes increased amplification, when it happens and where (geographically) it is happening. Once you know this, you can fine-tune what you post to increase the likelihood everything you post will be shared.

Applause Rate
This is the rate at which your audience enjoys the content you share and endorses it to their connections. It also increases your placement in search (especially Google) for those connected to those you are connected to (for more, please see my blog post titled "Social media directly influences search rankings").

On Twitter, this is the number of "Favorite" clicks per tweet. On Facebook, this is the number of "Likes" per post. On Google Plus, this is the number of +1's per post. On your blog and on YouTube, this is the number of +1s and "Likes" per post or video.

A really good fourth metric would be Economic Value, but that is a much more in-depth conversation for another day (and another blog post). If you would like to discuss the economic value of social media for roofing or would like assistance setting up a social media metric tracking system, please email me at Chris@RoofPal.com.

How to Get your Roofing Company Started with Social Media

If you own or work at a roofing company that hasn’t bought into social media yet, the message is simple: it is time to finally jump on the bandwagon! People are online right now talking about your company whether you like or not, so if you don’t engage in the conversation you risk losing your customers.

To get you started, here are seven sequential steps to follow that will help you develop a presence and be relevant on social media:

Define your offers and customers
The first thing you should do before engaging in online marketing or social media marketing is to write down exactly what it is you are trying to promote (new construction, re-roofing, roof maintenance, roof cleaning, reflective coatings, solar installation, etc.) and define your target customers (homeowners, HOA managers, building owners, property managers, facility managers, multi-housing associations, etc.).

Sign-up for social media
The big ones are Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, and LinkedIn. I would also recommend blogging. I use Blogger since it is owned by Google and is favored in their search results. Facebook allows you to create a business fan page that allows you to get some decent analytics on traffic, but people have to find you or be recommended (as opposed to reaching out to them and offering to connect through a personal page branded as your company).

Identify a social media manager
Managing multiple social networks is a daunting task. It's not rocket science, but it does take time and skill. I recommend doing this before you start posting content, requesting friends and adding followers.

I also recommend using free tools like Ping.fm and HootSuite to gather mentions of your brand, industry or search terms and review the success of your posts through real-time statistics. However, I do not recommend using it to schedule your posts and Tweets though (for more, please read my blog post titled "Auto-Posting to Facebook Decreases Likes and Comments by 70%"). Once you get the hang of the free tools, there is also paid services like SproutSocial (plans range from $9 to $49 with a 30-day free trial) that does all of that plus it allows you to take all of those you are connected to and create contacts out of them which you can manage in the system and track engagement, has one inbox for all of your messages from all the networks, and allows you to track check-ins at FourSquare and Gowalla.

Post updates
It is important to have good content on your social media pages before you start adding friends and followers. When you try to find friends, the first thing they will do is look at the page to see if they want to follow you. You need to give them a reason to connect with you first. What kind of content? Provide valuable information about the industry. Post pictures of your roofers working and before & after pictures of jobs. On YouTube, post short videos of jobs (before, during and after), commercials you have made, how you practice safety, types of roof maintenance, video customer testimonials, etc.

Find friends and followers
Twitter and Google+ are by far the easiest to build a network. Search keywords like "need roofer", "roof leak", "roofers", etc. to find followers. Also consider terms your potential customers would use (for example, "property management", "property manager", "facility manager", etc.). Once you start connecting with people, these sites will begin to understand the kind of person you want to connect with and will recommend similar profiles. Also, find your competitors' profiles and offer to connect with the people with are connected with them.

Engage with friends and followers
Your first priority should be building a relationship with people, not pitching your roofing services. "Like" and comment on their posts. Congratulate them on successes. Show them that an actual human being is behind your company's profile and that you take the time to learn about them and care enough to connect with them. Most social media sites will inform you of birthday's that day. Wish them a happy birthday (and maybe offer them a limited time free roof inspection or discount on roof cleaning).

Stay current
Sign up for alerts to be emailed or even sent to your phone when people engage with you via your social networking sites (at least in the beginning) so you can quickly respond. Timing is everything with social media. People come in, look around and post, then get out. If you are responding a day or two after the fact, it is almost pointless.

If you have any questions about getting started with social media, or would like assistance setting up your roofing company's social media networks, generating content and making connections, please email Chris@RoofPal.com.

5 Tips for Better SEO Results

You want to be found online by homeowners and/or building owners and property/facility managers they search on Google, Yahoo! and Bing, so here are five easy tips that will help you, the roofing contractor, get found more often in search engines:

Well-Written Title Tags
Your target keyword(s) should be displayed in the page title as close to the beginning of the page title as possible. When your website shows up, Google bolds the SEO keyword(s) in the title tag used by the user in the search to make it easier for their eyes to see relevant listings.

If your title tag is not well-written for search engines, your content may not rank well enough to be found.

Relevant and Well-Written Description Tags
When a user reads the listings on a search result page, their eye is skimming the title, and secondarily reading the description. If your description is weak in comparison to your competitors’ descriptions on the same search results page, you can miss out on click-through's.

For the best SEO results, your page's Meta titles and Meta descriptions must be written in a way that engages the visitor and so that it is keyword-relevant in order to be found by users and to convert click-throughs from the search results page.

Relevant Content
Google’s recent Panda updates are proof that content is still the most important thing to get strong SEO results. Don't short-change this - you need enough content to earn authority with Google, Yahoo! and Bing. SEO results are driven by quality content written to meet the needs of your audience, and lots and lots of it.

Engaging Calls-to-Action
If your SEO objective is to produce sales-ready leads, then getting qualified visitors to your website is only half of the equation. It serves no purpose to strive for SEO results that drive traffic to your website if you can’t convert a good percentage of visitors into real sales-ready leads. Experiment with calls-to-action to find the right one(s) for your company.

Social Search Drives SEO Results
Even though it is late 2011, many roofing contractors still ignore social media for a variety of reasons (lack of understanding, lack of time, don't believe it matters, etc.). Both Google and Bing use as ranking signals regarding how much of your website’s content is shared across social media (and by whom). Google is using its +1 sharing button and Bing is using Facebook Likes as ranking signals. Google is also beginning to track the extent of content sharing on Google+ (their new social network).

You will improve SEO results when you make it easy for your website content to be shared through social media, contributing to social search success. Your employees should share your content and encourage customers to share it as well. Blog content is another great formats for social sharing.

If you have any questions about this blog post, or would like assistance with roofing website optimization for search and sharing, please email Chris@RoofPal.com.

Does Bad Spelling and Grammar Affect Your Google PageRank?

If your roofing website (or individual web pages) currently have a low PageRank with Google, it may be possible that this could (in part) be a result of poor spelling and grammar.

Matt Cutts, who works for Google's Search Quality group (specializing in search engine optimization issues) recently made the correlation between low PageRank and poor spelling in a Google Webmaster Help video.

In responding to a question about whether spelling and grammar matter when Google evaluates site quality, Cutts said “We noticed a while ago that, if you look at the PageRank of a page — how reputable we think a particular page or site is — the ability to spell correlates relatively well with that. So, the reputable sites tend to spell better and the sites that are lower PageRank, or very low PageRank, tend not to spell as well.”

Cutts says that spelling and grammar aren’t currently used as a “direct signal” for search ranking, but that “I think it would be fair” to use them in that way.

Google has been very clear that overall site quality and usability is part of what Panda is looking at. The question “Does this article have spelling, stylistic, or factual errors?” is even one of 23 questions that webmasters should ask themselves in relation to the Panda changes. Similar questions include “How much quality control is done on content?” and “Was the article edited well, or does it appear sloppy or hastily produced?”

Mr. Cutts also mentions in the video that Google has studied ways to determine the reading level of content on the web, and that this type of analysis “would be pretty interesting to explore as a potential quality signal.” Interestingly, Google added a reading level filter to its advanced search results.

The bottom line is that there is no proof that poor spelling or grammar directly affects your PageRank, but it is definitely something to ensure is not an issue just in case.

If you have any questions about this blog post, or would like an independent roofing website evaluation performed, please email Chris@RoofPal.com.

Auto-Posting to Facebook Decreases Likes and Comments by 70%

Automatically publishing content to your Facebook News Feed through 3rd-party applications like HootSuite, TweetDeck, and Networked Blogs receive an average of 70% fewer "Likes" and comments, according to a new study by Applum.

Why Does This Happen?

The difference is likely due to Facebook reducing the prominence of posts published by third-party API's - collapsing all recent updates from the same ones a user would otherwise see.

Likes and comments increase an individual post’s prominence in the Facebook News Feed, which increases impressions and improves the likelihood of clicks, so RoofPal's recommendation is for roofing contractors to stop using auto-posting applications and switch to manual posting if you want potential and existing customers to actually see your posts, Like them and comment on them.

Time vs. Value
Many roofing contractors also update Facebook automatically by syncing their Twitter posts or auto-converting their blog post headlines. This does increase efficiency by eliminating the need to copy and paste headlines and links from one platform to another, but it is not optimal as different platforms have different publishing capabilities and norms. For example, Facebook allows for rich media posts so authors can select a thumbnail image and caption along with posting a link and headline. It’s typical for Twitter accounts to post up to a dozen times a day, but that volume could be viewed as spam on Facebook. Auto-posts then appear robotic and less compelling to those who may see it in their News Feed.

Which 3rd-Party Apps are the Worst?
EdgeRank Checker has revealed empirical data that automatically-published posts perform worse than manually published ones. Analyzing over 1 Million Facebook updates by more than 50,000 pages with a combined reach of over 1 Billion fans (including duplicates). It then calculated the engagement ratio of the total Likes and comments on a Page’s post, divided by the total fans of the Page at the time of the post for the ten most popular third-party publishing APIs. Compared to the engagement of posts published manually to Facebook’s web or mobile interfaces, the reduction in engagement ratios of the top third-party publishing APIs were:
 • HootSuite – 69% reduction
 • TweetDeck – 73% reduction
 • Sendible – 75% reduction
 • Networked Blogs – 76% reduction
 • RSS Graffiti – 81% reduction
 • Twitter – 83% reduction
 • Publisher – 86% reduction
 • twitterfeed – 90% reduction
 • dlvr.it – 91% reduction
 • Social RSS – 94% reductions

The Bottom-Line
On average, posts published through a 3rd-party auto-posting application had approximately 70% fewer Likes and comments than those published through Facebook’s first-party interfaces (manually). Also, if a user’s News Feed contains multiple posts from a single API (whether from a single author or several different Pages and friends), the posts are collapsed and must be unfolded to be seen.

It is well worth the extra minute to manually craft a Facebook post by hand than auto-posting because you are sacrificing a lot of social media performance and return on investment to save what ulimately amounts to a very small amount of additional time and effort.

Questions? Need Help?
If you have questions about this post, or would like assistance with your roofing social media strategy, please email Chris@RoofPal.com.

Is Your Email Address Causing you to Lose Roofing Jobs?

My email address is Chris@RoofPal.com. Based on that alone, if you had to guess the number of employees who work at RoofPal, would you estimate it is a large, medium or small business?

As you interact with potential customers, often your email address becomes visible - in the email you send, on your social media profile, on your business card, on your website, etc. Depending on the kind of customer you are looking to attract, the way your company structures email addresses could be sending the wrong impression.

Scenario

Let's say you are a commercial roofing contractor and are trying to get work with a large property management company that makes capital improvement decisions on several shopping centers and professional buildings in your metropolitan area. The property manager wants to know that your roofing company is competent and capable enough to handle the business you are asking for.

The Problem with Your Email Address

If your email address is Bob@TheRoofPros.com (or God forbid something like TheRoofPros@gmail.com) and the guy from the other roofing company trying to get that same work has the email address Jim.Smith@SuperRoofers.com, if you both are recommending the same systems at a similar cost, the final major category of consideration would be capability. The property manager who will make the decision as to which roofing contractor to award the business might (even subconsciously) wonder if The Roof Pros has enough roofers and backoffice staff to adequately support this increased volume of work.

Perception Issue

What most property managers likely don't know is that the in-the-field roofers themselves typically make up the largest % of headcount and don't typically have a company-issued email address. Most single-state or regional roofing contractors don't have enough backoffice personnel (those who typically are the ones with company-issued email addresses) to require first and last name email naming standards unless there are a couple people with the same first name. It doesn't matter that they don't know this - if his or her perception is that you are a small roofing contractor and the other guy is a medium or large roofing contractor, then the assumption will likely be that either you aren't big enough to handle all this new work, or you do have enough people ready to take it on, but only because you have little else to work on right now (neither is a perception you want). I'm not saying that is true, but you may spend unnecessary time disproving this perception and in some cases may not get a job (or even the opportunity to bid a job) simply because of this perception.

The Solution

To eliminate this perception, the easiest strategy is to simply issue company email addresses using both first and last name - even if you only have 3 people with company-issued email addresses. If you are reading this blog post and have the first name only email address issue, I would recommend speaking with the person who manages your email accounts about setting up first and last name accounts and linking them to your first name only accounts. It will take some time to get those who already have your first name only account to update their contact list (or you can just use both and have one forward to the other), but the short-term pain should be worth it in the end if you can avoid losing a big job in the future because the perception is your roofing company is "too small".

Questions?

If you have any questions about this blog post or would like to discuss roofing marketing strategy concepts in detail, please email me at Chris@RoofPal.com (yes, RoofPal is a very small company - if you are looking for a large, expensive marketing firm you might want to look elsewhere).

Internal Linking on your Website and Blog is Critical for SEO

In terms of search engine optimization (SEO), internal linking on your roofing website and blog is absolutely critical.

Here are four reasons why doing a good job at this is so valuable to a roofing contractor:

1. Internal linking tells Google, Yahoo! and Bing that you think your own webpage you are linking to contains valuable content. If you aren't endorsing your own content, why should anyone else do it?

2. Internal linking enhances the visitor's experience on your website. Leading home/building owners and property/facility managers to other related content and information will give them all the information they need that you have to offer.

3. Internal linking reduces your bounce rate. When someone views a page on your website, giving them additional pages to link to will keep bounce rate at a minimum since they aren't going to one page and leaving. This helps your pages rank better in search results.

4. Internal linking improves indexing. Google and other search engine bots can easily travel from one page to the next, contributing to that web page being indexed quicker than normal. Again, this helps your pages rank better in search results.

There are two major types of internal links. First are in-content links, which are links in the page that lead to other related pages on your website or blog. Second are navigation links, which are related keywords and categories for your pages which are usually listed in a navigation-style sidebar or header/footer.

Every page on your roofing website and blog is its own entity. In the SEO world, that means every page must have its own keywords that tells search engines what it is about. Many blogs prompt you to add keywords so searchers looking for content on a specific topic know that your page is relevant to their search.

Establish internal linking when you create the page
For in-content links, I recommend incorporating those in your new web page or blog post for any words you use to similar content throughout your website and blog as you create it. Upon publication, your next step should be to build at least two internal links coming in to the new page or post from your existing pages where there is a natural fit.

I recommend you set up navigation links as part of your website framework (so they appear on all pages).

Can you have too many internal links?
Too much of anything is bad. Having no internal links is obviously not good, and having too many isn't good either (you need to strike a balance).

A general rule of thumb is 1-5 internal links per 500 words, so if you have a 1,500 word blog post you should have 3-15 links. It is not recommended to link multiple words to the same page, but sometimes it is helpful if that page you want to link to have multiple extremely relevant keywords.

If you have any questions about internal linking or search engine optimization, or would like help with creating roofing website content or blogging, please email Chris@RoofPal.com.