Monday, February 13, 2012

Software solutions can speed the roofing process, saving time and money



Your customers are changing. The first generation of kids who grew up texting, buying music on iTunes, purchasing items on eBay and coding their own MySpace pages are now graduating from college. Many have purchased homes of their own, and some are now working as property managers, facility managers, multihousing community managers and homeowners association managers. In other words, the first generation of children who only know how to purchase something by clicking a button are now making decisions about roofing. What this means is the industry as a whole needs to adapt to them.

In the next five years, these kids are going to completely change the way services are bought because they want convenience and simplicity. If your roofing company isn’t “push-of-a-button” easy to work with, one day these consumers will stop calling or simply send you a text message informing you they no longer need your services.

Enabling the immediate transfer of information has tremendous benefit to roofing contractors. Increased speed, improved accuracy and significant reduction of manual tasks create an obvious case for reduced costs of labor, inventory and operating costs, as well as significantly improved employee and customer satisfaction.

Real-time data processing would allow you to achieve cost reductions and productivity gains by building an inspection report and proposal while you conduct the inspection. Customers could have the report in hand, sign-off on the recommendations and actually remit the down payment before your technician is off the roof.

In addition, requests for service or leak repair work could be automatically routed to your scheduling system, which would alert your technicians through their cell phones, giving them all the information they need, including GPS-guided directions to the facility. All work can be tracked and reported back to your office and to the customer as it is happening. While on the roof, your technicians could access all the roofing history for the building with a few clicks and update the records with pictures, videos, drawings and notes based on the work performed. Invoices would be automatically generated and sent to the homeowner or the building owners’ Accounts Payable representative instantaneously, significantly reducing the actual cash-flow cycle time.

There are several software companies that specifically cater to the roofing industry. AccuLynx, Dataforma, Facility Control Systems, RoofLogic and dozens others offer solutions that range in functionality, usability and price. With real-time data processing, everything is updated in the system as it happens. What now takes up to a week manually can be done in a couple hours.

THE BOTTOM LINE
It’s time for the roofing industry to evolve. Our processes are manual, complicated, costly and, frankly, take too long. If they haven’t already, your customers will soon demand you become “click-of-a-button” easy to work with. They want information and they want it now. As an industry we can no longer do things the way we’ve always done them. Real-time information isn’t the flavor of the month. It is 2012, and it is time we embrace the information age before we are left behind.


Sunday, February 5, 2012

SEO Periodic Table - How to get your roofing website to the top of Google search


I found this great infographic on what is actually important for search engine optimization (SEO) and how important each factor is, and wanted to share it with my friends in the roofing industry (contractors, manufacturers, suppliers, and distributors).

What is most important to getting your roofing website or blog to the top of Google search? Here is a list (in no particular order):

Content quality. All pages of your website need to be well written, and there must be a substantial amount of high quality original information.

Content research. You should do fairly extensive research on which keywords are the most used to search for the content you are sharing.

HTML titles. Make sure your HTML title tags contain keywords that are relevant to the content on the page.

Architecture crawl. Make sure search engines can easily "crawl", or scan for current information, all the pages on your website or blog.

Link quality. Make sure the links on your website or blog go to trusted, high-quality websites.

Link text. Don't use link to another page on your website or blog using the words "click here" (or something similar), highlight a good keyword or phrase that makes sense for the destination page and make that word or phrase become the linked text.

Trust/authority. Your website or blog will become a trusted authority as a result of lots of inbound links, many shares on social media, and other similar factors.

Physical proximity. The closer geographically you are to someone, the better.


Additionally, here are the second-tier items that will help get your roofing website or blog to the top of Google search:

Words and phrases. On each page, make sure you are using the words and phrases that you want it to be found for when someone does a Google search.

Engaging content. Use your website or blog's analytics to see not only how many page visits you get, but how long people spend looking at the page. Are they opening it and then clicking back or closing the window quickly after, or are they reading the whole page?

Fresh content. Are you producing new content and is it relevent to the "hot" search topics of your industry?

HTML description. Make sure your meta description tags accurately describe what the page is about.

Social reputation. Are people who are respected on social media sharing links to your website or blog?

History. The more someone visits your website or blog, and especially if they have "Liked" something on Facebook or shared on social media in any way, the higher other pages on your website or blog will begin to show up for them on search.


Last but not least, here are some additional items to consider that do have some impact on how your roofing website or blog will be found on Google search:

HTML headers. Make sure headlines and sub-headers use proper header tags with relevant keywords.

Page speed. The faster your page loads, the better.

URL format. The shorter a URL is, the better. Also, make sure the URL contains meaningful keywords to the topics of the webpage or blog post.

Number of links. The more external links that point to your website or blog, the better.

Social shares. The more people who share links to your webpage or blog post on social media, the better.

History. The longer your website or blog has existed, the better.

Social connections. The more those you are connected to on social media Like, comment on, re-Tweet, etc. posts containing links to your website or blog, the better.


Please also note the pink and orange sections at the bottom of the chart that discuss violations and blocking. These are some things you definitely do not want to be doing, as it will decrease your positioning in Google search.

If you have any questions about this blog post, please email me at Chris@RoofPal.com.