Chapter 1 — Select Roofing Contractors: The Foundations For Good SEO
At Eso-Exo Web Development, we pride ourselves in ethical business practices. Our Co-Founder Mr. Carver, was displeased with his previous experience within the industry and created his own company with the help of Mr. Todd. The company name stands for translating an esoteric idea and putting fingers to keyboards to make an exoteric website design. Our company specializes in Website Development and Search Engine Optimization for businesses under 25 employees. We want to offer these powerful tools to companies that would otherwise be priced out. SEO in particular seems out of reach for many and we want to change that notion. Starting with this blog, we want to add our voice to the conversation, showcase a different client each entry and discuss how SEO can be improved for small business websites with a few minor changes. Of course we won’t be giving away our secret sauce so to speak, but we will at least show you how to grill the burger. Before we begin, our website can be found here and we are a short email away from getting you started with a brand new website or marketing campaign. We promise our goal is to not sell you, we simply point out what is on your list of “to-do’s” before you attempt to break into the online sphere.
Back in 2016 when the company was founded, Mr. Carver’s Cousin had also recently started a business and invited him to a small business networking event hosted weekly by a company called BNI. It was a great opportunity to network, showcase public speaking skills and interact with small businesses facing similar challenges in the community. From this modest start, Eso-Exo (which at the time was Carver Strategies) gained momentum and clients. BNI carried over as the business moved to Fort Collins CO. Due to the nature of networking, most of the clients of our business we referrals, many from BNI originally. In Fort Collins, this was no different, one happy client led to another through word of mouth. Mr. Stanevich of Select Roofing Contractors was no different. He had BNI meetings each week with our company, watching its progress, satisfied customer testimonials and bi-yearly showcases of our most impressive projects. When his digital marketing contract expired he approached us to upgrade everything, from his website to his SEO campaign. We were happy to help because we recognized that Select Roofing Contractors was an honest roofer and an award-winning roofing company with a huge portion of the local businesses as clients.
First things first, the Select Roofing Contractors website was an outdated WordPress website which loaded abysmally and displayed some very out-of-date content. We understand this blog is supposed to be about SEO, but this client is a prime example of getting your ducks in a row long before you jump in head first with marketing. Imagine this — a client finds your website through a huge SEO campaign you’ve just launched. The SEO was strong, so you were able to snag the visitor, but the website looks old and isn’t well organized. Additionally, there photos are a bit small, load slowly and there doesn’t seem to be any recent work or projects displayed. The potential client then goes to another website, a competitors website. Your SEO basically just gave your competition new business. All it required was a new website to match the SEO and boom, there’s a visitor which becomes a conversion. The second lesson to take away from this is: SEO is only as powerful as your willingness to be committed to your online presence. That means, keeping the website up-to-date, posting content to different platforms such as the website and social media, and never taking an extended break from the online sphere your business occupies. Breaks, gaps, and time off will kill a business’s success online.
Back to Select Roofing Contractors, we sat down with the owner, running him through our biggest issues with his current website, listening to his feedback of additions he wanted to include as well as covering the elements of the current site that really shined through the flaws. We love his color scheme, the professional aesthetic of his brand and the numerous awards Select Roofing Contractors have won, specifically for the quality of their roofing services. After two months, we were able to produce a website he was blown away by. The key differences between the website were: judicious use of big powerful images of his completed commercial roofing projects, a much easier to navigate website and focus on good content. Good content means we built pages to cover SRC’s awards, lengthily list of client projects and a gallery only page for those client who wanted to skip to words and get right to the meat of roofing. This sets up an opportunity in all three places to keep the website continuously updating, never staying static for long which is excellent for SEO. Allowing the design to facilitate easy SEO without just worrying about keywords, meta data and alt tags is key. Those factors are important, but a constantly moving, changing evolving website is way more important for long-term success and these are things to be thinking about very early on in the process, before the nitty-gritty SEO details are even being discussed.
Once the site was nearing it’s final stages we began talking to our client about SEO. We did our own keyword research, but the experts know their industry more than a handful of marketers putting in a few hours behind an algorithm prediction tool. Here’s what we mean, you don’t need to hire an SEO team to determine what words customers use to find you. Run an HVAC business? Maybe heating and cooling repair or installation are big keywords for your geolocation and it didn’t require me to have an annual subscription to MOZ (an SEO software company) to figure that out. For Select Roofing Contractors their two biggest keywords were obvious, Commercial Roofing and Residential Roofing. There we’re others we discovered in our research, but that is just icing, if you can nail down SEO on the prime keywords, you will excel in marketing your business online. We ensured the titles of each page highlighted keywords, added meta data which also featured keywords and alt tagged photos with the very same. These are all small steps we will cover in more detail in a future blog. For now its important to remember to write your content organically. If there’s no room for “Commercial Roofing in Fort Collins” within your content, either change it entirely or don’t include those keywords.
Many people have this incorrect assumption that Google’s algorithm is simple enough to scan a page see a keyword and say “these people are roofers” it really requires a bit of finesse. SEO experts are starting to learn that the algorithm is years ahead of where we thought it would be. It’s beginning to prioritize readability, organization and design over simple keyword stuffing and bad content being spammed everywhere. In the case of Select Roofing Contractors, we only had to talk about their awards in great detail to achieve this affect. It’s important for two factors, it shows clients that SRC is trustworthy and honest while also convincing Google through legitimate content that when we use “award-winning roofing contractors” as a keyword in blogs, or social media we aren’t making it up. Spamming keywords is bad because it’s hollow. Each keyword needs to be backed with genuine content to assert that when you link or post a keyword, there’s plenty to back it up. The SRC about page is littered with awards and their project page is filled with happy clients, beautiful photos and detailed descriptions of the services provided.
We know it sounds very simple and stupid to advise those starting with SEO to “post good content” but that serves as the foundation for everything we will discuss in future articles here. Having a structured website which encourages weekly or monthly updates while also using that time to craft good content is what sets a bad website apart from a good website in the eyes of both Google and visitors to the site. There are so many other checkboxes for SEO and digital marketing strategies, but without this foundation, all of it crumbles. Clients needs to be involved in every step of the process, because effective marketing requires more than the research of marketers, it needs experts who are not only interested in helping, but active in pushing out content. We told Select Roofing Contractors that we would handle the monthly blog, offsite materials, social media posts and testimonial management if they complimented us with continual client project write-ups, numerous photos for each project and blog ideas. Without an active part in the process and setting up the website to handle it, the progress would have been much slower. Despite 2020 being one of the worst years for small businesses attempting complex SEO strategies, SRC has weathered the storm. This is because our simplest methods for being recognized by Google (good content, a constantly updating website) stands up to shifting online spheres. Select Roofing Contractors has a solid web presence in Fort Collins, Loveland and Greely for Commercial and Residential roofing in large part due to the foundation we built our campaign on.
Worst case scenario is Select Roofing Contractors loses a chunk of their marketing budget and can only bring us on as a consultant… Due to our lengthily set up and priorities early on of designing the website the way it is and taking the time to craft legitimate content, they will suffer very little. The client of course would have to take on a boatload of responsibility, but they could manage. Which is to say, if you attempted this same thing on your own, its do-able. To review — Step one is building a website in such a way that you actually want to keep it updated and spend time on it every single week or month. Step two is write and gathering content that interests Google through organic though-out methods over keywords stuffing and spam. Step three, look into keywords you already know would generate traffic through simple experience within the industry. Step four, use those keywords in social media posts, website blogs and content updates to products/ projects/ galleries/ webpages. And that will get you further than anybody who isn’t hiring a dedicated SEO firm and you’ve saved thousands of dollars yearly. If this simple method generated a bunch of business, then reinvest that into more SEO either inhouse or like Select Roofing Contractors did, with a company like us.
To finish off this blog, go check out SRC’s website and see for yourself if what we say is true. Does their website feel stuffed with irrelevant or spammed content? Or is there a good reason to stay on the website between gorgeous photos, cool commercial roofing projects or testimonials from some residential roofing clients? Don’t forget their about page showcasing those awards we mentioned. If you need a roof, give them a call and if you need SEO give us a dial too.
