Contents08 sections
A roofer's website earns most of its year in a handful of storm weeks, and it either handles them or it does not. A hail line rolls through Baytown on a Tuesday afternoon, and by Wednesday morning half the neighborhood is on the phone. The people whose roofs held are pricing an inspection they had been putting off. The people whose ceilings are dripping are calling anyone who answers.
Both of them found you the same way: they typed something into Google and tapped the first result that did not make them scroll before it gave them a phone number.
01Can a Thumb Reach the Number?
Nothing else on the page matters if the phone number is not the first thing a thumb can reach. Put it in the header on every page, put it big, and make it a tel: link so tapping it dials. A number written as plain text next to the words "call today" reads on a phone the way "please leave a message" reads on a machine. Every roofer's site in Baytown has a phone number somewhere on it; the ones that book the storm work have one that dials from the top of the screen without a scroll.
02Does Emergency Tarping Need Its Own Page?
Yes. Someone whose living room ceiling is coming down does not want a free inspection scheduled for Friday. They want a tarp on the roof before it rains again tonight. If you do emergency tarping, that belongs on a page of its own, named on the menu, and priced or at least bracketed in dollars. "Emergency services available" is not a page. It is a line that reads like nobody has ever called about it. A page that says "tarp installed within four hours for two hundred and fifty dollars, credited toward the repair" reads like a business that has done this before, because it has.
03What Should the Insurance Page Say?
The most common question a homeowner has after a storm is not what the roof costs. It is whether their insurance will pay for it, and how the claim gets filed. Most roofers' sites are silent on that. A page that says plainly what a claim looks like is worth more than any headline about quality: the adjuster, the deductible, the supplements, the depreciation, how long a check takes. It answers the fear the person is sitting with, and it separates the roofers who have handled a thousand claims from the ones who are hoping the customer figures it out.
04Which Photos Should a Roofer Use?
Your own. The photograph on a roofing site of a smiling family in front of a two-story colonial in autumn colors is not from Baytown, and everyone looking at it knows. A phone photo of a hail-dented shingle you pulled off a house on Loop 201, next to the new one, is worth ten of them. So is a photo of your crew tarping a roof in the dark with a headlamp on. People trust what looks like the neighborhood they live in. Stock photography is a way of telling them you have never worked in it.
05Why Does the Google Map Matter More?
The three roofers Google shows on a map when someone searches after a storm get most of the calls, and almost none of that has to do with the website. The Google Business Profile is filled out, the address matches the website exactly down to the "Suite" abbreviation, and the reviews are recent and answered. A roofer whose website is beautiful but whose Business Profile still lists the phone number from before the last office move loses to the one whose site is plain and whose Profile is right. On every build we do, we cross-check the Profile and the website against each other before launch, same address, same hours, same phone number, same service area, so a storm week does not turn up a mismatch nobody noticed in April.
06Which Reviews Do Homeowners Read?
The recent ones, not the average. A four-point-nine over four hundred reviews with nothing posted in a year reads as a business that peaked. A four-point-six with a fresh review from last month, and the owner's answer under it, reads as a business someone can call today. Ask for a review after every job, and answer the ones you get, whether they are five stars or two. The answer under a bad one is read by ten people who will never post a review of their own, and it is where they decide whether to call.
07What Does the Site Do Between Storms?
Storm weeks pay the year, but the year has fifty-one other weeks in it, and a roofer whose site only speaks to an emergency is quiet through all of them. The pages that earn calls between storms are the ones about the boring parts of the work: what a full replacement involves, how long a repair lasts, what happens on the day the crew shows up, what a warranty covers and what it does not. Those pages catch the homeowner who noticed a curled shingle from the yard and started thinking about it. That homeowner is not in a hurry, which means they are the person most likely to compare three roofers before they call one, and the roofer whose site answered their question is the one they pick.
08What Does the Storm Week Add Up To?
A roofer's website has to hold two moods and hand off between them without a rebuild. In storm week it is a dispatch tool: number in the header, tarp service on the menu, insurance page a tap away, photographs from the storm itself if you can get them up fast enough. Between storms it is a considered-purchase brochure: what the work is, what it costs, what stands behind it, and enough about the crew that a stranger feels like they already know who is going to show up.
Get the phone number where a thumb finds it, write the insurance page, keep the Business Profile in the same state as the website, and put your own storm work on the page instead of somebody else's happy colonial, and the site does the job it was built for on the week that matters most.