A storm came through, so somebody asked a neighbour, typed roofers near me into their phone, and rang the two or three companies that came up. Whoever could get on the roof soonest and looked legitimate got the job.
That search still runs 71,000 times a month in the United States. It is still one of the ways a homeowner finds you.
The second route is the one that changed. A homeowner now opens ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Perplexity, or reads the AI summary sitting above Google's results, and describes the problem the way they would say it out loud: a storm took shingles off my roof and I do not know if insurance covers it, or what should a new roof cost on a house this size. They get back one answer with three or four companies named in it, and they ring one of those.
Both routes are live and both end in a signed contract. On the second one, being on page one does not get you very far on its own, because the answer names only a few companies and most homeowners never scroll past it.
Both routes read the same pages. Google's crawler and the AI crawlers fetch the same website and look at the same headings, the same answers and the same evidence that you know the trade.
The page that earns you the ranking is usually the page that earns you the recommendation inside AI answers. A clear page on storm damage repair that explains what insurance covers and what it does not is what puts you at position four on Google, and it is the same page an assistant reads before it tells a homeowner to call you.
Keep focusing on SEO only and you pick up the rankings while missing the questions where an assistant recommends someone else. Run the two together and every page you publish does both jobs at once.
Done properly this gets you three things: rankings on the Google searches that bring inspections, recommendations in AI answers across every major assistant, and signed jobs from both.
Key takeaway: Homeowners now find roofers through two routes, Google results and AI answers, and if you follow this guide the same set of pages will win you both.
Dingers Roofing & Construction is a locally owned roofing company in Wichita, Kansas. No franchise behind them, no private equity owner, no national advertising. They did the work properly instead, and their results in SEO and AI search now match companies operating in every state.
Their Domain Rating is 18. That is a number most agencies would tell you rules out competitive terms altogether. They hold third place for commercial roofing, a search of 36,000 a month that our data scores at difficulty 49.
Those searches matter because of who runs them. A facilities manager searching commercial roof replacement is not browsing, and neither is a homeowner searching storm damage roof repair the morning after a hailstorm.
| Search | Position and detail |
|---|---|
| roof installation | #4 of 46,000 monthly searches, difficulty 6 |
| commercial roofing | #3 of 36,000 monthly searches, difficulty 49, and the highest-value term in the set at $7.05 a click |
| roof leak repair | #4 of 27,000 monthly searches, difficulty 2 |
| storm damage roof repair | #5 of 15,000 monthly searches, difficulty 0 |
| commercial roof replacement | #3 of 13,000 monthly searches, difficulty 0 |
| commercial roof repair | #2 of 12,000 monthly searches, difficulty 39 |
| metal roof repair | #4 of 10,000 monthly searches, difficulty 0 |
| new roof installation | #1 of 9,100 monthly searches, difficulty 38 |
Three patterns produced that. They went after commercial work as well as residential, and six of these eight are commercial terms. Commercial roof replacement is 13,000 searches a month at difficulty 0, because almost every roofing website in the country is written for homeowners only.
They also give every roof type and every job type its own page rather than one page called Services, so metal roofing, roof repair, roof installation, inspections and commercial roofing each rank for their own cluster.
And they rank well above their weight class. At Domain Rating 18 they hold first place for new roof installation at difficulty 38, and second for commercial roof repair at difficulty 39. Depth of coverage on one subject is doing the job that domain authority usually does.
None of this needed a franchise or a storm-chasing sales team. Their 1,301 organic keywords bring 83,818 visits a month, 234 of those keywords sit in the top three, and the traffic is worth $301,816 a month in equivalent paid clicks. They spend about $2,598 a month on ads, so the organic side is returning roughly 116 times what the advertising costs them.
In the guide below we show you how to do SEO and AEO for roofers the same way, using our five-step framework.
All figures from ContentMonk, US data, August 2026. Dingers Roofing & Construction has no affiliation with ContentMonk and is not a customer.
Below we walk through each of the five steps of how to do SEO and AEO for roofing companies, in order: finding the searches and prompts that bring inspections, working out why other companies are winning them, building better pages, getting mentioned on the sources AI trusts, and keeping the results once you have them. Run all five and you get rankings on Google, recommendations in AI answers, and signed jobs from both.
Everything here is specific to roofing. The examples are real searches homeowners and facilities managers run, the difficulty scores are real, and the third-party sources named in step 4 are the manufacturer directories and trade platforms that carry weight in this trade rather than a generic list.
Start by writing down every search and every question that comes from somebody ready to book an inspection.
A bottom-of-funnel prompt is one where the person has already decided they need a roofer and is choosing which one to ring. Who can tarp my roof today is one of those. How long does a shingle roof last is not, because that person is not buying anything this month. Both are worth having eventually, but only the first one puts a crew on a roof.
| Keyword they type into Google | Prompt they give an AI assistant |
|---|---|
| storm damage roof repair | A storm took shingles off my roof, who do I call and will insurance pay? |
| emergency roof repair near me | My roof is leaking in the rain right now, who can tarp it today? |
| roof replacement cost | What should a new roof actually cost on a house my size? |
| hail damage roof inspection | Is it worth getting a hail inspection after last week's storm? |
| metal roof installers near me | Who fits standing seam metal roofs near me and is it worth the extra? |
The obvious terms are the hardest. Roofers near me gets 71,000 searches a month at difficulty 38, and roof repair near me gets 66,000 at difficulty 47. Those are the terms every franchise and every storm chaser in the country is already bidding on.
Now look at the specific jobs. Gutter installation near me gets 31,000 searches a month at difficulty 1 and an $11.00 click price. Storm damage roof repair gets 14,000 at difficulty 0. Emergency roof repair near me gets 9,700 at difficulty 0 with a $12.00 click. Skylight repair near me gets 2,000 at difficulty 0, and tile roof repair near me gets 700 at difficulty 0 with an $11.00 click.
Then there is the layer that belongs to roofing and almost no other trade: the insurance questions. Does insurance cover roof replacement gets 600 searches a month at difficulty 10, and roof insurance claim help gets 150 at difficulty 4. These sit between the damage and the sale, and the company that answers them properly is the company the homeowner rings.
Work through every roof type you fit, every kind of damage you repair, every town you cover and every insurance question you get asked on site. Use the words homeowners use rather than the trade terms, and do not forget commercial, which is where Dingers found most of its openings.
Whoever ranks and gets recommended today did the work to get there. Nobody is going to hand you the method, so you look at what is producing their results and build something better.
For each search on your list, check four things.
Once the research is done, everything starts with your own pages. This is the part you fully control and the part most companies skip, because a website with a gallery of finished roofs and a phone number will not rank for anything competitive.
For a page to rank and get cited, or as we prefer to put it, to influence what AI says about your market, it has to be objectively better than what is already there. Better means more actionable, backed by something only you know, and genuinely more useful to the person reading it.
A company relying only on its own website tends to reach roughly 15 to 20% AI visibility and then stall. Everything above that comes from other websites talking about you.
Backlinks from trusted domains are still one of the strongest ranking factors in Google, and those same domains are the ones AI assistants cite. One relationship pays you twice.
Roofing has something most trades do not, and it is the highest-trust listing available to you: the manufacturer certification directories. The GAF contractor locator and Master Elite status, the Owens Corning Preferred and Platinum locators, and the CertainTeed SELECT ShingleMaster directory. Homeowners are told by the manufacturers themselves to check these, and the assistants read them.
After that come Google Business Profile, which is free and feeds both the local pack and much of what appears in AI Overviews, then Angi, HomeAdvisor, Thumbtack, Yelp, Houzz, Porch, Nextdoor and the Better Business Bureau. Watch what those cost you: HomeAdvisor charges roughly $15 to $60 a lead whether or not the customer hires you, and BBB accreditation runs from a few hundred dollars up to about $4,000.
Then the trade layer and the neighbours. Roofing Contractor magazine, RoofersCoffeeShop, Roofing Insights and the NRCA on one side, and r/Roofing, r/HomeImprovement, city subreddits and local Facebook groups on the other. A Reddit thread ranks third on seo for roofing companies, which tells you how readily those threads surface on roofing queries.
Positions move, competitors publish, and models get retrained and start citing different sources. A page that named you in March can name someone else by August without anything on your site changing.
Four things to check every week: which tracked prompts stopped naming your company, which pages lost positions, which competitor started appearing where you used to, and which pages are collecting impressions without clicks.
When a page slips, improve it rather than replacing it. Put a sharper answer near the top, refresh the pricing and the dates, add whatever you have learned on roofs since you wrote it, and you keep the authority the URL has already earned.
Roofing rewards this work more than almost any trade, because the job values are large and the click prices are punishing. Here is the arithmetic for one company in one major city.
These are ten bottom-of-funnel searches in Houston, each a different intent.
| Bottom-of-funnel search | Monthly searches |
|---|---|
| roof repair houston | 1,300 |
| roof replacement houston | 800 |
| roofing company houston | 600 |
| gutter installation houston | 450 |
| roof inspection houston | 400 |
| roofers houston | 350 |
| commercial roofing houston | 350 |
| metal roofing houston | 300 |
| roof leak repair houston | 250 |
| flat roof repair houston | 30 |
That is 4,830 searches a month in one city. Only three of the ten sit at a difficulty of 21 or lower, which is a harder picture than most trades, and those three are exactly where you start. The highest click price in the set is $25.00 for roof leak repair houston, so every one of those visits is one you would otherwise be paying a great deal for.
Traffic per page varies enormously, so counting articles tells you nothing useful. One page on the right bottom-of-funnel term can carry a thousand visits a month while five others carry fifty between them. What follows is per-plan capacity: how much of the opportunity each plan lets you research, publish against and monitor at the same time.
| How you run it | What you can work at once | Organic visits per month by month 12 | Jobs per month by month 12 | Revenue earned in year 1 * |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starter, $99/mo | One town, a focused set of roof and job types | 900 | 2.7 | $80,900 |
| Pro, $199/mo | Residential and commercial plus the insurance questions | 1,800 | 5.4 | $161,800 |
| Scale, $449/mo | Multiple towns or divisions, tracked and updated together | 3,800 | 11.4 | $341,600 |
| Done for you, quoted | Our team runs the whole framework for your company | 6,500 | 19.5 | $584,300 |
* These figures are deliberately conservative. The model treats every page as an average performer, and that is not how this works in practice. When the work is done properly, one page on the right bottom-of-funnel term can outperform ten others, so real numbers are likely to be considerably higher.
Custom plans go beyond Scale, so the top self-serve row is a starting point rather than a ceiling.
Done-for-you sits higher on judgement rather than output. Our team picks winnable targets on the first pass, produces content that gets cited sooner, and does the third-party work in step 4 that busy companies postpone, with scope agreed per engagement.
On the payback: at $6,000 a job, a single signed roof covers five years of the Starter plan.
Illustrative model built on the assumptions listed above. ContentMonk data, US, August 2026. Not a guarantee of results.
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Get a Free Strategy CallAEO, or answer engine optimisation, is the work of getting your company named when a homeowner asks an AI assistant who to call. It covers ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews. In practice it means building pages that answer roofing questions clearly and getting mentioned on the third-party sources those assistants cite.
SEO gets your pages ranking in Google's list of blue links. AEO gets your company named inside an AI-generated answer, where only a few names appear at all. They rely on the same pages and the same third-party mentions, which is why running them together costs little more than running one.
Assistants build answers from pages they trust: your own site, your GAF, Owens Corning and CertainTeed certification listings, Google Business Profile, directories like Angi, local press, and the Reddit and Facebook threads where homeowners ask for a name. Companies that get recommended have accurate listings everywhere, strong pages on the work they sell, and third-party coverage backing both up.
Storms are unpredictable and referrals are finite, while search demand runs all year and rises sharply after weather events. Pages built before the storm are the ones ranking during it. Roofers near me alone gets 71,000 searches a month, and none of that traffic depends on knowing somebody.
They do different jobs. Paid leads stop the moment you stop paying, cost roughly $15 to $60 each whether or not the job closes, and are often sold to several competitors at once. A page you own keeps bringing inspections for years and belongs only to you.
Running it yourself with software starts at $99 a month, and a seven-day free trial needs no card. Agency retainers in the trades typically run from a couple of thousand a month upward depending on how many towns you cover. Our done-for-you engagements are quoted per company.
Expect the first movement around month three or four, with results compounding from there. Specific job and roof type terms move fastest, which is why the framework starts there rather than with the head terms. The forecast on this page assumes nothing happens at all for the first three months.
Yes. Google still sends the largest share of homeowner traffic, and the assistants read the pages Google ranks. Strong SEO is what makes your site visible to the crawlers that feed AI answers, so dropping it removes the foundation the AI visibility sits on.
Start a free trial to see exactly where your company stands, get the opportunities ranked in order of what is worth your time, and turn both into signed jobs. Or have our team run the five-step framework for you.