How Elevation Marketing Helped Elite Roofing Grow From a $4M Roofing Company to $19.3M in 5 Years
Table of Contents
The Background
When the team here at Elevation Marketing first began working with Elite Roofing in 2014, Elite was a rising threat in the roofing industry. Their reputation and commitment to ‘Roofing Done Right’ had served them well. However, their online presence was nearly non-existent. If they were going to continue to outpace the competition in terms of growth and market share, they were going to have to depend on more than word of mouth and their boots on the ground sales team. It was time for their website to start generating leads.
At the time. Elite Roofing had been working with an SEO company in an effort to boost their organic traffic. Unfortunately, the incumbent agency wasn’t providing the value Elite was paying for; a pain point felt by countless small businesses nationwide. When the incumbent built the Elite Roofing website, they failed to take the initiative to put Google Analytics in place. Google Analytics is a basic but essential component of any website. The metrics Google Analytics provide help a website owner determine how their site is performing, changes that need to be made and perhaps most importantly, if SEO efforts are proving fruitful. One we put Google Analytics in place, we were able to quickly determine where Elite’s traffic was coming from and just how much they were getting.
With modest traffic numbers of 3,010 users per year, Elite Roofing needed a new strategy—and our team at Elevation Marketing stepped in!
Proven Results
By implementing a cohesive digital strategy combining organic and local SEO, content, paid media, social media, PR and email marketing, as well as print and direct mail efforts, Elevation has helped build the Elite Roofing brand into a nationally recognized roofing powerhouse. Through a dynamic, data driven digital strategy, we have boosted Elite’s traffic to well above 23,000 users in the first 3 quarters of 2020 and helped the company grow into a multimillion dollar corporation.
Results
122%
INCREASE IN LEADS
122% increase of online leads since 2014. We are on pace with a 5.08% increase in online leads between 2019 and 2020.
378
REVIEWS
Google Reviews: From 10 in 2014 to 356 YTD
Google My Business Phone Calls: 113 in 90 days. More than a call a day over the past 3 months. (We don’t have annual data for local)
90% of local search appearance comes from Discovery (customers searching for the service, not the business name.)
102
KEYWORDS
102 keywords in positions 1-3 on Search Engine Results Page
Starting (almost) From Scratch
Elite Roofing has always provided quality roofing solutions in the Denver area, but their marketing strategy didn’t always live up to their roofing ability. In April 2014, Elite had a website and little else. Because Elite’s previous SEO companyOrganic SEO hadn’t set up Google Analytics, the Elevation Marketing team had no historical data with which to work. While some rudimentary SEO work had been done, we were essentially starting from scratch.
Once we got Google Analytics in place, we found that Elite was seeing modest traffic of levels of 3,010 monthly users in 2014. Since then, traffic has steadily increased year over year, particularly since 2017.
Today, Elite’s traffic is well over 23,000 users as of the end of September 2020. The largest jump we saw occurred between 2017 and 2018, when a devastating $2.3 billion storm struck Colorado on May 8, 2017.The Elevation Marketing team ran a highly effective marketing campaign centered on helping Colorado homeowners get back on their feet—and indeed, it took more than a year for local roofing contractors to get caught up on roof replacements from that infamous storm.
Even without the boosted demand from mother nature, we continued to increase Elite Roofing’s online presence through our comprehensive digital strategy boosting new users, namely through their organic acquisition channel. In roughly five years, we’ve taken Elite Roofing from 3,010 new users a year to over 23,000 new users through the first three quarters of 2020. While the organic channel was our main growth channel, we are also driving traffic through social media, referral websites, email marketing, PR, and our paid media channels.
Elite Roofing Acquisition Traffic
Steady increase in traffic year over year, particularly since 2017.
Organic SEO
Consistently, our largest source of new users on Elite’s website has been via organic search. This is due to the comprehensive organic SEO strategy we’ve implemented on and off their site. We’ve carefully structured the SEO on the Elite Roofing website to target a balance of relevant keywords, and today the results are striking. The Elite website currently ranks 1-3 on Google’s SERPs for 102 individual keywords.
Consistent, High-Quality Content
You’ll hear it again and again in the digital marketing world, but content truly is king. One of the biggest reasons for our success with organic SEO, on the Elite Roofing website, is that we’ve made consistent content a centerpiece of our digital strategy. The Elite Roofing blog is updated weekly with high-quality posts that are well-researched and SEO optimized, all while offering users genuinely helpful information. Posts are interlinked with other blog posts as well as key pages throughout the Elite Roofing website. Further, all feature a call to action that drives users to engage by following Elite on various social channels or contacting them for a roofing consultation, inspection, and more. By maintaining a consistent content strategy, the Elite website is full of helpful posts and pages that provide value to users and position the Elite Roofing brand as a leader in the roofing industry, both locally and nationally.
Kickstarting with Paid Search
Prior to engaging us, Elite Roofing had only run a very small paid search campaign. Our paid search team stepped in to expand the program, introduce a diverse keyword matchtype strategy with extensive A/B creative testing, and began conversion tracking. By introducing fundamental best practices and tapping into years of experience in paid search optimization, we were able to establish a paid search program that not only expands brand awareness but serves as a steady source of sales qualified leads.
- Average Click Through Rate (CTR) increased 912%
- Conversion rate went from 0% (leads were not tracked) to 5.81%
- Clicks increased 652% from June 2014 to 2020, while CPC’s for the same period only increased 23%
The Elevation team also tapped into display advertising to expand brand awareness and drive qualified traffic to the site. During the 2020 storm season, we drove nearly 1 million impressions and drew visitors to the site who had recently completed searches related to storm damage at at just over $1 a click. When compared to average search CPC’s in the roofing industry, which range from $20 to $60, this approach helped to expand our digital footprint at a much more cost-effective rate.
2017-2018 By The Numbers:
Prioritizing Google Local Services Ads
Local Services Ads from Google have also proven to be a major asset in building out Elite Roofing’s digital marketing strategy. Our team worked with Google just as they were rolling out the GLSA program to roofers in the Denver area. We quickly got Elite established with the Google Guarantee and were able to begin tapping into this new ad opportunity.
Backed by the built-in trust of Google’s verification system, Local Services Ads help attract customers with a vested interest in contacting a business. Since getting Elite set up, the Local Services Ads program has proven to be a major driver of qualified sales calls and has helped Elite continue to dominate local SERPs. Our spending on GLSA ads is also easily adjustable, and we increase or decrease our investment regularly depending on the time of year.
PR as a Marketing Component
Another example of the power of local marketing, effective public relations has also played a role in our marketing strategy. Working for spots in local news posts and broadcasts helps put the Elite Roofing brand in front of more local Denverites, while also helping to position Elite as an authority. Meanwhile, awards submissions have been an excellent means to show off Elite’s roofing prowess and build their resume with major accolades, including being named to the Inc. 5000 List of the Fastest-Growing Private Companies in America in 2017, 2018 and 2019 and as the 2019 Denver Business Journal Fast 50. Through our PR strategy we have successfully built a solid backlink profile from authoritative roofing pages. While PR may not be the largest component of our digital strategy, it represents a relatively low-cost channel that provides a great deal of marketing value.
Implementing Conversational Marketing
While advertisements, paid search, and organic SEO are all important, getting users to your website is only half the battle. Once there, users need to have a reason to stay, and part of this is improving the User Experience (UX) and driving greater engagement.
We introduced the Elite chatbot in early 2019 as a way to engage with users in all areas of the site. The chatbot delivers tailored messaging throughout the Elite website in order to deliver a superior UX and drive qualified leads. Today, our bot accounts for 32 percent of overall leads, making it a key component of our cohesive digital strategy for Elite.
Elite Roofing Success
By The Numbers 2017-2018
Conclusion
From their humble beginnings in 2006, Elite Roofing has come a long way. Beginning as a local construction company, Elite specialized in roofing and began to work their way toward their current status of being synonymous with superior quality residential and commercial roofing.
Elite’s roofing ability, values, and commitment to “Roofing Done Right” have brought them far—and a revamped, multifaceted marketing strategy from Elevation Marketing has helped to get them there.
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