Ask Google for roofing keyword ideas and it will happily hand you a truckload. Some of it is roof. A lot of it is gutters, siding, windows, skylights, shingle brands, other roofers' names, people looking for roofing jobs and people who want to install a metal roof themselves over a long weekend.
None of that is Google being careless. Keyword Planner is a metal detector, not a jeweler. It beeps at everything near the word roof, and it's on you to tell the ring from the bottle caps. Sorting one from the other is your job, and it's the difference between an account that bids on homeowners and one that bids on everyone who has ever looked up.
One Roofer's Website Seeded 2,114 Keyword Ideas in Keyword Planner
Every roofer who has advertised for a few years has built pages for the jobs that pay. Their websites are a free keyword study, if you know how to read them. Keyword Planner does the reading: hand it a roofing company's web address and it comes back with the searches those pages line up with.
We fed it the websites of the 12 roofers in our example market, Minneapolis-St. Paul, each a verified Google Search advertiser, with the location set to that market. Together they produced 8,772 unique keyword ideas. The biggest single site returned 2,114 on its own.
That's the raw material. Your market will give you different numbers, but the same shape: thousands of ideas, a few hundred worth money, and a long tail you'll spend the rest of this chapter cutting.
Two surprises came out of the keep pile in our example market. The first was how little homeowners type about insurance. Only 112 of the ideas mentioned it at all, and the biggest, "roof inspection for insurance," drew about 30 searches a month. In our reading, the insurance question lives in Google's "People also ask" boxes and in the conversation after a homeowner calls, not in what they type. Chapter 14 covers how to handle insurance work without chasing searches that barely exist.
The second was the calendar. "Ice dam removal" averaged 390 searches a month, then hit 3,600 in December alone. A roofer who steams ice dams should give that work a separate ad group with a page of its own, live from the first hard freeze and shut off once the gutters run clear. If you don't, "ice dam" goes on the negative list before the first cold snap sends you calls you can't take.
Most Roofing Keyword Ideas Have No Bid Behind Them
Of those 8,772 ideas, 7,666 came back with no top-of-page bid at all. That's 87%.
A missing bid means advertisers aren't competing for the search, and in roofing the usual reason is simple: nobody hires a roofer from it. Think "roof shingle colors," "types of roof vents" or "what is a ridge cap." Real searches, real people, no jobs.
The bids that do show up deserve a little skepticism too. Keyword Planner estimates them from broad match, so treat any top-of-page range as give or take about 30%. They're a map of where the money is, not a price list.
The Roofers Already Bidding Near You Did Your First Research
Before you seed Keyword Planner, scout the roofers who are actually writing checks to Google in your market. The ones still bidding after five years stopped guessing a long time ago. Two free tools show you who they are:
- Google's Ad preview and diagnosis tool shows a preview of the results page for a search, and you can set the location to your service area. Type "roof replacement" with your city and see who shows up.
- Google's Ads Transparency Center shows which advertisers have run ads and what they looked like.
One rule while you're looking: don't click competitors' ads to see where they go. It costs them money, it tells you nothing the preview tool won't, and it muddies everyone's data, including yours if they do it back.
Then take the websites of the roofers who keep showing up and run each one through Keyword Planner, location set to your service area. Those sites are years of paid-for trial and error, published for anyone to read. It's the closest thing you'll get to finding a competitor's estimate sheet blown onto your driveway.
Gutter and Siding Searches Need Their Own Campaign or a Negative
Many roofers also sell gutters, siding or windows, so their websites pull those searches into Keyword Planner. In our example market they weren't small. "Gutters" drew 1,600 searches a month. "Siding business near me" drew 1,300, with top-of-page bids up to $107. "Gutter service" carried the single highest bid in the whole pull, up to $232.
That's a business decision, not a keyword decision:
- If you sell it and want the work, give it its own campaign, its own ad groups and its own pages. Mixing gutter searches into a roof repair ad group wrecks the relevance you built in Chapter 4.
- If you don't sell it, or don't want to pay for it, add it as a negative keyword so your roofing ads never show for it.
Leaving it in because "it's close enough" is how a roofing budget ends up paying roofing prices for a homeowner who wanted a gutter guard.
Job Seekers and Do-It-Yourselfers Type Roofing Words Too
Next comes the crowd that will read your ad, click it, and never once need a roofer:
- Job seekers: "roofing jobs," "roofer hiring," "roofing apprentice."
- Do-it-yourselfers: "steel roofing how to install," "how to patch a roof leak," "diy roof repair."
- Material shoppers: "roofing materials," "steel roofing materials," and in our example market "skylights," which drew 2,400 searches from people mostly shopping for a product.
- Bargain hunters: anything with "cheap" or "free" in it.
All of these go on your negative keyword list, and the list has gaps unless you plug them yourself. One detail from Google trips people up: a negative doesn't automatically block its synonyms or its singular and plural forms. Google handles capitalization and misspellings for you, but "job" and "jobs," or "install" and "installation," need to be added separately.
Other Roofers' Names Come Back in Your List as Negatives
Seed Keyword Planner with competitors' sites and you'll get their names back, often with "reviews" attached. Our example-market pull was full of them, along with shingle manufacturers' names like GAF and Owens Corning.
Those go on the negative list too. A homeowner searching another roofer's name plus "reviews" is checking out someone they were already referred to, and paying to interrupt that rarely ends well. Bidding on a rival roofer's name is a separate project with separate money and lower odds, never something to slip into your main campaign. For most roofers, that's a big if.
Your own company name is the opposite. It belongs in the brand campaign from month one, where it's cheap, it protects your referrals, and it earns some of the account's first conversions.
One small check while you're in there: search your own company name on your phone and see what shows up above you. In a market where lead sellers and national remodelers advertise heavily, you may find someone else's ad sitting on top of your own name. That's the referral you earned over years, handed to whoever bid on it. The brand campaign is how you take it back, and it's one of the cheapest campaigns you'll ever run.
Manufacturer names deserve a moment of thought. "GAF roof" or "Owens Corning shingles" are usually product research, not hiring searches, so start them as negatives. If you hold a manufacturer certification and want to test those searches later, do it on purpose, in a separate ad group, with a page about that certification.
If Keyword Planner Can't Find Metal Roofing on Your Site, Neither Can Google
After you've run your competitors, run your own site. It's the quickest way to see your business the way Google's systems read it.
The results can be humbling. One of our 12 example sites returned only 15 keyword ideas, against more than 2,000 for the biggest. The likely reason is that the tool couldn't read much of what was on the pages, which is worth knowing whether or not you advertise. If you install metal roofs and nothing about metal comes back, your metal page is either missing, thin or hidden from Google's crawler. Fix the page before you buy the keyword. Chapter 4 explains why a click that lands on the wrong page costs more.
Five Close Searches, One Page, Exact Match: That's a Roofing Ad Group
Now sort the keepers by service. An ad group is a bucket, and a bucket holding a gutter, a skylight and a hail claim doesn't hold water. A typical roofing account starts with a handful of tight ones:
- Roof repair: repair and leak searches.
- Roof replacement: replacement and new-roof searches.
- Hail and storm: hail damage, storm damage, hail inspection.
- Emergency: emergency repair, if someone answers the phone after hours.
- Metal: metal roofing searches, if you install it.
- Gutters or siding: only if you sell them, and only as their own campaign.
Keep each group tight, around five or six close searches, so one ad can speak to all of them. Point every group at its own page: the repair group at your repair page, the hail group at your hail page. When the search, the ad and the page all say the same thing, relevance takes care of itself. An ad group with a dozen kinds of work in it is a junk drawer, and Google grades junk drawers accordingly.
Then launch on exact match only. It feels timid. It's the opposite: exact match makes Google prove itself on the searches you trust before you hand it the ones you don't. This is the Isolation campaign from Chapter 2: exact match with bids set by hand, BrandRocket's name for the campaign that pays only for the searches you already know convert. Phrase and broad versions of the same keywords sit out for now. They come back once the account has earned enough conversions to trust, in the Exploration campaign.
The negative list goes in on day one: gutters and siding if you don't sell them, jobs, do-it-yourself, materials, other roofers' names. Think of the day-one list as the first coat, not the last. Once Exploration starts running broad match, new junk searches will show up daily, and reading them becomes a daily habit.
Next: Exact Match First, Storm Searches Later
You have a keyword list that's all roof, sorted into ad groups that each point at the right page, launching on exact match. The next chapter explains why exact comes first, and how the account eventually reaches the hail, leak and ice dam searches no one would think to put on a list.
If you're just arriving, Chapter 4 covers the pages these ad groups point to, and Chapter 3 covers the budget they'll spend. All sixteen chapters are on the roofers guide home. And if you'd rather have us build the keyword list and the account, that's our Google Ads management.
