A hailstorm rolls through on a Tuesday afternoon. By dinner, a homeowner has walked the yard, found dented gutters and a few shingles with fresh bruises, and typed "hail damage roof inspection" into a phone. Your ad shows up. They tap it. Your home page loads, slowly, and opens with a drone shot of your warehouse and a paragraph about your founder's grandfather.
The homeowner scrolls for a hail page, doesn't find one, and backs out to the next ad. You paid for that click. And the part most roofers never hear about: Google noticed, and the next hail click may cost you more.
This chapter is about the part of the auction you can improve without raising a single bid.
Google Grades the Page a Hail Click Lands On, Not Just the Ad
Picture the morning after that storm. Twenty roofers in your area want the same "hail damage roof inspection" search, and Google has a fraction of a second to decide whose ads appear and in what order. That ranking is Ad Rank, and Google names six things that feed it. Here they are, told through that one hail search:
- Your bid. What you've told Google you'll pay, at most, for the click.
- Your ad and the page behind it. Whether your ad talks about hail, and whether the page it opens is about hail too, assessed right then, for that search.
- The minimum bar. An ad that's too weak for the search doesn't get shown, whatever the bid.
- The competition. If the other hail ads are nearly as strong as yours, positions come down to small differences.
- The homeowner's situation. The exact words typed, where they're standing, whether it's a phone, what time it is.
- Your extras. A call button, links to your hail page or financing, your location, and how much Google expects them to help.
Look at number two. Google's help pages say plainly that better ads frequently mean a cheaper click, so a roofer with the stronger hail page can pay less than a competitor and still sit above them. The internet is full of formulas that claim to calculate the discount to the penny. Google has never published one, and neither will we. The direction is enough: the page counts, on every single click.
Quality Score Tells a Roofer What Broke, Not What a Click Costs
Each keyword you bid on carries a score out of 10 that Google calls Quality Score. Think of it as three inspections rolled into one grade:
- Expected clickthrough rate, Google's guess at whether a homeowner who sees your ad for this search will tap it.
- Ad relevance, whether your ad actually talks about the thing in the search.
- Landing page experience, how useful the page is once they arrive.
Here's what surprises most roofers: the auction never looks at that number. Google says so on its own help page. Quality Score is a dashboard light. Google measures quality fresh at every auction; Quality Score is the summary it shows you afterward so you can see which of the three parts needs work.
One detail matters for roofers who like to bid their way to the top. Google judges expected clickthrough rate with the ad's position and assets factored out. So bidding higher to sit at the top of the page doesn't improve it. A better ad does. So does a better match between the search and the ad.
Think of Quality Score as the inspector's report on your own roof. It tells you which section is leaking. It doesn't send you the bill.
To read the report, open the Keywords page in your account, add the Quality Score columns, and look at the three pieces for each keyword. Each piece gets one of three grades. Google's own advice is that the middle grade and the bottom grade both point to room for improvement, so only the top grade means leave it alone. Here's which roofing fix goes with which weak grade:
- Expected clickthrough rate below average: your ad looks like the four other roofing ads on the page, so nobody picks it. Chapter 8 covers writing ads in homeowners' own words.
- Ad relevance below average: the ad group holds too many different searches for one ad to match. Split it, which the ad group section below explains.
- Landing page experience below average: the hail searcher lands on your founder's story, or waits eight seconds on a phone for the page to appear. The rest of this chapter is about both.
New keywords start with no history, so their scores fill in as the account collects impressions. Don't panic over a blank or a low number in week one. Watch the pattern over a month, and fix the grade that's worst across your biggest-spending keywords first. A weak landing page on your top hail keyword costs more than a weak ad on a search that runs twice a week.
A Hail Search Deserves a Hail Page
Landing page experience is Google's estimate of how relevant and useful your page will be to the person who clicked. For a roofer, the most common way to fail it is simple: sending every click to the home page.
A home page tries to serve everyone. It has the company story, the service list, the reviews, the financing banner and a contact button. A homeowner who searched for a hail inspection has to hunt through all of it for the one thing they asked about. Some find it. Plenty don't bother.
Four of the 12 roofers in our example market, Minneapolis-St. Paul, had dedicated storm or hail pages among the pages we checked: a storm damage page, a hail inspection page, a hail damage repair page, even a map of recent hail in the area. That's the model. A hail search lands on a page that says hail in the headline, shows what hail damage looks like, explains the inspection, and puts the phone number where a thumb can reach it.
The same logic runs through every service you advertise. Repair searches go to a repair page. Replacement searches go to a replacement page. Metal roofing searches go to the metal page. Each page is one promise, kept the moment the page opens.
All Twelve Example Roofing Sites Loaded Slowly on a Phone
Relevance is half of landing page experience. Speed is the other half a homeowner feels, and after a storm plenty of them are searching on a phone.
We put all 12 example sites through Google's PageSpeed Insights on its phone setting. On its 100-point performance scale, the lowest roofer scored 30, the highest 78, and the middle of the pack sat at 62. The more telling number is how long each page took to show its main content, what Google calls Largest Contentful Paint. On these 12 sites it ranged from 4.4 seconds to 31.4 seconds.
Google's own guidance on web.dev says that number should be 2.5 seconds or less for a good experience, and anything over 4 seconds is poor. All 12 landed in the poor range on this test.
Two caveats keep this honest. It's one lab test per site, and results move from run to run. And your own site may already be faster than these. But the pattern is hard to ignore: a dozen roofers paying for clicks, and not one of them loads its main content inside Google's good range on a phone. Run your own pages through PageSpeed Insights. It's free, it takes a minute, and it tells you which images and scripts are slowing things down.
A slow page doesn't just annoy people. It loses them before they see your phone number, and every lost visitor is a click you paid for that never had a chance to become an inspection.
Tight Ad Groups Make Roofing Relevance the Easy Part
Of the three parts of Quality Score, ad relevance is the one you can fix fastest, and the fix is structural. Build small ad groups, each around one theme, with about five or six closely related keywords:
- Roof repair: repair searches, 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 at night.
- Metal: metal roofing searches, if you install it.
Each ad group gets ads that repeat its searches in the headline and a landing page built for that one job. When the searcher, the ad and the page all say the same thing, relevance takes care of itself. When one ad group holds everything from "gutter cleaning" to "commercial flat roof," no ad can match all of it, and Quality Score tells you so.
This is also where the Isolation campaign from Chapter 2 gets its shape: exact-match keywords with hand-set bids (our name for it at BrandRocket), sorted into these tight groups from day one.
Call Buttons and Storm Links Count in the Auction Too
The sixth Ad Rank factor is the one roofers most often leave empty: the expected impact of your ad assets. Assets are the extras that make an ad bigger and more useful, such as:
- A call asset, so a homeowner can tap to call straight from the ad.
- A location asset, pulling your address from your Google Business Profile, so the homeowner sees you're local before they tap.
- Sitelinks to your hail page, your financing page or your reviews.
Google factors their expected impact into Ad Rank. They don't change expected clickthrough rate, since that's judged with assets removed, but they can still move your ad up the page. Chapter 8 covers writing them. For now, the point is budget: assets are free to add, and they're one more way to rank higher without bidding more.
Next: The Keywords Your Competitors Already Found
With your pages fast, focused and ready for the searches that matter, the next job is building the keyword list itself. Chapter 5 shows how to borrow your competitors' research: Google's own tools will tell you what searches their sites attract, and most of what comes back is either gold or a negative keyword.
If you're catching up, Chapter 1 covers tracking and Chapter 3 covers the budget math that tells you what a better page is worth. The rest of the guide is on the roofers guide home. And if you'd rather have someone build the pages and the campaigns together, that's what our Google Ads management does.
