Many marketers who do local lead gen (specifically rank and rent websites) assume roofing’s a great niche to go into. There’s no shortage of roofs, right? And they’re all gonna need repaired or redone every so many years. Plus it’s high ticket and the margins are good, which means the monthly rental fee for you, should you set up a roofing rank and rent site, could be well into the thousands of dollars per month. So like, why not, right?
Well, based on my own experience, here’s a few reasons you might wanna think twice about going into the roofing niche. Number one, it’s crazy competitive, which makes it hard to rank these itty-bitty sites. Unless you go into a teeny-tiny town, but then, are you even gonna generate enough leads to make it worth it? Probably not. Second, say you run Google ads in the short-term, while you’re patiently waiting for your site to rank. Okay, cool. But check out the average cost per click. It’s astronomical.
Thirdly, what happens in these cutthroat markets, is they sorta become “winner takes all.” You get some rank and rent OG, who’s been doing this since like 2015, and they have a skill level and a feel for this and a network and connections and link building opportunities and momentum that nobody else has, right? And so they dominate, rank like 3–4 sites on page one, gobble up all the new roofing leads, and make a killing while everyone else struggles to even get a few calls a month.
Whenever there’s gobs of money to be made, it attracts all the top talent, doesn’t it? And maybe you’re over there saying, “Well, yeah Katie, but competition’s a good thing. It’s just proof that the pie’s really big and if you can come in and take even a small slice, you’ll be well rewarded for your efforts,” right? And with some business models, yeah, I kinda agree. But not with rank and rent. Ya see, that’s the beauty of this thing: there’s so much low-hanging fruit, there’s really no reason to go into a tough niche.
Oh, and another thing I almost forgot to mention is, because the roofing companies themselves are raking in so much money in this space, they’ve got huge marketing budgets they can use to hire some of the biggest SEO and marketing agencies out there. Some of which actually know what they’re doing, and so now you’re going up against them too. As opposed to just the sloppy brochure-style websites the other roofers paid their nephew or neighbor or a guy on Fiverr to set up for them, right?
So when you’re trying to come in with a brand new three-page rank and rent site and catch up to a roofing site that’s actually been done right, that’s six years old, that has lots of citations and high quality backlinks? Google’s looking at ya, going, “Aw, that’s adorable. We’ll put ya back on page six and check back in a year to see if you’re actually legit or not.” Ya know? So, bottom line, when you compare roofing to something like palm tree trimming or popcorn ceiling removal, it’s just night and day.
And the last last thing I’ll leave ya with, in regards to the roofing niche, is this: when something’s super high ticket, you run into that situation where people are gonna shop around more, right? They’re gonna get a few bids, make sure they’re not getting gouged on price. So this means your conversion rates won’t be as good. Especially if the roofer you’re working with is one of the premiere players, and they charge on the high side, make sense? So yeah, if you’re new to rank and rent, proceed with caution for this particular niche.
