Teardown: A Roofing Site That Ranks and Still Doesn’t Convert
An Allentown roofing and siding company sits at organic position three for “roof replacement allentown pa.” That is the money term in the biggest roofing market in the Lehigh Valley, and this company beats almost everybody in town for it.
It has 58 Google reviews at 4.6 stars. It is not in the map pack. The three businesses that are sit above it on the screen, and the one at the top has 124 reviews at a flat 5.0.
So the traffic arrives in April, during the first real week of estimate season after the March wind. Then it looks at a page built from a template a sales rep sold over the phone. Our guess is that most of it leaves. The ranking is an asset somebody already paid for, and it is being spent on a page that cannot close.
Anonymized, as always. Here is the scorecard and the three things we would charge money to fix.
The scorecard
| Measure | Result |
|---|---|
| Organic position, “roof replacement allentown pa” | #3 |
| Map pack position, same term | Not in the three |
| Google rating | 4.6 |
| Google reviews | 58 |
| Reviews held by the pack leader | 124, at 5.0 |
| Time to interactive | 622ms |
| Homepage page weight | 323KB |
| HTML parse errors on the homepage | 16 |
| Images carrying alt text | None |
| Deprecated tags still in the markup | Yes, including <center> |
| Platform | Reseller template, sold and hosted by the vendor |
The interesting row is the first one. Ranking is the hard part, and they have it.
Three things working
It ranks, and almost nobody else in Allentown does
We audited ten Allentown roofing companies. Most of them do not appear on page one for the head term at all. That includes the Lehigh Valley review leader, which carries 917 Google reviews and shows up in neither the pack nor page-one organic. Another local firm with an exact-match regional brand and 174 reviews is also nowhere.
Read that chart the right way round. Our subject has the fewest reviews of the ten and the best organic position of the ten. Whatever is on those pages is working on the content side. That is worth protecting and it is worth building on, and nobody should be told to throw it away.
The site is fast
622 milliseconds to interactive. Two seconds is the number we use as a target and this is comfortably under a third of it.
That is unusual for a template of this kind. We measured a Bethlehem roofer on a drag-and-drop builder whose homepage loads 27 render-blocking stylesheets before anything appears. Our subject does not have that problem. Speed is not the leak here, and telling this owner his site is slow would be selling him something he does not need.
The rating looks like a real business
4.6 across 58 reviews reads as honest. It is the profile of a company that has been doing roofs for years and had a couple of jobs go sideways, which is every roofing company.
That matters more than people think. A homeowner scrolling three estimates does not automatically trust the perfect 5.0 with nine reviews. Around here, the pack in Lehighton is held by a company with 5 reviews and one with 8. A 4.6 on 58 is more convincing than either, once somebody actually sees it.
Three things costing them money
The same caveat as every teardown we publish. We do not have this company’s analytics. The arithmetic below has its assumptions written out so you can substitute your own and get a number that means something for your business.
1. Organic #3 sits underneath the map pack, and the map pack is where the clicks go
On a phone, a local roofing search fills the first screen with the three-pack. Organic position three is well below it. The ranking they own is real, and it is being seen by a fraction of the people who searched.
Here is what the gap looks like across the whole town.
One of ten. The Allentown pack is the most contested one we track in this region, which is worth saying plainly, because the advice changes by town. Drive 40 minutes to Palmerton and Google returns no local pack at all for roofing terms, and page one is filled with directories and contractors headquartered outside Carbon County. Winning there is a different, much cheaper project.
Cost, with the assumptions visible. Say the head term and its variants produce 400 local searches a month in the Allentown area. If the pack takes the first 40 of every 100 clicks and organic position three takes 6, moving into the pack is worth roughly 100 extra visits a month. At a 4 percent call rate and a one-in-five close on jobs that average $11,000, that is not a small line item. Run your own version of that math with your own close rate before you believe mine.
The fix: reviews and the Google Business Profile, in that order, and nothing on the website until both are done. Get from 58 to past 125. Ask every customer, the same week the job closes, using a text with a direct link.
Sixty-six reviews sounds like a wall. It is about one a week for fifteen months, and a roofing company running three crews finishes more jobs than that. The reason most shops do not get there is not the ask, it is that nobody owns the ask. Give it to the person who schedules, not the person on the roof, and put it on the same checklist as the final invoice.
The profile itself takes an afternoon. Service categories, service area set to the towns you drive to rather than a radius, hours that are actually right, and photos from real jobs with dates on them.
2. The comparison happens before they reach the site, and the site does not help
This is the conversion half of the problem, and it is the reason the ranking is not paying.
The homeowner sees three estimates worth of options at once. Ours shows up as a line of organic text with no star rating attached, underneath three competitors displaying stars, review counts and a call button. By the time somebody clicks through, they have already ranked the options.
Then they land on a page with no reviews on it. The 58 reviews this company earned are sitting on Google, doing nothing for the one visitor who came all the way to the website. There is no review wall, no quoted customer, no count anywhere on the page.
The fix: put the reviews on the site. Live pull from Google, with the star rating and the count near the top of the homepage and on every service page. This is half a day of work and it is the single best change available on a site that already ranks.
While that is open, add the two things a roofing visitor in April is actually looking for and this page does not answer. Whether you handle the insurance claim, and how fast you can get somebody out to look. Both belong above the fold, in plain words, not on a separate page called Our Process.
3. The template cannot carry the pages the ranking deserves
Sixteen HTML parse errors, deprecated tags from an older web, and not one image on the homepage carrying alt text. None of those individually will cost a job today.
What they tell you is that nobody owns this site. It was sold, built once, and left. Which means the obvious next move, a page for each town this company drives to, is not going to happen. A roofing company in Allentown serving Emmaus, Whitehall, Catasauqua and Bethlehem has four more rankings available and one template that will not let anybody build them.
Vendor-hosted reseller platforms also tend to hold the domain and the content. Ask yours, in writing, whether you can export the site. The answers are educational.
The fix: move the site onto something you own before adding pages to it. Then build the town pages, one at a time, using whatever is already working on the homepage. This is the expensive item on the list and it is also the one that can wait until after the reviews.
When we would tell this owner to spend nothing
If April and May are already booked and the crews are stretched, none of this should happen yet.
Roofing demand around here does not arrive evenly. One hail line across Lehigh County in late spring and a three-crew company is sold out through July. Adding 100 visits a month to a company that cannot get to the estimates produces slower callbacks, which produces exactly the kind of review that drags a 4.6 down toward a 4.3.
The honest sequence for a seasonal trade is to fix the review process during the busy months, because that is when you have customers to ask. Do the website work in the winter, when there is time to do it properly.
What we would do first if it were ours
Reviews. Not the website.
This company is already ranked. Buying more ranking is the expensive way to solve a problem it does not have. The thing standing between it and the pack is 66 reviews and a profile nobody has touched since it was created. Both of those can be fixed with a text message template and an afternoon.
Second job, same month, put the reviews on the website. Then leave everything else alone until there are 90 days of data showing what changed. The full teardown method is here if you want to run these passes yourself, and the HVAC teardown covers the opposite case, a company with the reviews and a website that cannot be contacted.
What to do next
Count your reviews tonight, then count the reviews of the three businesses in your town’s pack. If the gap is more than about 40, that is your whole project for the next two quarters and the website can wait.
What is harder to work out on your own is whether you are losing at the ranking stage or the choosing stage. Those have completely different fixes, and most owners guess wrong about which one they have.
The $399 Strategy Session separates them. You get your position town by town, your review and speed numbers beside the three holding each pack, what your reviews actually say about your office, and the one leak we would plug first. The report is yours whatever you decide. Hire us inside 60 days and the $399 is credited against the project.
