The agencies that help roofing companies get more leads from local search without selling a package share one habit: they audit first, build the plan around your service area and competitors, and report on calls and booked estimates instead of rankings alone. Sunstone Digital Tech works this way, and the clearest evidence is in the client results it publishes.
This case study walks through three of those engagements: Window World, Groundworks, and Cody Pools. None is a roofing contractor, so the article doesn’t pretend otherwise. They are high-ticket, locally searched home-service businesses (exteriors, foundations and drainage, pools) that face the same problems a roofer does: Google Maps visibility, location coverage, lead quality, and conversion. Each section ends with what a roofing contractor can take from it.
A note on method. Every figure below is one Sunstone has published. Where a baseline, date range, or client quote isn’t public, we’ve left it out instead of estimating it. Roofing-specific baselines are shared during a proposal, after your own market is audited.
What “not a package” means for a roofing company
A package starts with the deliverables and fits the client to them: ten pages, 20 citations, four blog posts a month. A custom local search plan starts with where the company is losing calls and works backward.
For a roofer, those losses usually sit in a handful of places:
- A Google Business Profile with the wrong primary category, or services that don’t match what the company wants to sell (repair versus full replacement, residential versus commercial).
- A service-area business listing whose radius doesn’t match where crews actually work.
- Thin or duplicated city pages that don’t earn rankings in the towns that matter.
- Inconsistent business listings across citation sources.
- Too few recent reviews to compete in the local pack.
- No call tracking, so nobody knows which source produced the roof inspection.
Two roofers in different metros can have entirely different problems. A storm-driven repair business in a crowded market needs a different plan than a commercial roofing contractor serving property managers across a region. That difference is the practical test of whether an agency is selling a package.
Case study 1: Window World, a home exterior brand that grew organic leads 164%
Situation
Window World sells windows, siding, and other exterior products, a category adjacent to roofing. Buyers search locally (“siding contractors near me,” “window replacement in [city]”), the purchase is large, and the shortlist is usually settled by what appears in the map pack and the first page of results.
Results
Sunstone’s published results for the engagement:
| Metric | Result |
|---|---|
| Organic traffic | +187% |
| Keyword rankings | +312% |
| Organic leads | +164% |
What the numbers show
Rankings grew faster than traffic, and traffic grew faster than leads. That ordering is normal, and it matters for how you judge any roofing SEO agency. A rankings chart is the earliest signal and the least valuable one. Leads are the one that pays for the engagement.
The work behind a result like this follows the sequence Sunstone applies to local service companies: find where customers are being lost, fix the technical and on-page gaps that suppress visibility, build location-specific content, and tie the traffic to tracked leads.
Lesson for roofers
Ask any agency to report all three layers (rankings, traffic, and leads) for the same period. If the report stops at rankings, you can’t tell whether visibility is turning into estimates.
Case study 2: Groundworks, scaling across 30+ markets without multiplying chaos
Situation
Groundworks sells foundation repair and related home services across many metro areas. Multi-market local search breaks in predictable ways: some cities rank while others stall, location pages get cloned with the city name swapped, and Google Business Profiles drift out of sync.
Commercial and multi-branch roofing companies hit the same wall. If you run crews in six metros, you don’t have one SEO problem. You have six, plus a governance problem.
Results
Sunstone reports that the Groundworks program drove:
| Metric | Result |
|---|---|
| Organic traffic | +264% |
| Leads | +198% |
| Top-10 keywords | 3,420+ across 30+ major markets |
Why scale needs a custom plan
A repeatable system and a cookie-cutter template are different things. The system can be standardized: how profiles are named and categorized, how reviews are requested, how citations are kept consistent, how each location is tracked. The market layer cannot be. Keyword targets, page content, and competitive pressure have to be mapped market by market, because the competitor set in one city is rarely the competitor set in the next.
That split between standardized operations and market-specific strategy is also how Sunstone approaches its multi-location marketing work, where brand, campaigns, and reporting stay unified while each territory gets its own targets.
Lesson for roofers
If you’re opening a second or third territory, build the governance first: one owner for each Google profile, one review process, one tracking standard. Then customize page content and keywords per market. Companies that skip the governance step spend year two cleaning up year one.
Case study 3: Cody Pools, when conversion work and paid media beat buying traffic
Situation
Cody Pools is a seasonal, high-ticket service business, so wasted traffic is expensive and lost calls are hard to recover. Roofing has the same shape. Storm season and replacement cycles compress demand into windows where a slow site or a missed call costs a job.
Results
Sunstone’s published results for the engagement:
| Metric | Result |
|---|---|
| Qualified leads | +312% |
| Conversion rate | +189% |
| Revenue generated | $3.17M |
What stands out
Conversion rate rose 189% alongside a 312% gain in qualified leads. The site converted a larger share of visitors, and more of the visitors were the right ones. Traffic without conversion work is the classic way roofing companies waste ad budget, especially when they buy generic leads or send paid clicks to a homepage.
Sunstone also reports a 3.8x return on ad spend for qualified campaigns, which is the standard we apply when paid search supports local SEO: ads go to high-intent queries and locations, they point to pages built for that service, and spend is judged on tracked leads and revenue instead of clicks.
Lesson for roofers
Paid media works best as a short-term accelerator while local SEO builds. Set stopping rules in advance: which queries, which cities, and what cost per qualified lead triggers a cut. If an agency can’t tell you when it would turn the ads off, the ads are the product.
The roofing local search sequence we’d run, and what to expect
Across these engagements, the order of work matters more than any single tactic. For a roofing company the sequence looks like this.
Weeks 1 to 2: audit and tracking
Before anything is changed, the audit covers the Google Business Profile (primary category, services, service-area settings), citation consistency, review volume and recency, location page coverage, technical issues, and how calls and form fills are currently tracked. Call tracking and form attribution go in at this stage. Without them, no later result can be verified.
Weeks 2 to 6: foundation fixes
This is where the Google Maps work happens: category and service alignment, photos, Q&A, and a review request workflow tied to completed jobs. Citation cleanup runs in parallel. On the website, repair, replacement, and inspection pages get aligned to how homeowners search, and city pages are built with local content instead of swapped place names. Our SEO for roofing businesses service covers this layer in detail.
Weeks 6 to 12 and beyond: expand and compound
Once the foundation is stable, the work shifts to additional markets, link building, content that answers homeowner questions, and targeted paid campaigns where the data justifies them. Sunstone reports that client leads increase by 73% in 60 days on average across its client base. Treat that as an agency-wide figure, not a promise for your market. Your own timeline depends on competition, review history, and how much needs fixing at the start.
Commercial roofing follows the same structure with a different audience. Property managers and facility owners search for inspections, coatings, and re-roofing, and the buying process involves bids and multiple decision-makers. That’s why Sunstone treats a commercial roofing marketing agency engagement as its own plan, with different pages, keywords, and lead-qualification steps than a residential program.
Questions to ask any roofing marketing agency before you sign
Use these to separate custom work from a repackaged bundle.
- How will you attribute calls and forms to a source? Look for call tracking numbers, form attribution, and a way to tie leads to booked estimates.
- What do you audit before proposing a scope? A credible answer names the Google profile, citations, location pages, reviews, and tracking. If a price arrives before an audit, you’re looking at a package.
- How will my service-area radius and categories be set? Roofers who serve a defined territory need this decided on purpose, not by default.
- Which of your results come from roofing or comparable home-service companies, and can I see the baseline? A number without a starting point proves little.
- How do you handle more than one market? Ask who governs the profiles, how location pages are kept unique, and how each market is reported.
- When would you stop spending on ads? The answer should include a cost-per-lead or cost-per-job threshold.
- What’s the realistic timeline for first movement and meaningful lift? Anyone promising page-one results in two weeks is guessing.
Several agencies publish useful roofing content, and a few are good at it. The ones worth hiring will answer all seven questions with specifics, and will tell you what they’d fix first in your market.
Get a roofing local search audit built around your market
If you want to see how this process would apply to your service area, Sunstone’s roofing marketing team can start with an audit of your Google Business Profile, citations, location pages, and call tracking, then recommend a plan sized to your territory and competition. Sunstone has worked with more than 2,500 businesses and holds a 4.9 Google rating. You’ll get a proposal built from your own findings, not a canned bundle.
