How to rank top of Google for the keyword ‘roofers London’

When targeting a keyword in SEO, it’s essential to analyse the SEO strategies of the top ranking websites. This way we can determine exactly what is needed to take the number one position.

There are over 7,000 monthly searches for roofers in London. This includes the main keyword ‘roofers London’, which has 1300 monthly services, as well as variations and regions.

As any homeowner in London will know, roofing services don’t come cheap. According to Which, the average cost of a new tiled roof is around £14,000. A flat roof for a single garage can cost around £1,000, or if the roofer uses EPDM, it’s more like £1,600. On top of this, roofers in London often charge a callout fee of around £150.

This means, a roofing company can expect to make anything from £150, to £14,000 upwards for a conversion on their website.

According to the latest Salesforce figures, the average conversion rate is 2-3%, and can be 5% or higher.

So, crunching the numbers, a roofing website that ranks highly in London could attract around 1,000 visitors per month. This could generate up to 30 leads or more, potentially worth thousands, or tens of thousands of pounds each month.

With over 7,000 monthly searches for roofing services in London, securing a top ranking position is highly valuable for any roofing company looking to dominate the local market.

So, let’s see how it’s done.


Page one results

As of February 2025, the page one results for the main keyword ‘roofers London’, looks like this:

PositionWebsite
1https://www.checkatrade.com/Search/Roofer/in/London
2https://www.no1roofing.com/
3https://www.londonroofingltd.com/
4https://www.thelondonroofers.com/
5https://trustedtraders.which.co.uk/roofers-in-london/
6https://www.trustatrader.com/roofers-roofing-in-london
7https://londoncityroofing.co.uk/
8https://roofer-northlondon.co.uk/
9https://www.lbroofingspecialist.co.uk/
10https://samsgutters.net/roof-repair-london/

Checkatrade are in first, and two other directories, Trusted Traders and Trust-a-Trader are in 5th and 6th respectively.

This means the other seven positions are up for grabs for a roofing company servicing London. I’m going to analyse the top four ranking roofing websites, and see how they compare.


Competitor comparison

First, let’s look at the two biggest ranking metrics, volume of pages, and number of websites linking.

WebsitePositionPagesLinks
Element Roofing Co (https://www.no1roofing.com/)230141
London Roofing Ltd (https://www.londonroofingltd.com/)363111
Hightop Roofing London (https://www.thelondonroofers.com/)43395
London City Roofing (https://londoncityroofing.co.uk/)73080

As we can see in the table, they are neatly ordered by link volume, with the highest ranked having the most links.

London Roofing Ltd has 33 more pages than Element Roofing Co, but Element Roofing Co has 30 more links, and these may be outweighing the pages. So, case closed, we just need 30 pages of content and 142 links and we’ll be first right?

Not quite. Google results are more nuanced than that, so let’s dig a little deeper.


Content depth

It’s not all about quantity when trying to rank a website on Google, and quality is far more important. One simple way we can assess quality is to look at the content depth and types of content. This indicates helpfulness, which is a key component of Google’s helpful content criteria.


Element Roofing Co

MetricsQtyContent TypeQty
Total Pages30Transactional28
Total Word Count17897Informational0
Average Word Count597Company2
Videos1Case Studies0
Images640
Thin Pages14
Errors0

London Roofing Ltd

MetricsQtyContent TypeQty
Total Pages63Transactional16
Total Word Count21465Informational0
Average Word Count341Company11
Videos1Case Studies36
Images1261
Thin Pages58
Errors0

Hightop Roofing London

MetricsQtyContent TypeQty
Total Pages33Transactional18
Total Word Count66877Informational10
Average Word Count2027Company5
Videos1Case Studies0
Images131
Thin Pages4
Errors4

London City Roofing

MetricsQtyContent TypeQty
Total Pages30Transactional21
Total Word Count9589Informational0
Average Word Count320Company9
Videos6Case Studies0
Images332
Thin Pages19
Errors7

After some analysis, we can see that Hightop Roofing London stands out with the highest total word count of 66,877, an average of 2,027 per page. Their home page has 14,277 words, so this may be skewed slightly, but they have the least amount of thin content.

I would say they’ve gone too far by adding over 14,000 words to their home page, and I assume it’s been done or overseen by an SEO. If it has, then they will claim success seeing as they are ranked in 4th, but it seems excessive to me in terms of providing a good user experience.

London Roofing Ltd has taken a different approach, and has 36 pages of case studies, showcasing real-world work. This is excellent for users and for Google’s E-E-A-T, however, they could make them more in-depth, as they have 58 potentially thin pages.

Element Roofing Co, ranking in first, takes a more moderate approach. They have a total word count of 17,897 with an average of 597 words per page. They are lacking both informational content and case studies, which could limit their credibility and authority.

Finally, we have London City Roofing, which has the lowest word count at just 9,589 and the highest number of errors, making it the weakest in terms of content depth and quality.



Relevance

Perhaps the biggest ranking metric on Google is relevance. So, considering our search term is ‘roofers London’, let’s see how these websites compare.

In this analysis, I looked for multiple variants of ‘roof’, such as roofing, roofers and roofer, and the word London, within key elements of each page.


Element Roofing Co

MetricQty%
Roofing in Title30100%
Roofing in H1 2480%
Roofing in H2224746.67%
Roofing in Page Text16885626.67%
London in Title 30100%
London in H1 13.33%
London in H2179569.67%
London in Page Text1300.73%

London Roofing Ltd

MetricQty%
Roofing in Title5282.54%
Roofing in H1 812.7%
Roofing in H25485.71%
Roofing in Page Text9481504.76%
London in Title 5282.54%
London in H1 2031.75%
London in H25485.71%
London in Page Text4742.21%

Hightop Roofing London

MetricQty%
Roofing in Title2781.82%
Roofing in H1 2678.79%
Roofing in H245136.36%
Roofing in Page Text31859651.52%
London in Title 1648.48%
London in H1 1648.48%
London in H22266.67%
London in Page Text10691.6%

London City Roofing

MetricQty%
Roofing in Title2376.67%
Roofing in H1 2893.33%
Roofing in H268226.67%
Roofing in Page Text8382793.33%
London in Title 2376.67%
London in H1 31103.33%
London in H265216.67%
London in Page Text7207.51%

Element Roofing Co has 100% of its titles including variants of “roofing” and “London”, and an impressive presence of “roofing” in H1s (80%), H2s (746.67%) and through the body text (5626.67%).

London Roofing Ltd, while incorporating “roofing” and “London” in over 80% of its titles, has significantly lower usage of these terms in headings and body text. It does, however, use “London” in H1s at a rate of 31.75%, which is stronger than Element Roofing Co.

Hightop Roofing London has a high density of “roofing” in its page text (9651.52%), but only 48.48% of its titles include “London”.

London City Roofing performs well in both keyword categories, with strong inclusion of “roofing” in H1s (93.33%) and H2s (226.67%) and a significantly higher presence of “London” in H1s (103.33%) than the rest.



There are multiple tools we can use to analyse backlinks, with the top four being Majestic, AHREFs, Moz and SEMrush. For this analysis, I used SEMrush, which uses its own quality metric called Authority Score.

WebsiteReferring DomainsBacklinksAuthority Score
Element Roofing Co 14161010
London Roofing Ltd 11151210
Hightop Roofing London9526612
London City Roofing 8013110

All four websites have similar Authority Scores, with Hightop Roofing London just edging it. Element Roofing Co has the most links, so if we were looking at links alone, we would say Element Roofing Co should rank highest.

Element Roofing Co, London Roofing Ltd and London City Roofing are listed on similar directories, including Checkatrade, Yell.com and The Best Rated. Hightop Roofing London has the weakest backlink profile, despite having the highest Authority Score. Their links are mostly from non-relevant domains and look to be spammy, paid for, or scraped links.



E-E-A-T

E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. It’s a set of guidelines used by Google to assess content credibility. When analysing for E-E-A-T, I generally look at four categories of signals: on site, in content, social and reviews.


On site

This analysis looks at the website itself, to see if it ticks the required boxes for E-E-A-T. These include:

  • About us page
  • Contact page
  • Meet the team
  • NAP (name, address, phone number)
  • Company No
  • Author Bio
  • Reviews
  • Privacy policy/terms
  • HTTPS
  • Case studies
  • Accreditations/industry certifications
  • Awards
  • Gallery
  • Schema
WebsiteOn site score
London Roofing Ltd 8
Element Roofing Co 6
Hightop Roofing London 5
London City Roofing 6

None of the four websites excel in this area. Using my system there is potential for a maximum score of 17, however the highest scoring website is London Roofing Ltd with 8.


In content

For this analysis, I analyse signals within content across the entire website. This includes:

  • Academic/professional credentials
  • Content quality signals
  • Professional association signals
  • Authority and trust signals
  • Experience signals
  • Author and expertise signals
  • Academic and research links

In Schema

  • Person Schema
  • Organization Schema
  • Review Schema Types
  • Professional Schema Signals
  • E-E-A-T Schema
  • Educational/Professional Properties
WebsiteIn content score
Element Roofing Co 11.12
London City Roofing 6.65
London Roofing Ltd 6.41
Hightop Roofing London 2.2

This score is calculated on percentages. For example, Element Roofing Co has 836 words (4.67%) that signal academic or professional credentials. This includes words like association, accreditation, certification, member etc and signal associations with professional industry bodies. Again, none of the websites excel, however Element Roofing Co are the clear winners in this analysis.


Social signals

For this analysis, I place a score on how many social platforms they’re on, their posting frequency and engagement.

WebsiteSocial score
London Roofing Ltd 9
Element Roofing Co 0
Hightop Roofing London 0
London City Roofing 0

Social media seems to be an untapped market for roofing in London and the only company here with any social presence is London Roofing Ltd. They are on Facebook, X, Linkedin, YouTube and Instagram, and although they don’t have a huge following, they will be gaining an advantage over their competitors in terms of social signals.


Reviews

For this analysis, the score is based on how many review platforms they’re on, the quantity of reviews and their rating.

WebsiteSocial score
Element Roofing Co 10
London Roofing Ltd 7
London City Roofing 4
Hightop Roofing London 0

Element Roofing Co are the standout here with excellent reviews on Google, Checkatrade and Yell. London Roofing Ltd aren’t far behind, and Hightop Roofing London has none as far as I could see.


Total E-E-A-T scores

It is close between Element Roofing Co and London Roofing Ltd, but London Roofing Ltd just about edges it, mainly because of their social score.

WebsiteTotal score
London Roofing Ltd 30
Element Roofing Co 29
London City Roofing 17
Hightop Roofing London 7




Areas for improvement

There is lots that can be improved on all four websites here. Neither website scored highly for E-E-A-T and only London City Roofing has social signals. Content is relatively thin across the board and it’s only Hightop Roofing London that has paid attention to depth, and they’ve probably gone too far by adding over 14,000 words to their home page.

All four websites have relatively weak backlink profiles and none have high authority links from respected websites, outside of directories. It looks as though there are no real standout players in this niche, which means there are opportunities for competitors to make a real impact.


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