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.
Table of Contents
- 1. Page One Results
- 2. Competitor Comparison
- 3. Content Depth
- 4. Relevance
- 5. Backlinks
- 6. E-E-A-T
- 7. Final Assessment
- 8. Why Are They Ranking Top?
- 9. Areas of Improvement
- 10. Advice to Competitors
Page one results
As of February 2025, the page one results for the main keyword ‘roofers London’, looks like this:
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.
| Website | Position | Pages | Links |
|---|---|---|---|
| Element Roofing Co (https://www.no1roofing.com/) | 2 | 30 | 141 |
| London Roofing Ltd (https://www.londonroofingltd.com/) | 3 | 63 | 111 |
| Hightop Roofing London (https://www.thelondonroofers.com/) | 4 | 33 | 95 |
| London City Roofing (https://londoncityroofing.co.uk/) | 7 | 30 | 80 |
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
| Metrics | Qty | Content Type | Qty |
|---|---|---|---|
| Total Pages | 30 | Transactional | 28 |
| Total Word Count | 17897 | Informational | 0 |
| Average Word Count | 597 | Company | 2 |
| Videos | 1 | Case Studies | 0 |
| Images | 640 | ||
| Thin Pages | 14 | ||
| Errors | 0 |
London Roofing Ltd
| Metrics | Qty | Content Type | Qty |
|---|---|---|---|
| Total Pages | 63 | Transactional | 16 |
| Total Word Count | 21465 | Informational | 0 |
| Average Word Count | 341 | Company | 11 |
| Videos | 1 | Case Studies | 36 |
| Images | 1261 | ||
| Thin Pages | 58 | ||
| Errors | 0 |
Hightop Roofing London
| Metrics | Qty | Content Type | Qty |
|---|---|---|---|
| Total Pages | 33 | Transactional | 18 |
| Total Word Count | 66877 | Informational | 10 |
| Average Word Count | 2027 | Company | 5 |
| Videos | 1 | Case Studies | 0 |
| Images | 131 | ||
| Thin Pages | 4 | ||
| Errors | 4 |
London City Roofing
| Metrics | Qty | Content Type | Qty |
|---|---|---|---|
| Total Pages | 30 | Transactional | 21 |
| Total Word Count | 9589 | Informational | 0 |
| Average Word Count | 320 | Company | 9 |
| Videos | 6 | Case Studies | 0 |
| Images | 332 | ||
| Thin Pages | 19 | ||
| Errors | 7 |
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
| Metric | Qty | % |
|---|---|---|
| Roofing in Title | 30 | 100% |
| Roofing in H1 | 24 | 80% |
| Roofing in H2 | 224 | 746.67% |
| Roofing in Page Text | 1688 | 5626.67% |
| London in Title | 30 | 100% |
| London in H1 | 1 | 3.33% |
| London in H2 | 179 | 569.67% |
| London in Page Text | 130 | 0.73% |
London Roofing Ltd
| Metric | Qty | % |
|---|---|---|
| Roofing in Title | 52 | 82.54% |
| Roofing in H1 | 8 | 12.7% |
| Roofing in H2 | 54 | 85.71% |
| Roofing in Page Text | 948 | 1504.76% |
| London in Title | 52 | 82.54% |
| London in H1 | 20 | 31.75% |
| London in H2 | 54 | 85.71% |
| London in Page Text | 474 | 2.21% |
Hightop Roofing London
| Metric | Qty | % |
|---|---|---|
| Roofing in Title | 27 | 81.82% |
| Roofing in H1 | 26 | 78.79% |
| Roofing in H2 | 45 | 136.36% |
| Roofing in Page Text | 3185 | 9651.52% |
| London in Title | 16 | 48.48% |
| London in H1 | 16 | 48.48% |
| London in H2 | 22 | 66.67% |
| London in Page Text | 1069 | 1.6% |
London City Roofing
| Metric | Qty | % |
|---|---|---|
| Roofing in Title | 23 | 76.67% |
| Roofing in H1 | 28 | 93.33% |
| Roofing in H2 | 68 | 226.67% |
| Roofing in Page Text | 838 | 2793.33% |
| London in Title | 23 | 76.67% |
| London in H1 | 31 | 103.33% |
| London in H2 | 65 | 216.67% |
| London in Page Text | 720 | 7.51% |
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.
Backlinks
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.
| Website | Referring Domains | Backlinks | Authority Score |
|---|---|---|---|
| Element Roofing Co | 141 | 610 | 10 |
| London Roofing Ltd | 111 | 512 | 10 |
| Hightop Roofing London | 95 | 266 | 12 |
| London City Roofing | 80 | 131 | 10 |
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
| Website | On 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
| Website | In 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.
| Website | Social 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.
| Website | Social 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.
| Website | Total score |
|---|---|
| London Roofing Ltd | 30 |
| Element Roofing Co | 29 |
| London City Roofing | 17 |
| Hightop Roofing London | 7 |
Final assessment
Despite keywords for roofers in London being highly valuable in terms of driving new business, I’m not overly impressed with any of the four highest ranking website.
However, I can see why Google has them ordered the way they are and my analysis has confirmed this. Here is a table that ranks each website according to the six ranking metrics I analysed.
| Website | 1st | 2nd | 3rd | 4th |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Content volume | London Roofing Ltd | Hightop Roofing London | Element Roofing Co | London City Roofing |
| Content depth | Hightop Roofing London | London Roofing Ltd | Element Roofing Co | London City Roofing |
| Content relevance | Element Roofing Co | London Roofing Ltd | London City Roofing | Hightop Roofing London |
| Backlink volume | Element Roofing Co | London Roofing Ltd | Hightop Roofing London | London City Roofing |
| Backlink quality | Element Roofing Co | London Roofing Ltd | London City Roofing | Hightop Roofing London |
| E-E-A-T | London Roofing Ltd | Element Roofing Co | Hightop Roofing London | London City Roofing |
Based on this, I would rank these four in the same order as Google:
- Element Roofing Co
- London Roofing Ltd
- Hightop Roofing London
- London City Roofing
It appears that content relevance and backlinks are the deciding factors, which isn’t a surprise as this is the case for most keywords. However, the depth of quality across the board isn’t particularly strong, and there are definitely opportunities for competitors to make an impact within this niche.
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.
Advice for competitors
If I represented a roofing company that wanted to dominate London on a Google search, I would advise creating 40 or 50 pages of in-depth content. This would include case studies with an engaging storytelling narrative. I would aim for a 100% E-E-A-T score, by implementing signals through the website and content.
I would put together a social media strategy, because there seems to be a gap here. I know roofing isn’t the most exciting subject matter for social media, but almost everyone has a roof right? I’m sure with the right strategy there are opportunities for a company to take over the social media scene within this niche.
In terms of backlinks, I would add the website to all relevant directories, and this would put them on the same level as the websites I’ve analysed here. Beyond this, I would look at adding some solid informational content. With some highly engaging informational content there are opportunities to gain links on multiple high authority websites related to properties and homes.
What do you think? Is roofers in London an easy keyword to rank for? Despite having over 7,000 searches per month, how much traffic do you think it will really drive? Let me know in the comments!