Google Ads for Roofers

What should a roofing lead cost?

Work it out from the market before you touch the account, and start with the pessimistic number, because that is the one you plan around. In Houston in September 2026, Keyword Planner's top-of-page bids on searches that mean someone wants a roofer ran from about $13 a click on the low end to $58 on the high end.

The gap between those two is not the market. It is the account. Across my own roofing accounts, Search runs between $266 and $474 per lead, a lead being a homeowner who books an appointment, and the number moves with the trade and the area. So a number near the bottom of that range is realistic, not a sales figure.

That is why the estimate call starts here: what a lead costs in your county, and what a sold roof costs at your close rate.

Why set up Local Services first?

Because the Google Guaranteed block at the top is usually the cheapest lead a roofer can buy, and I set it up for every client either way. But it runs out. It bills per lead, there are only so many leads in a county, and it ranks on your reviews and your distance from the homeowner, not on what you spend.

The money is there. The leads are not.

So you do not pick one: Local Services runs until it caps, and Search is how you buy more than the block will give you. Google Ads or Local Services, in full, and why a Local Services budget goes unspent.

Which roofing keyword wastes the most money?

The one that looks best: "roofing contractors" plus your city, on phrase match. Phrase match shows your ad on any search containing that phrase, and every competitor in your town is called Something Roofing.

So a trade-plus-city phrase keyword matches every competitor's brand search in that city. Someone searching a roofer by name has already picked a roofer. You are paying to show up second on a search that was never for you.

I pulled the search terms on one of my own accounts over a summer. That one keyword had taken 52 percent of the campaign's spend and produced a fifth of a lead. The sibling ad group, same kind of keyword in a different county on exact match, had not one competitor name in twenty-seven clicks and nearly three leads.

What I do now: every trade-plus-city keyword goes on exact match, which still catches plurals and word order but stops catching brand names, and the local competitor names go in as negatives before the campaign runs. You can build that list in ten seconds by searching "roofers near me" in your own town and writing down who is in the map pack.

Why one ad group per roofing job?

A repair search and a replacement search cost about the same per click, twenty to twenty-five dollars. One is a $400 job and the other is a $15,000 job. In the same ad group with the same bid, Google spends where the volume is, and the volume is repair. On one account I took over, a single repair keyword had taken 42 percent of the whole campaign on sixteen clicks.

Each group carries routing negatives: the replacement group blocks "repair" and the repair group blocks "replacement", so a repair search cannot land on the expensive bid. Those negatives go at ad group level. The things you never do, commercial work, gutters, jobs, DIY, go at campaign level so they are blocked everywhere.

Should a roofing account be built around storms?

Not the whole account. I built one for a Houston roofer whose website leads with a hailstorm banner. Across his four counties, every hail and storm term combined came to under 400 searches a month. "Roofers" alone was 2,900.

Hail is real money when it hits, but it is a week, not a strategy.

So the storm group stays small, and when a hail event hits I clone it into its own campaign with a burst budget for that week. The rest of the year runs on replacement, repair and inspections, because that is what homeowners type when there is no storm. If your site leads with hail, it is talking to a small slice of your market.

What should happen after a homeowner clicks?

Roofing leads call. A hail lead calls immediately. So the page after the click needs a tracked phone number on the first screen as a real tap-to-call link, one short form above the fold, no menu that leaves the page, and the same offer the ad promised in the same words.

I load every client's current site on a phone before I do anything else. On that Houston roofer, the first phone screen had a headline, a photo and a button. The number was behind the menu and again at the very bottom, and the button loaded a second page before a homeowner saw a form field. That is why every account gets its own landing page as part of the build.

How should a new roofing account bid?

Not the way Google suggests on day one. Smart bidding learns from conversions, and a new roofing account has none, so asking it to optimise for a cost per lead it has never seen gets you weeks of unstable bids.

I start on Maximize Clicks with a ceiling, around $30 a click in a market like Houston, while call tracking proves it is counting real phone calls. Only after fifteen conversions in a thirty-day window, twice in a row, with tracking I have checked, does it move to Maximize Conversions.

Conversion goals are set per campaign with account defaults off. I have seen a Search campaign under-count by about half because it was running account default goals and nobody knew.

Is this for commercial roofers?

No. This is built for roofers selling homeowners a new roof. A commercial-led company, TPO and EPDM for property managers and general contractors, needs different keywords, a different page and usually a different channel, and Local Services is built for homeowners. If most of your work is commercial, I'll say so on the call rather than sell you a residential account.

What does it cost a roofing company?

$1,000 once to build, then from $1,500 a month, which covers ad spend up to $10,000 a month. Ad spend is separate, at least $2,000 a month, paid straight to Google and never marked up, and Local Services leads are billed by Google per lead.

Month to month, and one roofing company per county: once a roofer signs in a county, I won't work against them there. The totals are on the pricing page, and how the rest of the build works is on Google Ads for contractors.

Elijah Nawrot, founder of Red Orca Digital. Three years on roofs, four running paid ads for roofing companies. Red Orca is a Google Partner. More about me.
Last updated September 24, 2026