What a roofer's website needs after a hailstorm

For your trade 5 min read

After a storm your phone rings for two weeks. What a roofing website has to say in that window, and what to check before it starts.

The hail came through on a Tuesday afternoon. By Wednesday morning there are trucks on the street with plates from three states away, and every homeowner within four miles is on their phone looking at roofs and looking at roofers. For two weeks, more people are trying to find someone like you than at any other point in the year, and the page they land on was written in a quiet month.

Say where you are from, plainly

After a storm a town fills up with crews nobody has heard of. Most of them do fine work and leave. Some of them do not. The homeowner reading your site is trying to sort you from all of them, and they cannot do it from a logo.

So give them the things a visiting crew cannot easily give. A street address, written as text. The towns you work in, named. How long you have been doing this here. The name of the person who answers the phone, which is probably you. These are the small set of facts that only a local roofer happens to have.

Say what you can actually do this week

The instinct after a storm is to write "call now for immediate service" because that is what the other sites say. The better answer is the true one.

If you are booked into November and you can inspect next Thursday, write that. If you can get a tarp on a leaking roof tomorrow but a full replacement is six weeks out, write both halves. The person who cannot wait will call somebody else, which they were going to do anyway. The person who can wait now has a reason to keep your number rather than close the tab.

Separate the inspection from the claim

Two different things get tangled together in a homeowner's head after hail, and untangling them on your website saves you a great many long phone calls.

One is the inspection: somebody gets on the roof, looks at it, and tells you what is there. The other is the insurance claim, which is a process the homeowner runs with their own insurer. Write, in a short paragraph, what you actually do in each. If you photograph the damage and hand over a written report but you do not file anything on their behalf, say that. If you meet the adjuster on the roof, say that. Whatever the true version is, one paragraph of it is worth more than a page of reassurance.

Show damage, not finished roofs

Nearly every roofing website shows the same photograph: a finished roof, late afternoon light, nobody on it. It is a lovely photograph and it answers a question nobody is asking this week.

The question this week is "do I have damage". So show hail bruising on an asphalt shingle, close up. Show a lifted ridge. Show what granule loss looks like in a gutter, and what a soft spot looks like from a ladder. Six photographs of real damage from roofs in your own town, each with a line saying what it is, do more for a worried homeowner than any finished roof will.

Put your license number where it can be checked

Write your license number on the page as text, so somebody can copy it and paste it into the state lookup. Not inside an image, where it cannot be copied and cannot be read out by a phone.

Say who carries your liability cover. Say whether the people on the roof are covered, because that is a question homeowners have learned to ask and rarely enjoy asking. This is one of a very small number of things a stranger can verify about you in two minutes without leaving the sofa, which is exactly why it is worth making easy.

Answer the deposit question before it gets asked

There is a familiar story that goes round after every storm, about a crew that took money up front and never came back. You are competing with the memory of that crew.

So write your terms in plain words. What you take before work starts, if anything. When the balance is due. What happens if the insurance money arrives late. You do not need to put figures on the page to do this, because the shape of the answer is what settles someone.

Check the page holds up in the week it matters

Storm week is the one week your website carries many times its usual traffic, and it is a poor week to discover that the inquiry form stopped emailing you in March.

Send yourself a test inquiry from your own phone, on mobile data, standing outside. See whether it arrives and see how long the page took to load. Check the certificate has not expired, because a browser warning in front of a nervous homeowner ends the visit instantly. None of this is your job to have noticed. Hosts go down and forms fail without warning, and the only way anybody finds out is by testing it.

A short checklist

Street address and the towns you cover, written as text
Your license number as text, not inside an image
What you can start this week, and what is booked out
Six photographs of storm damage, each with one line of context
A paragraph on what an inspection includes and what it does not
A paragraph on deposits and when the balance falls due
A test inquiry sent from your own phone this morning

Questions people ask

How do I show I am not a storm chaser

Give the facts a visiting crew cannot: a local street address, the towns you serve by name, your license number in text, and years trading here. Stated plainly, without saying a word about anybody else.

Should I put a banner on my site after a storm

A single line at the top saying what you can do this week and how quickly is genuinely useful. A flashing emergency bar that stays up all year stops meaning anything.

Do I need a separate page for hail damage

One good page beats several thin ones. If hail is most of your work, it deserves its own page with real photographs on it, not a paragraph repeated with the word swapped.

Should I talk about insurance on my website

Describe what you do, not what their insurer will do. You can explain your part of the process honestly without making any promise about a claim you have not seen.

Can I put roof replacement prices on the site

A range for a common size of roof is fair and helpful. An exact figure for a roof nobody has looked at is a number you will have to take back later.

My site has not been touched in two years, is that a problem

Only if it has stopped doing the things above. Age is not the fault. A dead form, an expired certificate or a phone number you no longer use is the fault, and each of those takes minutes to check.