Hire a roofing marketing company whose work you can check yourself. Keep your domain, Google Business Profile, Analytics, Search Console, ad accounts and tracking numbers in your name, with the agency a level below you. Watch it place a test call and send a test form from your live site, then find both in its report. Walk away from anyone who promises a ranking, since Google says nobody can, and from any contract you can’t get out of.
Eight roofing marketing agencies that publish their prices are compared side by side here, with their contract terms. Whatever the fee, have Google bill the ad spend to your own card, so nobody can mark it up.
The pitches arrive daily, and asking other owners online brings more
“I get no less than 20 emails a day from SEO/digital marketing companies,” an owner on r/RoofingSales wrote in January 2025. In an August 2026 r/RoofingSales thread asking owners who’d had success with a marketing company, at least three of the eight longest top comments came from marketers selling their own services.
Google’s advice on hiring an SEO is to be wary of agencies that email you out of the blue. If we contacted you first, hold us to everything below.
In 2018 the FTC stopped Pointbreak Media, whose callers claimed to represent Google and threatened that businesses would be labeled “permanently closed.” Two years later the FTC mailed refunds averaging $158.32 to 4,467 small business owners.
Google says “No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google,” and that there’s no way to pay for a better local ranking, with ads or otherwise. It never asks for a one-time password or PIN or pushes you to pay to keep your Business Profile. Anyone calling as Google should be able to email you from an @google.com address. A real Partner badge clicks through to a profile page on Google and rests on $10,000 in ad spend over 90 days and certified staff, so it says nothing about roofs sold.
Ask to see your rank across your whole service area
Ask any agency to show your Google Maps rank from points across the area you serve, since a search run from your office will flatter you. Most roofers rank well near their own office and lower a few miles out, because Google weighs how far a business is from the person searching. Why Your Roofing Company Disappears on Google Maps Outside Your Hometown explains why.
Ask which search the report used, too. On the same day, from the same spot, one roofer made the top three at 20 of 169 points for “roof coating” and at a single point for “roofing contractor.” A report built on the easier search would look great.
A map can’t tell you why you rank where you do, so ask how the agency tested any cause it names.
Every account should be in your name, with the agency a level below you
Check each of these before you sign:
- Domain. Look up your domain at lookup.icann.org to find its registrar, and make sure you’re the registrant on file there. A change to the registrant’s name or email can block a move to another registrar for 60 days, so fix it before you need to move.
- Google Business Profile. Google’s rules for agencies say you keep ownership or co-ownership at all times, so make yourself the owner and the agency a manager, with no shared passwords. Once you ask, an agency has 7 business days to hand back exclusive control.
- Analytics and Search Console. Hold Administrator in Google Analytics and verified Owner in Search Console. For an audit, Google says to grant read access to Search Console and no more.
- Google Ads. The agency sets up a separate account for you and must give you its customer ID on request, and Google bans it from deleting or deliberately damaging the account of a client it’s about to lose.
- Facebook ads. Keep the ad account in your own business portfolio and give the agency access, since Meta lets only the owner share it with another business.
- Tracking numbers. CallRail says you own the numbers you create in it and won’t block a port-out an administrator on the account has approved. Porting a US or Canadian number out is free and usually takes four to six weeks. I take that to mean numbers in the agency’s account need its administrator to release them, though CallRail doesn’t say so outright. Ask before you paint one on a truck.
Check every agency report against your own phone
“They send me reports each month about how great we are ranking,” the owner of an 18-location roofing business wrote on r/localseo in 2025. The owner’s own Analytics and CallRail showed calls flat or down at the location the agency served and steady or growing at the ones it never touched, so the untouched locations worked as a control group.
A roofing company’s in-house marketing manager posted on r/SEO in 2024 that Analytics showed 13,000 organic users over three months against 403 clicks in Search Console. Analytics filters out the bots it knows about without saying how many, and any it misses stay in the count. The agency’s report claimed more than 400 indexed pages, some of them about divorce law, while Search Console counted 43, and it billed $5,000 a month for one blog post a quarter.
Impressions and average position are the easiest numbers in a report to inflate, since a rank-tracking robot that searches the same term every week adds impressions and never clicks.
So count your inspections and signed jobs by month, starting before you hire anyone, and hold every report against that count. How to Track Which Marketing Brings In Your Roofing Jobs covers the setup. Ask for the date on every claim in an audit and rerun the ones that matter, since rankings and speed scores change from day to day.
Google holds you responsible for what your agency does
Google says you’re responsible for what any company you hire does, and that deceptive content an SEO creates can get your site removed from its index. Extra words in your business name, such as a list of services, could get your Business Profile suspended, and pages turned out in bulk with AI, without adding value for readers, count as abuse under Google’s spam policies.
Fake reviews are a legal risk as well: since October 2024 an FTC rule has banned buying or selling them, AI-written ones included, along with paying for reviews that must say something positive or negative. The FTC can seek civil penalties from anyone who breaks it knowingly.
Get the fee and the way out in writing before you sign
Get every fee in writing, the one-time ones included, along with what each plan covers. A plan without call tracking leaves both of you guessing which calls it brought in. If an agency offers a guarantee, get its definition of a qualified lead in writing too.
Google sets the minimum for Local Services Ads market by market, and for a DFW roofing client in September 2026 it was $327 a week, about $1,400 a month, paid on top of any agency fee. Where an agency owes you a monthly report under Google’s ad terms, it must show the exact amount Google charged, apart from the agency’s own fee, which it has to disclose in writing before your first purchase and on every invoice. Google also bans an agency from mostly doing SEO while claiming your budget went to ads. How Much Should a Roofing Company Spend on Marketing? covers budgets.
An owner on r/marketing, quoted 2,600 Canadian dollars a month for a package, wrote that “last min they hit me with a 12 month contract.” In the US there’s no federal click-to-cancel rule to fall back on, since a federal appeals court threw out the FTC’s version in July 2025, so leaving comes down to what the contract says. Google’s page on hiring an SEO also says a small local business can probably do much of the work itself.
Google’s own hiring questions skip the accounts and the exit
Google’s questions for hiring an SEO cover past work, what results to expect and by when, how success gets measured, and whether they’ll share every change they make to your site. It also says to check references, which one owner on r/RoofingSales asked a cold-calling marketing company for and never got. I’d add these four:
- Which searches does your report cover, and when were they run?
- How did you test what you say is causing the problem?
- Whose name is on my domain, profile, ad accounts and tracking numbers?
- What does it cost to leave, and how much notice do you need?
Google’s third-party complaint form takes reports of an ad agency that guarantees top placement or claims a special relationship with Google.
To see where your company ranks across your service area, run the free Google Maps heatmap. Pick your Google profile and a search, and in a few minutes you’ll see your rank at 49 points around your office.