Summit Roofing had been in business for 11 years in the Charlotte area. Solid reputation, great crews, word-of-mouth that kept them busy enough. But “busy enough” was starting to feel like a ceiling. New competitors were showing up with slicker websites and Google Ads budgets. Their phone was getting quieter. They called us in March.
What followed was a pretty clean before-and-after. Not a miracle — real work, some dead ends, and a lot of iteration. Here's exactly what happened.
The Starting Point
Before we touched anything, we did a full audit. The numbers weren't catastrophic — they were just quietly bad in that way that takes years to notice.
- Website built in 2019. Mobile performance score: 41/100. It loaded in 6.2 seconds on a phone.
- Google Business Profile half-filled — no service descriptions, outdated hours, photos from a company event in 2021.
- 23 reviews at 4.1 stars. Enough to look legitimate, not enough to look dominant.
- No Google Ads. No retargeting. No follow-up system after a lead came in.
- Averaging 14 inbound leads per month, closing roughly 8 of them.
They were surviving almost entirely on referrals. Which works — until it doesn't. One slow season, a few big jobs that fell through, and suddenly you're looking at a real problem. They weren't there yet. But they could see it from where they were standing.
“Busy enough” is a dangerous place to be. It means you're one bad quarter away from figuring out you don't have a business — you have a job.
What We Changed (And Why)
Four things, in order of how fast they'd move the needle.
1. The Website
We rebuilt it mobile-first from scratch. Not a redesign — a rebuild. Load time went from 6.2 seconds to 1.4 seconds. That alone pushes you up in rankings. The bigger move was adding a dedicated storm damage landing page targeting Charlotte specifically. Not generic roofing. Storm damage. Charlotte. After every major weather event, that's what people search.
The page had a clear headline, a phone number above the fold, a short form, and three trust signals — license number, insurance badge, and their best before/after photos. That's it. No wall of text about how “family-owned since 1994.”
2. Google Business Profile
We completed every single field — service areas, services offered, business description with actual keywords, Q&A entries pre-populated with common questions. Then we uploaded 40 job photos in the first week. Real work, real houses in the Charlotte area.
We also set up a weekly Google Post schedule — brief updates, seasonal offers, storm alerts. And we implemented a review request SMS sequence that fired automatically after every completed job. More on that in section five.
3. Google Ads
We started conservative — $800/month targeting “roof repair Charlotte,” “storm damage roof Charlotte,” and a handful of emergency repair variations. Tight geographic radius. Call-only ads and lead form ads. No display network, no broad match.
4. Lead Follow-Up
The old process: a lead submitted a form, someone at the office saw it when they got around to it, and called back sometime that day. Maybe. The new process: automated SMS fires within 90 seconds of any form submission. Not a bot — a text that looked like it came from a real person, with the owner's name on it.
Speed matters more than almost anything in lead response. Studies consistently show the odds of connecting with a lead drop by over 80% after the first five minutes. Your competitor is a Google search away. If you don't respond fast, they will.
What We Left Alone
This part matters. We didn't touch their pricing. We didn't change how they ran their crews, how they talked to customers, or how they handled warranties. Their referral process stayed exactly the same.
Summit Roofing was already a good company. That's the thing — most service businesses that come to us aren't broken. They just don't show up online the way they show up in person. The gap between who they actually are and how they look on Google is the whole problem. We closed that gap.
Digital marketing doesn't fix a bad business. But for a good business that's invisible online? It's like turning the lights on in a room that was already clean.
The Month-by-Month Numbers
Month one was modest. That's normal — nothing is magic, everything takes a few weeks to find its footing. By month three, the compounding started to show.
| Period | Leads | Closed |
|---|---|---|
| Starting Point | 14 | 8 |
| Month 1 | 18 | 10 |
| Month 2 | 26 | 15 |
| Month 3 | 41 | 24 |
| Month 4+ | 47 | 28 |
By month three, their storm damage page had ranked to page one for their primary keyword. Reviews climbed from 23 at 4.1 stars to 67 at 4.8 stars. That's not just a vanity metric — that's the difference between a prospect clicking on you versus scrolling past.
Month four and beyond, we started pulling back paid spend as organic started carrying more weight. That's the goal — ads to fill the gap while SEO builds the foundation.
By month three: 41 leads, 67 reviews at 4.8 stars, storm damage page on page one. That's not magic — that's what three months of consistent work looks like.
The Honest Part
The first two weeks of ads were expensive and inefficient. The initial campaign structure was too broad — we were getting clicks from people two counties over who weren't anywhere near Summit's service area. Cost per click was high, conversion rate was low. We paused it, tightened the radius to an 18-mile circle around Charlotte, added a dozen negative keywords, and relaunched.
One campaign bombed completely — a “free roof inspection” angle that attracted a lot of tire-kickers looking for free estimates with no intention of moving forward. We killed it after ten days.
This is just how it works. There's no campaign you can build in week one that's perfect. You launch, you look at the data, you cut what's wasting money, and you double down on what's working. Anyone who promises you a campaign that performs immediately at full efficiency is either lying or selling you something pre-built that isn't designed for your market.
The testing phase is part of the job — not a sign something is broken. Google Ads takes 4–6 weeks to accumulate enough data to optimize properly. Month one is tuition. Month two is investment. Month three is return.
What Summit Roofing Looks Like Now
They hired two more crews. They had to — the volume of jobs they were booking outpaced what they had. That's a good problem, but it's still a problem to solve. Scaling up crew capacity is harder than scaling up leads. We gave them the latter and let them handle the former.
They turned off a slow referral partner relationship they'd been maintaining mostly out of habit. When your pipeline is full, you get to be selective about where work comes from.
They're now planning to expand into a second city. The playbook is already built — they just need to point it somewhere new.
That's what a working digital presence actually does. It doesn't just get you more leads — it changes what's possible for the business. You go from protecting what you have to thinking about what you could build.