Where UK roofing leads come from, and what each channel asks of you.

Roofing work reaches a UK firm along a short list of routes. People who used you before, or were told to ring you. Your free Google Business Profile, and the searches a homeowner runs when something has gone wrong. Paid clicks against those searches. Marketplaces selling the enquiry on, trade directories, and the board strapped to the scaffold. Underneath sits your own website, where most of those routes send the homeowner before anyone picks up a phone.

Ranking them by volume is the wrong first move, because they do not all cost the same thing. Some cost money, some cost months, and some cost your own time on a weekday evening, once the ladders are back on the van. So the table below sorts them by what each one takes from you, which is the comparison a two-van firm can act on.

Almost every guide to this question opens with somewhere to spend money, and that is the wrong order. The firms still busy in a wet February are usually the ones a neighbour names over a fence, and that reputation is earned on site. Drive swept, same-day call back even when the honest answer is a date nobody wants, and the finished job left where people can see it.

A roof is the most public thing any trade builds. The board on the scaffold and a signwritten van advertise on the street the job is on — which is where the next enquiry lives. One failed roof in a terrace of the same age is rarely the only one. Photograph the work while the scaffold still stands, with the covering visible. Then, at handover, ask for something specific: a review on the listing, or the name of the neighbour who came out to ask what you were doing up there.

Put a board on every scaffold you erect. The neighbours with a roof of the same age are the people most likely to need you next.

Search for a roofer after a gale and what loads first is a map with a handful of local businesses on it. That listing is free, most roofing firms already have one, and a good share have filled in almost nothing. It is the highest-return evening of unpaid work available to a roofing business, and the only item on this page you could finish tonight.

• Categories. Set the primary category to roofing, then add what you truly work in — flat roofing, guttering, chimney work. The primary one does most of the sorting.
• Service area. List the towns your vans actually reach. A patch drawn wider than you travel brings in enquiries you then turn down, and turning them down still takes your time.
• Photographs. Finished roofs, in daylight, with the covering readable — slate, plain tile, interlocking, felt, rubber. Homeowners compare roofs, never logos.
• Reviews, and your replies. Ask at every handover. An owner's calm reply to a middling review persuades the next reader more than the review itself does.
• Hours and the questions section. Answer what people genuinely ask there — insurance work, gutters with the job, how far you travel — and keep opening hours accurate.

That is admin rather than marketing, and each part helps the next: reviews lift the listing, the listing brings more clicks, and the photographs go on the pages in the next section.

Most of what gets sold to a firm as marketing for roofers is advertising. The cheaper half is publishing — writing down, once, the answers you give down the phone over and over. A homeowner with a brown ring spreading across a landing ceiling rarely searches for a roofer. They search for what they think they have: slipped slate, flat roof leaking after rain, water coming in around the chimney, valley blocked with moss.

Pages written for those searches are the cheapest work a roofing firm builds, and the raw material every other route here depends on. The set is small. One page per job you want more of, one per town your vans reach, and one answering the question nobody publishes: what a roof inspection involves, who comes, and what happens afterwards. Write them in the homeowner's words, and take down whatever stopped being true last autumn.

Homeowners rarely search for a roofer. They search for what they can see: a slipped slate, a wet patch on the landing ceiling, moss in the valley.

Paid search is the only route here that can put an enquiry in front of you this afternoon, and you pay for that speed. There is no single price for a roofing click, but the pattern is steady. It sits at the expensive end of what a small trade buys in the UK, it climbs in the cities, and it climbs on the terms that sound most urgent. It goes up for everyone at once in the week after a storm — the week you most want it. One re-roof is worth enough that plenty of firms bid hard for the same homeowner.

• Bid for the job, not the word. Flat roof replacement and roof leak repair behave nothing alike in the diary or on the invoice. Pay for the one you want and leave the other.
• Land the click on the matching page. Paying a premium to drop somebody on a home page that makes them hunt is the commonest way a roofing firm loses money here.
• Cap it, watch it, judge it on jobs. Set a daily ceiling before the wind gets up, pause it once the diary fills, and count what reached a scaffold rather than what reached the inbox.

A marketplace sells you an enquiry. The model is simple: a homeowner fills in a form on a site that ranks for the searches you would like to rank for. That enquiry then goes out to roofing firms — commonly several at once, sometimes to one firm at a higher price. You pay per enquiry, or a subscription with a quota of them, and in the usual case you pay whether or not any of it becomes work.

The sharing changes what you are buying. Several firms get the same enquiry, so the one that rings back first usually wins, whoever is better on a roof. That makes the marketplace question a question about your own firm. Can somebody ring back quickly, on every day you trade, including the days after a gale when every firm on the list is flat out?

Every route above ends in the same place: a homeowner on your website, comparing you with two other roofing firms open in other tabs. That is where enquiries quietly disappear, and it is the cheapest place to fix, because you have already paid for the visit.

What loses it is seldom the design. It is the wait. Somebody reads your page on a Sunday evening with one question standing between them and a call, and nobody is there to ask. Will you travel out to their village? Do you touch flat roofs? Do you handle insurance work?

An assistant sitting in your site's own chat window answers that question at the hour it gets asked. Adoomi is one of these, and the scope is worth stating plainly. A website chatbot answers strictly from the roofing pages you approved, in whatever language the message arrived in, so a roof covering you have not listed gets a straight no instead of a guess. Lead capture takes the postcode, what the homeowner can see of the roof from the ground and which elevation it is on. The WhatsApp handoff then carries their original wording to your team, while an email alert lands with the person you nominated. Photos reach the team only after WhatsApp handoff, if the homeowner sends them there.

The limits are the part worth reading twice. Cause belongs to whoever gets on the roof. The same brown ring can come from a lifted slate, a valley packed with debris or a seam that has let go on flat felt, and nobody settles which from the pavement. Prices come from your team, after somebody has been up on the roof, and inspection dates go in your diary. A message describing water inside the house, or slates coming down where people walk, goes straight to a person. Your own storm wording is repeated back word for word, with the homeowner's description attached and no verdict added.

Setup takes about ten minutes: point it at the roofing pages, check what it would say to a homeowner, and finish by putting one line on the site. The Free plan is priced at £0 and includes 50 message credits monthly, one credit per AI answer. Above it, 200 credits cost £8 a month, 500 cost £20 and 4,000 cost £75, all set out on the pricing page. Conversations sit on EU infrastructure, can be exported or deleted on a GDPR request, and are logged as identifiers in place of message content. Compliance itself stays with your own registrations, policies and processes.

1. This week — the free listing. Fill the profile in properly, load photographs of finished roofs, and ask for a review at every handover. Cheap in money, and it moves first.
2. This month — the pages. One page for each job you want more of, one for each town your vans reach, in the homeowner's words. Delete whatever stopped being true.
3. Before the next gale — the answering. Decide who takes an out-of-hours handover, and make sure a homeowner on your site at the weekend meets an answer instead of a form.
4. Only then — the paid routes. Buy clicks or buy enquiries once the free ones work, so you can see what the money added on top of them.

Paid routes multiply whatever is already there. A firm with a thin listing, stale pages and slow callbacks pays full price to send strangers into all three — fix the free half and the paid half gets cheaper by itself.