Reviews for Roofers
Your customer cannot see the work. Reviews are the only evidence they will ever have
An unverifiable product
A full roof re-tile is £5,090. Fascias, soffits and guttering, £1,830. A flat roof in EPDM, £1,790. A repair, £505. A survey, £175.
Here is what makes roofing different from every other trade on this site: the customer cannot check your work. Ever.
A homeowner can look at a painted room, walk on a patio, use a bathroom. They cannot get on the roof, they would not know what they were looking at if they did, and the failure mode — water finding its way in — may not show for two winters.
That puts an unusual weight on reviews. They are not supporting evidence. For most roofing customers they are the only evidence, which is why a thin or ageing review profile costs a roofer more work than it costs almost anyone else.
What that means for what you ask for
Because the work is unverifiable, the reviews that matter are the ones that describe things the customer could verify.
Not “excellent roof”. They do not know. Nobody knows.
But they do know whether the scaffold went up when you said. Whether the skip appeared and left. Whether the garden was cleared of nails. Whether the price on the quote was the price on the invoice. Whether someone explained what was actually wrong instead of just handing over a number.
Those are the things a stranger reading your profile can weigh, and they are the things that need to be in your reviews. Ask for them by name.
There is a second kind worth chasing: the review left a year or two later. “Had our roof done by these two winters ago, not a drop since” is the closest thing to proof that exists in this trade, and almost no roofer ever goes back and asks for it.
The ratio
A re-tile is £5,090. Our Noticed package is £49 a month — £588 a year. One re-tile covers more than eight years.
More usefully: surveys are £175 and they are how re-tiles begin. A stronger profile converts more of the people who are hesitating between three names into a survey booking, and the survey is where you win the job.
What we’d actually do
Ask the day after the scaffold comes down. That is when the job feels finished to them, not when the last tile went on.
Ask for the checkable things. Timing, tidiness, price holding, whether it was explained. Give them the prompt.
Run a winter-two request. A short message to customers from two years ago asking whether everything has held up. Most will say yes and a good share will post it, and those are the most valuable reviews a roofer can own.
Reply with the technical detail. “Glad it’s holding — that one had a failed valley rather than slipped tiles, which is why we stripped that section back” tells the next reader you know what you are doing better than any claim on your website.
Feed them into the storm weeks. When the wind blows, your profile gets read. Reviews mentioning emergency repairs done quickly are worth having visible at that moment.
What good looks like at six months
- A request after every job, going out automatically
- Reviews that name timing, tidiness and price rather than praising the roof
- At least two “still fine after two winters” reviews from older customers
- Storm-season responsiveness visible in recent reviews
- A newest review that is never more than a month or two old
The mistakes we see most
Asking for a review of the roof. They cannot assess it. Ask about the things they can.
Ignoring old customers. Your two-year-old jobs are your best untapped source and nobody in this trade goes back.
Going quiet outside storm season. A profile with nothing since last February looks like a business that has stopped.
Arguing with the one about the mess. Reply, apologise for the mess specifically, say what you do now. Every reader has worried about mess.
Where this lands in Gaffer
Requests fire off completed jobs, so the day-after ask happens by itself in the middle of a busy week.
The two-year follow-up is scheduled at completion, which is the only realistic way it ever gets sent — no roofer is going to diarise it manually across four hundred jobs.
Reviews attach to the job, so a re-tile that produced a strong comment sits with its photographs and its survey, ready to be used on the page for that type of work.
The first ninety days
Weeks 1-2. We set the request for the day after the scaffold comes down rather than the day the last tile went on, and we write the prompt around what the customer can actually judge: timing, tidiness, whether the price held, whether it was explained.
Weeks 3-6. We run the winter-two campaign – a short message to customers from two and three years ago asking whether everything has held up. Most will say yes, a good share will post it, and “not a drop since” from a real local name is the closest thing to proof this trade has.
Weeks 7-12. We get the technical replies running, so each response explains what was actually wrong with that roof. It tells the next reader you know the difference between a slipped tile and a failed valley, which is the whole argument for not being the cheapest quote.
At ninety days the measure is whether a nervous homeowner, who cannot inspect a single thing you have ever built, has enough evidence in front of them to ring you instead of the next name.
Storm weeks are when your profile gets read
Roofing demand is not evenly spread and neither is profile traffic. In the week after high winds, the number of people in your area looking up local roofers multiplies, and every one of them is anxious.
That is the week your reviews do the most work in the entire year, and it is not a week you can prepare for once it has started.
So the review flow has to be running continuously through the quiet months, not switched on when the weather turns. A profile with steady recent reviews going into a storm week converts a share of a very large, very motivated audience. The same profile with nothing since last spring watches that audience ring somebody else.
It is the same argument as the visibility work, for the same reason: the position is won months before it pays.
Questions roofers ask
Will people really review a roof? More than you would expect, because it is a big spend and a stressful one, and relief makes people generous.
What about the ones I only did a repair for? Ask them too. A £505 repair customer is a £5,090 re-tile customer in a few years.
Is it worth chasing old jobs? It is the single highest-value thing on this page and almost nobody does it.
Do I reply to every review? Yes, and reply with something specific. Generic thanks adds nothing for the next reader.
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