TL;DR
A roofer calls in May, after the first storms, wanting to be visible for the season. The season is already running and whatever we build now lands in August. This is the most consequential decision in seasonal trades marketing and it is almost never treated as a decision at all.
A roofer calls in May, after the first storms, wanting to be visible for the season. The season is already running. Whatever we build now lands in August.
This is the single most consequential decision in seasonal trades marketing and it is almost never treated as a decision. It is treated as when somebody got round to it.
The arithmetic
Work takes weeks to be crawled and reflected, months to settle into position, and longer again in a competitive local market. Call it three months before anything is meaningfully working, on a site that is otherwise healthy.
Now put that against a demand curve that is not flat. Roofing spikes after storms and through late summer. Heating spikes on the first genuinely cold night. Cooling spikes in the first real heat.
Start three months before the spike and you arrive as demand does. Start at the spike and you arrive as it ends, having paid for the whole thing and captured the tail.
The honest version of the advice: the best time to start is the quiet season, which is precisely when nobody feels like spending money on marketing. That tension is the whole problem and it is worth naming rather than talking around.
What to do if the call comes in May anyway
Because it will, and “you should have started in February” is not advice.
- Buy the season, build for the next one. Ads carry the near term while the organic side is built. This is the one situation where I will straightforwardly recommend spending on ads first. The demand is real, it is time-boxed, and there is no way to make organic arrive faster.
- Fix the things that work immediately. The Business Profile category, the phone number, the service area, whether the site loads on a phone in a driveway. None of those take three months.
- Fix intake before visibility. More calls into an unanswered phone is not a win. MIT’s study of 15,000 leads and 100,000 call attempts found a twenty-one-fold drop in the odds of qualifying a lead between a five and a thirty minute response, and in emergency trades the caller is working down a list, so the drop is steeper still.
What to do in the quiet months
This is the part that gets skipped, and it is where the year is actually won.
Publish the content that takes time to mature. The pages you want ranking in October should exist in June.
Collect reviews while the work is fresh. A trade that goes quiet for months has a review timeline with a visible gap in it, and BrightLocal’s 2026 survey of 1,002 US consumers found 74% look for reviews written in the last three months. Ask every customer during the busy season, not after it.
Photograph the jobs. Nobody wants to stage a photograph in November. The gallery you need next year is on somebody’s phone right now.
The thing I would stop doing
Switching the whole programme off in the off-season and on again in the spring. It is intuitive and it wastes the previous year’s work. Position decays, the review timeline gaps, and the rebuild starts partway back down the hill.
A smaller continuous programme beats a large intermittent one in every seasonal account I have seen. The spend curve should be flatter than the demand curve, not matched to it.
The other reason to be careful about arriving at the peak: succeeding at the wrong moment is its own problem. I have ended campaigns because they worked. A business that cannot answer the phone during a storm week does not benefit from being first in the pack during it.
The short version
- Three months from work to results. Demand is a spike, not a line.
- Start in the quiet season, exactly when nobody wants to spend.
- If the call comes late: buy the season, build for the next one.
- Profile, phone, service area and mobile load all work immediately.
- Fix intake first. Odds of qualifying drop 21-fold between five and thirty minutes.
- Collect reviews and photographs in the busy months. 74% of people want reviews from the last three.
- Do not switch off in the off-season. Flatter spend beats matched spend.
If a site should be ranking and it isn’t, that’s the work I do. Roofing and HVAC SEO covers seasonality, the profile and the phone. If you’re not sure which of several plausible problems is costing you, that’s what an SEO audit is for.
