Case study · Weathershield Roofing

Same roofer, same site. Now it backs up the reviews.

Weathershield Roofing & Guttering has been fixing roofs around Northampton for over fifteen years, with more than 180 Google reviews at 4.8 stars, and was first on the map for "roofers Northampton" when we started. The website was the weak link. Google was being told the business was in Bedford, there was no sitemap, and the address was nowhere on the page. Andrew did not need a new site. He needed the one he had to work, so we kept his WordPress, his Elementor layouts and his look, and rebuilt everything underneath.

WordPress and Elementor · Rank Math · 15 pages reworked, 24 new · Northampton · October 2026

Visit the live site Drag the before and after

The Weathershield Roofing home page, after — Home page. Same design, now with the Google rating under the heading and a menu that opens onto every service and area

The Weathershield Roofing home page, before — Home page. Same design, now with the Google rating under the heading and a menu that opens onto every service and area

The Weathershield Roofing footer, after — Footer. The address and opening hours now sit on every page, matching the Google listing, with every service linked

The Weathershield Roofing footer, before — Footer. The address and opening hours now sit on every page, matching the Google listing, with every service linked

Before: the archived site, 30 September 2026. After: the live site, 26 October 2026. Same size, same browser.

24new pages, on top of the 15 we reworked
37pages with their own title and description, up from none
82mobile PageSpeed on the home page, up from 45 to 53
0broken links across 163 pages in the launch crawl

Why a refresh, not a rebuild

The roofer was trusted. The website did not show it.

Andrew's customers already rated him. What they could not see on the site was most of it: no review count, no award, no Checkatrade score, no address. And underneath, Google was reading the wrong town and finding pages by luck. None of that needs a new design. It needs the right pages, the right data and the proof put where people look.

Old versus new

What changed underneath.

Measured on our own crawl of the old site on 16 October, and again after the work went live.

BeforeAfter

Sitemap

None. Every sitemap address returned a 404, so Google had to find pages by itself.

A working sitemap with 156 addresses, every one live and indexable.

What Google read

One block of business details that said Bedford, under a generic business type.

A roofing contractor in Northampton, with the right address and hours, breadcrumbs on every page and FAQ markup wherever there are questions.

Page titles

"Roof Repairs – Weathershield Roofing Ltd". No town, and no meta description on any of the 16 main pages.

"Roof Repairs Northampton | Leaks & Flat Roofs | Weathershield". 37 pages written for the search, each with its own description.

Service pages

7 pages of 350 to 445 words, mostly the same blocks repeated. Only the home page ranked for Northampton service searches.

14 service pages, each written for its own search. New: roof replacement, felt roofing, emergency and storm repairs, pitched and tiled, gutter repairs and cleaning, chimneys and leadwork, inspections and surveys.

Areas

4 town pages, and no page showing everywhere the business covers.

16 area pages and an Areas We Cover hub that links them all, from Duston and Kingsthorpe out to Kettering, Corby and Market Harborough.

Address and hours

Not on the site. The Abington Square address only appeared in hidden code.

In every footer: 54 Abington Square, both phone numbers, and opening hours that match the Google listing.

Proof

Four rotating customer quotes. No review count, no award, no Checkatrade score, no gallery of recent jobs, no guarantees page.

A trust strip near the top of the main pages, a reviews page, an Our Work gallery of real jobs, an FAQ page and a guarantees page.

Phone numbers

A call-tracking script swapped the real numbers for tracking numbers on some phones, and the links did not dial.

The real numbers show on every phone, and every one taps to call.

Company name

137 page footers carried an older company name.

The current registered company name on every page.

Sharing a link

No preview image or text when a page was shared.

A preview image and description on the main pages.

Trust signals

The proof was already there. We put it on the page.

People hiring a roofer are letting a stranger onto their house. They look for reviews, real work and a name and address they can check. Every one of those existed. The old home page did not mention the award, the Checkatrade score, the Google rating or the address.

Trust strip

Three kinds of proof, one click each.

Three cards a homeowner can check for themselves: Andrew's ThreeBestRated award listing for Northampton roofers, 9.8 out of 10 from 249 reviews on Checkatrade, and 4.8 stars on Google. Each links straight to the source. The strip sits near the top of the home page, About, Reviews and every service page, and the award and profiles are in the data Google reads too.

The Google rating also sits under the home page heading, the first thing anyone sees.
A new reviews page quotes real customers word for word, with a short guide to leaving a review.
Nothing invented. Every figure is the one on the public profile.

The Weathershield reviews page with cards for the ThreeBestRated award, the Checkatrade score and the Google rating

Our Work

Real jobs, not stock photos.

Fourteen photos from Andrew's own recent jobs: new tiled and slate roofs, dormers, flat roofs, lead valleys and flashings. They make up the Our Work gallery, and a "Recent jobs" strip of them now runs on nine service pages and all sixteen area pages.

The Our Work page showing a grid of real Weathershield roofing jobs around Northampton

FAQs and guarantees

The questions people ask before they ring.

An FAQ page in four groups: quotes and booking, roofing work, gutters and fascias, and areas, guarantees and aftercare. Each answer is marked up so Google can read it as a question and answer. A separate guarantees page explains what "fully guaranteed" means in practice, how the workmanship guarantee sits alongside manufacturer warranties, and what to do if there is ever a problem.

Every service and area page has its own questions too.
Answers use only what Andrew's business actually offers. No made-up prices, response times or accreditations.

The Weathershield FAQ page, with questions grouped under Quotes and booking and Roofing work

Speed

Faster on a phone, same hosting.

No new host and no new theme. Icons drawn inline instead of loading two icon fonts, the main image of each page loaded first, scripts moved out of the way, and 26 oversized blog images re-saved, from 63.8 MB down to 5.4 MB.

Page, mobileBeforeAfter

Home45 to 5382

Roof Repairs6689

Duston5066

Planning permission blog post6687

Google PageSpeed Insights, mobile, 19 October 2026. The time for the main image to appear on a phone fell from 3.0 to 8.0 seconds to 2.1 to 3.5 seconds. Desktop scores move around more, because of tracking and spam-protection scripts we left in place for now.

Everything else

The small things that add up.

1. One name, everywhere

Page titles and footers used an older company name, while Google listed Weathershield Roofing & Guttering. The site now uses the current name throughout, so search engines and customers see the same business wherever they look.

2. Google Business Profile

The listing was already strong, so we were careful with it. Four products added under Roofing, proper descriptions on the services, four duplicate keyword-stuffed services removed, and the first post published.

3. A clean crawl

We crawled every page, post and image after the work went live and fixed what it found. The final crawl: 163 pages, 0 broken links, 0 redirects, 0 missing images, one main heading per page and alt text on every image. A duplicate description tag on 63 blog posts and 79 thin date-archive pages went too.

4. A friendly 404

Anyone who lands on a dead link now gets a page that points them to roof repairs, all services, a free quote, the areas covered and the phone number, instead of a dead end.

5. A blog that works

The blog template rebuilt so every post has a proper heading, date, image and a quote button, and a new post on planning permission for a new roof in Northamptonshire.

What is still coming

Before the work, Weathershield was first on the map for "roofers Northampton" and "roof repairs Northampton" on a live search from Northampton, but the website itself was 15th for "roof repairs Northampton", outside the top 30 for "roofers Northampton", and no service page ranked for its own service. The changes are a few weeks old, so we are not showing ranking results yet, and we will not invent any. We will re-check the same searches from Northampton and add the results here.

Same thing, your business

Good at the job, quiet online?

Websites for trades See the prices The rest of the work

Why it keeps paying

A lead from Google is free. The next one is too.

Andrew paid once. The site is not a cost that stops when the invoice is paid, it is the one thing in the business that goes on bringing people in without being fed. Here is why, in three parts.

Free leads, for as long as the page ranks

An advert stops the moment the budget does. A page that ranks for "mobile hairdresser St Neots" sends the same people, for nothing, every day it stays there, and a well-built page stays there for years. The work is paid for once. Every click after that is a lead you did not buy.

This is the difference between renting attention and owning it. Ads have their place, we run them for clients, but the point of the site is that the searches people already make land on you without a bill attached.

It compounds, because Google remembers

Each service page earns its own searches. Each review makes the listing stronger. Each blog post answers one more question people type and links back to the booking page. None of it is undone by the next one; it stacks. A site that is six months old with thirty reviews and ten honest pages outranks a new one with the same prices, and the gap widens.

That is why the curve on the what-you-get page bends upward rather than running flat. HairBiba took ten perm bookings in a single month through the site. Nida Thai Massage went from no way to book online to ten plus a week. Neither number was there in week one, and neither has needed us to keep it there.

A new client is not one booking

The search brings someone in once. The business brings them back. A perm is redone every couple of months, a Profhilo course is two sessions and a top-up, a good fence gets the gate ordered and the neighbour asking who did it. So the value of one search result is a year of that client, plus the review and the referral, not the first invoice.

Which is the real sum behind "a website that pays for itself": one new client a month, each worth a year of bookings, from pages that cost nothing after the day they went live.

A salon client, found once, for "perm near me"

£100a visit, comes back every eight weeks

6 a yearin the first year

£600from one search result, before she tells a friend

A clinic client, found once, for "Profhilo Norwich"

£250a visit, books the two-session course, then the top-up

3 a yearin the first year

£750and leaves the review that brings the next one

A trade client, found once, for "fencing St Neots"

£420a visit, has the fence done, then the gate, then the neighbour asks

3 jobsin the first year

£1,500+from one page that ranked for one phrase

Get a plan for my business See the payback sums