What Top Rankings Knows

Top Rankings is an SEO company built exclusively for roofing contractors. We put your company in the Google Map Pack and at the top of organic search for every city you serve, so your phone rings with estimate requests instead of tire-kickers.

Top Rankings is the roofing-focused practice of Smile MEDIA, a digital agency that has been ranking businesses on Google since 1998, from local companies to national brands. We took everything that experience taught us and pointed all of it at one industry: roofing.

Our focus is revenue optimization: more booked jobs, higher average tickets, and business growth you can see on the schedule board.

Being part of Smile MEDIA means clients get a niche agency’s focus with a full-service agency’s bench: senior strategists, writers, developers, and outreach specialists who have ranked businesses in markets far harder than roofing.

Sheyne Branconnier is the CEO of Top Rankings and owner of Smile MEDIA, the Exeter, New Hampshire agency behind it. He has been building and marketing businesses online since 1995, from early e-commerce applications through cloud services to SEO for national brands.

He co-founded Northeast Internet Publishing in Portsmouth in 1995 to build early e-commerce applications, spent 14 years running a Seacoast cloud services provider that was acquired in 2015, and founded Smile MEDIA in 2011.

New Hampshire is a collection of small, tightly-packed markets rather than one big one, and that changes how roofing SEO should be run here.

Google decides which roofer to show based on hundreds of signals, but they cluster into three groups: relevance (does your site match the search?), proximity (are you local?), and authority (does the web trust you?).

Most marketing agencies treat a roofer like a restaurant with shingles. They don’t know that "roof repair" and "roof replacement" are completely different buyers, that storm season changes search behavior overnight, or that a single ranked keyword can be worth six figures in contracts.

Months 1–2: Foundation work. Rankings barely move. Months 2–3: First measurable movement. Months 4–6: Lead flow becomes obvious. Months 7–12: Compounding sets in. Year 2+: the campaign costs the same, but produces multiples of month six.

Search "roofing companies near me" and look at what loads first: a map with three businesses. For roofing contractors, those three listings generate more phone calls than everything below them combined. Homeowners tap the call button without ever visiting a website.

In the Map Pack, proximity to the searcher matters, so your strongest Map Pack presence is near your physical location. But organic rankings have no such limit.

Google now answers many roofing questions with AI Overviews before showing a single traditional result, ChatGPT handles millions of local recommendation queries, and Perplexity cites its sources right in the answer. The roofers being named are not lucky. They are the ones whose online presence AI systems can read, verify, and trust.

There is no separate "AI index" you can submit your site to, and no shortcut around the ranking systems that already exist. AI search is a new front end on the same competition.

Most roofing keyword lists are alphabetized junk. This one is organized the way homeowners actually buy, because a keyword’s value comes from the intent behind it, not its search volume.

The tiers are: Tier 1 contractor-selection keywords (highest value), Tier 2 replacement keywords (biggest tickets), Tier 3 repair and emergency keywords (fastest to convert), Tier 4 material and comparison keywords (research stage), Tier 5 storm and insurance keywords (seasonal), and Tier 6 commercial keywords (a different buyer entirely).

Each keyword group gets tagged with the job type it represents and a realistic average ticket. A keyword with 30 searches a month that produces $15,000 replacements beats a 500-search keyword that produces $300 gutter cleanings. Obvious once mapped, invisible in a generic tool export.

Traffic is vanity; booked estimates are sanity. Our keyword research maps every search in your market to a job type and dollar value, so your SEO budget flows to the keywords that produce contracts.

Our exclusivity rule isn’t marketing. It’s structural. You can’t honestly optimize two competitors for the same three Map Pack spots. Ever.

We enforce market exclusivity: one roofing client per service area. If we’re ranking you in Manchester, we won’t take another Manchester roofer.

Ads get more expensive every year (auction dynamics guarantee it). SEO’s cost per lead falls as rankings mature. Mature campaigns routinely land at a quarter of PPC’s cost per lead.

Your profile is a ranking asset, not a set-and-forget listing. We optimize every field: categories, services, service areas, hours, attributes, photos, and posts.

For local service queries, every AI system leans heavily on Google Business Profile data, reviews, and established directories. A complete, active profile with steady reviews is the closest thing to a direct line into AI answers.

When a homeowner searches "roofing companies near me," Google shows three businesses on a map before anything else. Those three roofers get the calls. Our local SEO service is a systematic campaign to make sure one of them is you.

Own the Google Map Pack in every city you serve. Google Business Profile optimization, reviews, citations, and local landing pages built for roofers.

We map every keyword a homeowner types between "roof leak" and "signed contract," then build your site around the ones that produce jobs, not just traffic.

We pull every roofing-related search with volume in your service area: head terms, long-tail questions, seasonal spikes, and the material-specific searches that signal premium jobs.

Google ranks pages, not companies. On-page SEO is the discipline of giving Google a perfectly structured page for every service you offer and every city you serve, then connecting them so authority flows where you need it.

By the time a homeowner calls three roofers for quotes, one company has usually already won: the one whose website explained the problem, the options, and the honest costs. Our content marketing makes you that company.

When two roofing websites both have good pages, Google ranks the one the rest of the web vouches for. Link building is how we systematically earn those endorsements, from real publications, not link farms.

$99 "500 backlinks" packages come from link farms Google has already flagged. Best case they do nothing; worst case they earn a penalty that takes months to recover from.

You can have great pages, strong reviews, and real authority, and still underperform because Google can’t crawl your site properly or your pages take six seconds to load on a phone. Technical SEO is the foundation inspection every campaign starts with.

Most web designers build brochures. We build lead engines: sites where the architecture, speed, and content structure are engineered for SEO before the first pixel is styled, because we’re the ones who have to rank it afterward.

Homeowners now ask ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews to pick a roofer for them, and the AI names two or three companies with no ads and no page two. This service builds the signals those systems read, so the name they give is yours.

Nobody controls what an AI system says, and AI answers change as models update. We put that in writing the same way we refuse to promise #1 rankings.