How Rapid Roofing is Leveraging AI SEO to Win New Clients Through AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity
Rapid Roofing is a forward-thinking roofing company capturing leads through ChatGPT. They already closed $120,000 in deals from ChatGPT by the time I came on (their in-house marketing team is awesome).
Now, our goal is to maximize and build on those returns. We're in our first months working together, but we've already increased marketing qualified leads coming through ChatGPT from an average of 5 per day to 14.
Here's some of what I created, and am creating, for their team:
- I have a custom Explore page in their Google Analytics that has pin downed the pages and queries that are moving the needle for them.
- I then placed those queries into Rankscale to track the topics and search terms to track our visibility, sentiment, and performance across different AI tools and Google’s AI overview.
- We care collaborating to create UGC content that helps us help potential clients and that AI loves to site.
- My main tasks for the month of January is to create new YouTube videos and shorts to use video SEO as a way to surface in material AI loves to surface.
How Can I Get More Leads For My Roofing Company Through ChatGPT
First things first, if you’ve got a good SEO team, don't stop that work. You're probably getting some traffic coming in from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and AI overviews.
The honest truth is that there's no direct path to ranking for AI queries like there is in more traditional SEO. The tools, processes, and analytics are much more complicated. But I can tell you that the companies that move first on this are the ones who will be ahead of any and all changes.
The leads Rapid Roofing is getting is proof of that.
Think about it.
People want to know how much it costs to replace a roof. They ask ChatGPT. Your brand appears and is touted as a good option. They may go to your site straight from ChatGPT, or they may wait a day or two and think on it.
But you’re top of mind. They may come to your sight directly later thanks to the answer an AI tool gave them. It’s tricky to track, but it’s worth the investment.
Is there a way I can rank for AI Search like I do for SEO?
Ranking for SEO is more of straightforward process. Not easy to pull off, but understandable. Here's the quick and dirty list of what it is:
- You get a sense of what your ideal clients are from your marketing team (they call it an ICP, an ideal client profile, at a high level and boil it down to an ICP).
- You start looking at what your competitors are doing. If they’re going after the same ICPs, then you’ll want to take note of their strategy. You can use a tool like Semrush to see what keywords they’re trying to rank for. (And yes, you can use Copilot, Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity and others to find these keywords too … ask it “give me 25 seed keywords that I should be trying to rank my roofing business for in [town name].
- From there, you start creating the pages around those keywords. If you’re my ideal kind of client, you already know all this.
What’s different, though, with AI SEO is that every day, every second the prompt is changing. I might ask an AI with its voice feature:
“Hey, my roof is a leaking piece of shit and it’s pissing me off. Are there any good roofers by me that aren’t assholes and have good ratings. They have to do a great job, too?”
Someone else might just type in “I need a new roof. Who would you recommend in [their town]?”
You have to do a lot more digging to figure out what AI tools are bringing you business, how to maximize that, and how to generate new leads on other platforms. That’s where I come in. Set up a time to talk if that’s helpful and you’ve got 2K to spend on something like this (the call is free, though).