The most common cause is distance. Google ranks the local pack on relevance, distance, and prominence, and distance is measured from wherever the searcher is standing to the address you verified on your Google Business Profile. If you run the company out of a house or a yard twenty miles from the neighborhood you want work in, you will not appear in that neighborhood’s pack no matter how good your website is. The second most common cause is a wrong primary category. Neither one costs anything to check.
Those two account for most of the cases I see, and both are boring. The interesting theories, penalties, algorithm updates, a competitor buying links, are almost never the answer. There were 130,481 roofing and siding contractor businesses in the US as of 2024 (IBISWorld), and in any city worth working in, a dozen of them are closer to the searcher than you are. The pack shows three. Everything below is ranked by how often it is actually the problem, not by how interesting it is to talk about.
| # | Cause | How often it is the real problem | Time to check |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Address and service-area setup | Very often | 5 min |
| 2 | Wrong categories | Very often | 2 min |
| 3 | Reviews behind the local competition | Often | 5 min |
| 4 | One page covering twelve towns | Often | 3 min |
| 5 | One page covering every service | Sometimes | 3 min |
| 6 | Name, address, phone inconsistent online | Common condition, weak cause | 5 min |
| 7 | Suspended, duplicate, or unverified profile | Rare, but total | 2 min |
Roofers are service-area businesses, so most hide the address on the profile. Hiding it from the public does not hide it from Google; the distance calculation still runs off the address you verified. Setting your service area to cover eight cities does not move that pin. It tells Google where you will drive, not where you rank.
To check it, open Google Maps on a desktop, drag the map until the target town fills the screen, and search “roofing contractor” from there. That returns results centered on the map view instead of on your own location, which is why searching from your own office always looks better than reality. Do this for each town you want work in and note where you land.
Fixing it is the hard one. You cannot invent an address; using a virtual office or a relative’s house is the single fastest way to get a profile suspended. The real options are a staffed location in that market, or accepting a proximity ceiling in far towns and competing there through the two levers you do control, prominence and website relevance, which are causes 3 through 5.
Category is the strongest relevance signal on the profile and it takes two minutes to look at. The primary category for a roofing company is Roofing Contractor. Profiles set to General Contractor, Construction Company, or Home Improvement Store as primary compete in the wrong pack, and the owner usually has no idea because the profile looks fine from the front.
Open your profile while signed into the Google account that owns it, click Edit profile, then Business information, then About. The primary category sits at the top. Secondary categories go underneath. Add secondaries only for work you actually sell and staff, such as Siding Contractor or Gutter Cleaning Service. Stacking ten unrelated categories to cover more ground splits your relevance and gives Google a reason to look at the profile more closely.
Change the primary category and give it a few weeks before you judge anything. Rankings move around for a while after a category edit.
Prominence is Google’s word for how well known the business appears to be, and reviews are the part of it you can affect directly. The number that matters is not your review count in isolation; it is your count compared to the specific companies showing in the pack for your city.
Search “roofing contractor” plus your city in Google Maps. Open each of the top three. Write down two things for each: total review count, and the date of the most recent review. Then write down your own. A profile with 180 reviews and nothing new in eight months reads as dormant next to one with 60 reviews and five from this month, so recency is worth as much attention as volume.
The fix is a process, not a purchase. Get the review link from your profile (Edit profile has a share link built for this), put it in the invoice email and in a text the crew lead sends from the driveway before he pulls out, and ask on every completed job. Do not buy reviews and do not screen customers to only ask the happy ones; both violate Google’s policy and both get profiles cleaned out eventually.
The usual version is a page called Service Areas with twelve town names in a list, or a footer stuffed with links to nothing. Google has one page to consider, that page is weakly about all twelve places, and it loses to the company that wrote a real page about that one town.
Check it with a Google search for site:yourdomain.com followed by a town name. If nothing comes back except the homepage and the list page, you have no page for that town.
Fixing this means writing one page per town you actually work in, with content only you could write: the neighborhoods you have worked in, the permit office you deal with, the hail events that hit that area, photos of your own jobs there. Duplicating one template and swapping the town name is worse than having nothing, because now you have twelve thin pages instead of one. Start with the three towns that produce your best margin work and write those properly before adding more.
One page called Roofing covering repair, replacement, storm damage, and gutters is asking a single page to answer four different searches from four different customers. The person typing “roof leak repair” has a bucket in the hallway; the person typing “roof replacement cost” is getting quotes. They need different pages.
Look at your own navigation, or run site:yourdomain.com in Google and count what actually exists. If it is a homepage, an about page, a contact page, and one services page, that is your answer.
Fixing it is a separate page per service, each one covering what the work involves, what affects the price, how long it takes, and what the customer should ask any contractor before signing. This matters less for the pack itself than causes 1 through 3, and more for the organic results underneath the pack and for the quotes you get asked for by name.
Old suite numbers, a call tracking number on some directories and the real number on others, the pre-DBA business name still sitting on an old listing. Roofers accumulate this faster than most trades because manufacturer certification directories, GAF and Owens Corning contractor locators and similar, keep whatever was submitted years ago.
Check it by searching your phone number in quotation marks in Google, then your business name in quotation marks, and reading what comes back. Look at Yelp, BBB, Facebook, Angi, Nextdoor, your local chamber, and any manufacturer locator you are listed on.
Correct the largest ones yourself; each takes a few minutes and no tool is required. Here is the uncomfortable part. Citation cleanup is the service agencies sell hardest because it is cheap to deliver and produces a tidy report showing 47 listings corrected. The effect is real and it is much smaller than the pitch implies. If your address is wrong for the market and your primary category says General Contractor, fixing 47 citations will not put you in the pack.
This is rare. It stays on the list because when it is the problem, it is the entire problem, and nothing else you do registers until it is resolved.
Sign into the account that owns the profile and look for a suspension notice in the dashboard. Then search your business name in Google Maps and look for a second listing at an old address, which happens after a move or when a former employee created a profile years ago. If the profile shows as unverified, that alone keeps you out of the pack.
The usual triggers are an address change, keyword stuffing in the business name (calling yourself “ABC Roofing | Roof Repair Phoenix” when the truck says ABC Roofing), or a virtual office. Reinstatement means filing a request with proof the business is real at that address: utility bill, contractor licence, insurance certificate, photos of signage and the yard. Duplicates get reported through the listing itself using the Suggest an edit option. Expect the process to be slow and to require documents, not arguments.
site:yourdomain.com plus each town name and see whether a real page exists for it.site:yourdomain.com and count your service pages. Repair, replacement, storm damage, and gutters should each have one.At the end of that you will know which of the seven you have. Most companies find three or four, and the order above tells you which to spend money on first.
Whitespark studied 540 local queries and found AI Overviews appearing in 68% of local searches, compared with 39% for local packs (reported via Search Engine Journal). More local searches now return an AI answer than return a map pack, which means a growing share of homeowners read a summary that names two or three companies before they ever scroll to a map. Getting cited in those answers runs on the same inputs, an accurate profile, real reviews, and pages that clearly state what you do and where you do it, so the work above is not wasted on it. It does mean the target moved while most contractors were still arguing about map pins.
If you run the check and want a second set of eyes on what you found, or you would rather have someone else do the fixing, that is what NetPageTwo does. It is $489 a month for technical and on-page SEO plus AI search work, month to month, cancel with 14 days’ notice. Book a call here: https://cal.com/l-b-marketing/netpagetwo. If the twenty-minute check tells you the answer and you fix it yourself, that is a good outcome too.
Related: roofing SEO work.