Why Contractors Lose Jobs On Home Advisor And What You Can Do About It
You ever get a Home Advisor lead, talk to them for like 20 minutes and work them up a quote, only to never hear from them again? It happens to a lot of contractors. You start to build a rapport and take the time to try and understand what it is that they’re trying to do but in the end you hear crickets. The big question is why. Why does that happen?
In some cases, they didn’t get the right vibe from you, in other cases your price was too high or too low. You can’t do anything about those cases. You are who you are and the price is the price. But in many cases, what happens is once the customer gets off the phone with you, they immediately Google you but they can’t find you. Even when they’re searching for you by name. Sometimes they even google your website and can’t find it. Then they spend about 5 minutes searching and searching. Maybe they find you, maybe they don’t. But once they can’t find you online, that’s it. You’re toast.
Even worse, they may Google you, and find you, but your website is trash. By trash I mean you don’t have any review or testimonials, or you don’t have any before and after photos of your past work. If the customer can’t get a sense of your work from online after speaking with you, you will not get that job. I know this because I’ve been working with contractors for the past 2 years and have seen this happen. I also am a homeowner and have hired several contractors from Home Advisor, Angie’s List, Yelp, you name it.
Even though I work with contractors on their SEO at Bryan Creative, I’m the same as the general public when hiring one. I’ve learned that it doesn’t matter if your website is ugly, outdated, or old. What does matter is being able to be found on Google, having testimonials, and having before and after pictures. Getting testimonials and before and after pictures is simple enough, but how do you get yourself found on Google?
Personally, I recommend finding a good SEO specialist to help you since there is a learning curve to doing the basic things you need to do but if you are going to go it alone here are the top 3 things you can do:
Connect your site to Google Search Console. This basically lets Google know you’re alive and that your site exists. It indexes your site in Google so that it is searchable
Claim you Google MyBusiness Page. This lets Google know that you’re a real business. Once you verify your business with them, you can appear in Google searches in the Maps section
Create a page for your business on Yelp, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, YP.com (Yellow Pages), and Instagram. Even if you’re never going to post, all those profiles will allow you to put a link back to your site so the customer can find you. Sometimes when customers search, these profiles will show up ahead of your own site because these sites are so popular.
Try those out and let me know if doing those saves you at least one job from Home Advisor. I bet it will.