Home Advisor Review (Angie's List, Houzz, Thumbtack Too)

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Home Advisor & Angie's List vs. Website, Google My Business & Google Ads

Should contractors use Thumbtack HomeAdvisor, Angie's List, Thumbtack & Houzz?When you're a general contractor or a construction company you're going to have a couple of different avenues to run your marketing. One of the most common solutions that new contractors will use is third party review sites such as Angie's list, home advisor, thumbtack, and Houzz.But is it a good idea to use home advisor? Are there consequences for advertising with Home Advisor rather than Google? Is it cheaper to advertise with home advisor or Google and Facebook?Essentially, these third party websites do two things, they have contractors build up profiles and get reviews from their customers, and these companies try to attract prospective construction leads,  advertising heavily on Google and television, while also working hard to rank for organic keywords in relevant sectors by writing authoritative content, building up backlinks to their content, and investing millions into it

Because these third-party aggregators make it simple for consumers to see whether or not a construction company or contractor is trustworthy by the use of reviews, and because they are massive international websites with hundreds of thousands of backlinks pointing to their site, Google has deemed them as a highly authoritative source and rewards them in the search engine result pages.In other words, Angie's list, home advisor, thumbtack and house rank in the organic search results of Google and Bing, while they also invest millions into paid advertising on the keywords that you want to win in your local area and sector.this means that when you use house, you are rewarding them for stealing traffic for the keywords and queries that your business solves

so the big question is whether or not it's a good idea for a contractor to use home advisor and these other third-party websites.

3 things to know Before you Start to use Home Advisor, Angie's list, or thumbtack in Houzz.

1. Contractors can get leads quickly at a relatively low cost.

Home advisor and Angie's list can be really helpful for contractors to get leads immediately. You may have a lower likelihood that you will win the bid because you don't have many reviews in the beginning, but you'll be able to take a crack at Leeds the moment you get signed up.Besides being able to actually get some weeds which can prove difficult when you're starting out, you won't have to pay a ton of money to get those leads. one misnomer that you're going to hear is general contractors complaining that they pay for leads that aren't necessarily great quality. No matter what you do online, you're going to have to invest money into attracting New leads.Remember, while you might get frustrated paying for leads from home advisor that don't convert, the alternative is to be spending on Facebook and Google and obtaining clicks that don't do anything.Later on here, I'll show you that I'm not real wild about these sites and I believe there's a better way, but I also thank contractors need to understand that you can acquire leads quickly and at a pretty low cost.Conclusion on this point: if you are just getting started, use home advisor to get your first 10 to 15 Leads.One of the most critical things you need to do is make sure that every job you complete that came from home advisor, you work hard to get them to give you a Google My business review and a testimonial on your website.

The primary reviews that you want built up over time will be your Google my business and after that you might want personal testimonials with a photo on your website. Ancillary to those two review sources are your actual reviews on HomeAdvisor or thumbtack or whatever site you're using.That's one of the critical conclusions here, get business from home advisor, but build up your reviews on Google my business first, and then secondly build up your profile on the particular website such as home advisor or Angie's list.

2: You are renting rather than buying your own space.

When you build up your review profile on a third-party aggregator site, you're essentially remodeling and investing in a rental property that you do not own.What do I mean by this? when you work to build up reviews on a home advisor page, even if it's your profile, you are essentially creating content that will cause Google and Bing to assign authority and clout to that website rather than your own website and Google my business profile.Conclusion: don't work to build up their own authority, work to build up your website and Google my business page. Investing time and energy to get reviews on your home advisor or thumbtack profile is essentially helping somebody else. Instead, get reviews, testimonials, and back links to your own website and Google my business page.

3: They are only good because of Google and Bing, and Google is already getting ready to have their own services solution that will replace it.

I'm not going to discuss whether it's moral or not, but I anticipate Google and Bing using their own services functionality in their search engines to replace HomeAdvisor, thumbtack, and some of the more spammy third-party aggregator sites.

Google local services are why you should avoid thumbtack and home advisor

See the Home Advisor Categories About to be Gobbled up by Google

google services categories 2019[/caption]And that's the final fight here, home advisor profiles and thumbtack profiles are only good as long as Google continues to reward these sites with high rankings in the search engine result pages. The moment that there's a different solution that Google tries to prioritize over home advisor, that profile becomes null and void.Conclusion: we know your website, Google my business page, and Google solutions are going to stay relevant for decades, we don't know if HomeAdvisor, thumbtack, Angie's list and Houzz will become irrelevant because Google decides to flush them out of the search engine result pages.in fact, if I was going to take a company and short it in the stock market, it would be the parent company of home advisor and houzz

4: Remember they will steal authority from your own website

This is kind of saying the same thing, but remember that by building up your company profile on home advisor or thumbtack, that profile can actually start competing with your own website and Google my business profile.I've seen it where all of a sudden people that are trying to contact you end up using your profile rather than your own website, which inserts a barrier between you and your perspective customer.this is a major problem when a third party places itself between you and your prospects, because they extort you for money.when you invest in your home advisor or thumbtack profile rather than your own website and Google my business profile, you will have a whole bunch of people that start to get referred to you and access you through that third-party rather than your own website, and you will have to pay to talk to people every time.Conclusion: take time to invest in your own website and your own Google my business profile or Bing business profile so that your thumbtack or HomeAdvisor profile doesn't outrank and cause you to have to pay in order to talk to your own word of mouth prospectsFinal thoughts.to sum everything up, I would tell new contractors to use HomeAdvisor or Houzz in order to get your first 10 to 15 clients, and then I would work hard to get those clients to review you on Google my business and then post the photos that you take on your own website and Google my business.