10 Best Ways to Get Contractor Leads
Competition within small businesses niches like home improvement companies and contractors is extremely high in most areas. This is in part because anyone can buy an old truck, put a sign out, and call themselves a small business. If you own a reputable, licensed company, you not only have to compete against other licensed contractors for leads. You also have to compete against “Craigslist businesses.” Those that can bid super low due to not paying for licensing. Fact is, steady online lead generation for contractors is the only way to create a consistent source of qualified customers.
Best Ways to Generate Contractor Leads
Border West Marketing has done extensive marketing work with many different types of businesses. We’ve run Google Ads for online retailers, more than doubling their revenue. Also, we’ve helped generate more quotes for roofers. We even currently manage all the online accounts of the top Hardie siding installation company in Austin.
Generating leads for contractors can be extremely difficult with so much competition. Choosing the correct ways to promote your business online is important. Some formats work better that others. Below, we’ll list the most effective forms of marketing for contractors, along with their strengths and weaknesses.
1. Building a Website
The first step in getting internet leads for a contractor is building a website. A well designed website is the best way to show what your business is about and provide information for potential customers. Hiring a professional web design company like Border West is a great way to ensure that you have a professional website that drives traffic.
Many small businesses choose to tackle the website building task on their own. If you choose to go that route, there are several easy to use sites online like Wix that guide you along a simple step-by-step process of creating a website. They provide a basic drag-and-drop website builder that requires no outside training.
If you have the time to learn it, building a WordPress website for your contracting company will prove much more beneficial in the long run. There are even web hosting sites like Bluehost that will help you set up your WordPress account quick and easy. Learning how to use WordPress can be difficult, but there is a ton of instructional material on the internet to teach you how. Overall, a WordPress site will look more professional, offer many more options, and perform much better online.
Google My Business is arguably the most effective way for small businesses to find customers locally. So much so that there are thousands of companies listed on there that don’t even have a website! Setting up a Google My Business account is absolutely necessary when thinking about getting internet leads for contractors.
Google My Business and Google Maps are set up in the same location. Once you set up a Google Business account for your contracting company, you will have to verify that you are the actual owner of the company. This will be done via a postcard, and usually takes about five days. When you receive the postcard, use the four digit code on it, and your business will be live.
If you listed a physical address, your business information and location will be listed on the map. If you didn’t, your company won’t show on the map, but you’ll be on the Google Local Business Listings.
Getting a contracting company listed on Google My Business will also offer the ability to get Google Reviews. This is a rating system from one to five stars that customers can rate businesses based on their experiences with them. There is also an area for them to leave a comment, and below it, a place for the business to respond publicly.
Getting good reviews is one way to get a business to show up on Google Maps. Another is to get more 5 star reviews. A contractor’s reputation is the most important part of their business. At Border West, we always recommend that our clients ask ALL of their customers for a review.
3.Craigslist for Contractor Leads
Yes, I know…I was just talking trash about “Craigslist businesses” a couple of paragraphs back. But using Craigslist for contractor leads can be a great way to find customers. Often, just by searching “Gigs,” you can find homeowners who want home improvement work done. Other plentiful contracting leads on Craigslist are requests for movers, lawn care, tree removal, and basic general labor. Be forewarned though, many times homeowners posting these jobs are looking to pay rock bottom prices.
In order to advertise your contractor business on Craigslist, you need to first setup an account. You will have to link a phone number and an email address (if you don’t have an email set up, Gmail offers a free and easy email account). Once you’ve setup your account, you’ll have options as to what category and location you want to advertise your contracting company. You’ll then choose a title for your post, and be given an area to describe the services you offer. You can include pictures and images as well that will be shown along with your post. These should include pictures of completed jobs, equipment, or even yourself. There will also be a fee of between $10 and $25 per ad, depending on your location.
My personal opinion of Craigslist is somewhere in the middle. It used to be a great way for small businesses, local landlords, and people selling items to advertise. In the last few years, a vast majority of people on Craigslist are scammers trying to trick you out of money. Or people trying to sell you something you don’t want (read How to Avoid Craigslist Scams). I’m not saying you can’t successfully use Craigslist to advertise your contracting company. Just be extremely cautious in dealing with people on there.
4. Facebook for Business
Social media is basically everywhere these days and it’s only going to continue to grow. Facebook was once just a place for posting photos and keeping connected with people you knew. Now, more and more, it’s a place people look for information.
Using Facebook to advertise your business is an easy and cheap (possibly free) way to get more contractor leads. First you’ll need to go to Facebook for Business set up page and create your profile. Make sure to fill in all the information accurately. Having differing information online can cause issues when customers search for your company. Also, Google and other search engines may penalize you if the information on your website is different from your other listings.
While setting up your profile, you’ll have the option of linking your website to your Facebook page. This is something you should definitely do. The more ways internet search engines can connect your company’s information online, the more likely you are to consistently generate contracting leads from Facebook.
Facebook will give you the option (and constantly pester you) to advertise with them. If you don’t want to actually create ads, Facebook will provide you with the easy option of boosting your posts. Going this route is an easy and fairly inexpensive way to get your company in front of more local clients.
If you do decide to use Facebook to promote your business, it’s important to keep it up to date. You need to continuously add information, post photos of completed jobs, and respond to comments. If your last work related Facebook post was four years ago, customers may move on to a different company. This is why hiring a social media management company to manage your Facebook posts can be a very good investment. Border West provides excellent social media management services for a very reasonable cost. This also includes reputation management (making sure you keep getting 5 star reviews) and advertising on Facebook. Find out more about Border West social media management for contractors by clicking here.
5. Local Online Business Listings
Local online business listings for contractors are a way to get your company added to dozens of locations on the internet. These are websites like YP.com, Yahoo, Bing Places for Business, Citysearch, and dozens more. When you’re working on online lead generation for contractors, the more places customers can find your business, the better.
There are companies like Yext that will set up and manage all of your company’s local online business listings for a fee. This generally ranges from $20 per month to $1000 per year, depending on how many listings you want. This can seem like a lot of money, especially for a growing company, but it an be worth it. Inputting your company information into all of these listings is extremely time consuming and difficult. Yext actually owns many of the online listing websites, and make it extremely difficult to list your business. They do this in hopes that you’ll just pay them to do it.
If you do decide to set up the local listings yourself, Business.com is a good starting place. They have a list of 50 places that you could potentially register your contracting company online. Not all of those listings will be useful, but it’s a very comprehensive list.
A word of advice: when starting off, just focus on the local online business listings that are the most relevant (Yahoo, Bing, etc). These are generally the easiest to set up and they will provide the most benefit for contractors.
6. Yelp for Business Owners
So, you’ve set up a business website, created your Facebook and Google profiles, and tackled the local registries. Now it’s time to consider branching out. Yelp for contractors could possibly be your next step.
Yelp became famous for making the 5 star review rating system popular. They have a website that provides listings for many companies in the US, and other countries, and grades them by their customer reviews. Getting dozens of 5 star Yelp reviews for your contracting company greatly increase your business. But, multiple bad reviews can do some serious damage.
Yelp has had some controversy over the years about which reviews they show. Sometimes, they won’t show a company’s 5 star reviews, but they do show all of their bad ones. There was previously speculation that purchasing advertising through Yelp would cause more 5 star reviews to be shown.
Keep this in mind if you do decide to pay to advertise your contracting business on Yelp. You can always sign up for a free account, but there’s no guarantee that all of your positive reviews will be shown.
7. Home Advisor
Home Advisor is a monster listing service for cleaners, lawn care professionals, roofers, electricians, and countless other types of businesses. They have spent millions of dollars dominating search markets. So if a customer searches “home improvement company” pretty much anywhere in the US, Home Advisor will be at the top of the list.
One thing to consider when contractors use Home Advisor to advertise is that they charge for customer leads. Every single one. Any customer lead you get, you pay for, even if it’s horrible. Home Advisor is a huge corporation that is very profitable. Selling customer leads for contractors is how they make money. Also, just because your company is buying leads doesn’t mean you’re the only one bidding on the job. Other Home Advisor members will be bidding against you. Many of these “companies” may be little more than one guy with a truck who hugely underbids everyone. This is because he has no real overhead (and probably no real experience). If that happens, you still have to pay for the lead.
So, is Home Advisor bad for contractors? Not entirely. It can be a valuable source for business leads. It can be especially beneficial for getting leads for small businesses that are growing, if they have the budget. If you’re interested in signing up with Home Advisor, you can click here to get started.
8. Google Ads (Adwords) Pay Per Click
When it comes to advertising a business online, Google is the big dog in the industry. Google’s ad revenue in 2018 was over $116 billion dollars! Up from $95 billion in 2017! The reason it continuously goes up year after year is because businesses advertising on Google Ads make money.
Using Google Ads for contractors is a great way gain an advantage over competitors. Google pay per click places your website or ad in front of potential customers exactly when they are looking for a service you provide. This could be when they are searching for a roofing company after a storm. Or looking on Google Maps for the “best Hardie siding installer near me.” Google Ads is the best source for contractor leads on the internet. If you know how to use them correctly.
Google Ads is the one area on this list where we would absolutely recommend using a professional service. Border West manages hundreds of Google Ads for contractors. We know from experience, if accounts are ran correctly, they will make businesses a lot of money. But if the Google Ads account is managed incorrectly, by someone with no experience, it can be a very large gamble.
Border West can offer a free, fast consultation to see the exact return on investment running Google Ads for contractors would generate. We can go over determining factors like budget, competition, and size of your company to put together some exact numbers on spend vs. return. Border West always makes money for our clients, it’s just a question of how much.
Border West currently offers no setup fee for new accounts, as well as a $150 match on your first month’s ad spend. Click here to fill out a simple information request form, or just call the number below.
9. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
We’ve officially graduated from the fun stuff. Now we start to get technical. Search engine optimization, or SEO for contractor websites is the next box we need to check.
If you’re not familiar, search engine optimization is, simply put, things you do to make your website show up higher on searches. There are a multitude of different ways to optimize your website for SEO that will improve your search rankings. Such things like formatting images or reducing unnecessary code to speed up loading time. Also, SEO has a lot to do with content creation (what you write on your website). These are just a couple of examples.
Search engine optimization for contractors is fairly rare, unless they hire an outside company. It’s a very detailed process that takes a long time to learn and a lot of continuous work. Quite simply, most SEO for contractors is done by a digital marketing agency because they just don’t have the time.
If you’re interested in learning SEO on your own, there is nearly unlimited information online. A great starting point is Moz’s Beginners Guide to SEO. Here you’ll find all the tools to get started on the lifelong journey to pushing websites up the ranks of Google. If you don’t want to invest 20+ hours per week on working on SEO for a contractor website, you can check out Border West’s SEO page. Call the number below for an instant response.
10. Content Creation (Blogging)
Content creation, or “writing stuff on your website” could technically be bunched together with SEO. But you don’t have to have a lot of content for SEO to be successful. And you don’t need a search engine optimized website to get results from writing content. You can write valuable content for a contractor website with very little experience and it will help your company on searches.
Adding content to a business website is going to be very helpful at getting potential customers to find you. Jimdo.com has a great page on how to create valuable content for a website. It’s easy enough for nearly anyone to understand and get started. If your website doesn’t have a blog already, kick your website designer in the butt! Unless it’s you, then set one up and get started.
Creating content that search engines think is valuable and readers appreciate can be a science. You can spend countless hours learning about SEO and how to rank your blog pages. Then next month, Google will change their search algorithm and set your website back. The best constant rule of thumb is to just write naturally and informatively, and you should eventually see results.
If you’re not much of a writer, there are dozens of websites advertising people who create content for a fee. Also, most SEO companies incorporate content creation as part of their plan to optimize your website. However you go about it, getting good content on your website is one of the best long term ways to continue to get contractor leads.
