Why Lead Generation Websites are BAD news…
Posted by Chief Bottle Washer in Lead Generation Websites on March 20th, 2009
If you’ve been a contractor for any length of time and had to experience a lead generation website, you know they are bad for the industry. Why? The turn your valuable service into a commodity, where the only thing the consumer is interested in is the LOW BID! A 25 year old company that has a history of fine quality workmanship is put on the same playing field as one that goes out of business every 6 months and comes back under a new name.
When times are slow, contractors feel the pinch and get desperate and resort to these lead generators. But they are only cutting their own throught in the long run. The same amount of money could be spent on website optimization, adwords, etc to bring in the same leads for a fraction of the cost they are paying to the lead services.
Whats unfortunate, is that the lead services have forgotten who their customers are. The CONTRACTORS! We pay the bills, not the consumer looking for the cheapest quote. Once more, the consumer usually doesn’t even realize that contractors are paying for leads that they submit. I would change my tune, if the lead generating websites only charged for leads that resulted in work being performed. You know 1 payment for 1 lead, but no, they want to charge for it multiple times, even after the work has already been completed, then they sell it to a sister company who then recycles the leads again, and again, and well you get the picture.
No wonder the homeowner won’t return your email or phone call. They finished the job 6 months ago and are still being hounded by calls, all the time wishing they had never filled out that “Send me 3 quotes” form on the parasite website.
BTW, how many bad reviews do you read on those websites? None? What, there are no bad contractors? Well they do remember who there customer is when it’s time to collect those lead payments, and if they can sell it to a subpar contractor, what do they care, their legal department has made the appropriate disclaimers that they are in no way affiliated with said contractor.
Bad News on barely describes it, they are sucking the life blood out of the trades communties. It needs to stop. There are alternatives now, lets discuss and implement the best of these alternatives. Toolbeltguys.com taking back the trades from the advertising big wigs.
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On Page Optimization…Continued
Posted by Chief Bottle Washer in Uncategorized on March 18th, 2009
So what else can you do on your page to make the search engines want to rank you higher than your competion. The most important thing is having valuable content. And if it so happens that you can change it regularly, the search engines just love new stuff. So, updating regularly will keep them “crawling” your site. Crawling just means that the search engine checks your site to see what has changed since the last time if visted.
Remeber the Meta tags for keywords? It should be in the post below… Remember to use your keywords liberally through your content so search engine feels comfortable that what you told it was there, really is. They don’t like to be “tricked”. However don’t go overboard by repeating the keywords unnecessarily. The is called “stuffing” and if found out could cause you to become “blacklisted”. It’s identified as “BLACKHAT” SEO which can get you banned from the search engines you so desperatly need. Through these post, I’ll try only to promote WHITEHAT seo and warn what could be considered as black-hat.
Ok, now lets try to get back to on page optimization. The search engines give weight to the items on your page that are highlighted to the user. This can be in heading tags <h1> <h2>…etc Or in italized words. In words set off by a different font/color/or with bolding. Again, be subtle with these, turning off your users with flashing neon lights will not do you any good. Try and uses a thesaurus and mix up your text a bit so that your not using the same words over and over again. The general public is a fickle animal. You never know how they will search for your product or service.
Tomorrow, I’ll try and start putting some info together on Off Page Optimization. So we’ll see you then and BTW, we welcome any questions or comments.
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On Page Optimization, what the heck is it?
Posted by Chief Bottle Washer in SEO for Contractors on March 14th, 2009
On page optimization are the tools/techniques that you can use in your webpages (through HTML) to make your pages more attractive to search engines. There are items that you can see on the page (all users see) and there are also items that only the search engine sees.
Lets start with things that only the search engine sees. Meta tags come to mind. These can take up an entire book to discuss fully, but we’ll only go over a few of the basic ones. These are also the most common. Meta command go at the start of your page in the <HEAD> section. And look something like:
<head>
<meta name=”Keywords” content=” handyman, home repair, repairs, maintenance, commercial maintenance, home repairs, handyman projects”>
<meta name=”Description” content=”Contractor services nationwide.”>
The two most common meta tags are keywords and description. The keyword meta tag tells the search engine what kind of content it can expect on the page. The description tag tells the search engine what the description is that it should display to the user in the search results. If you don’t have a description tag, the search engine will take it’s best guess and usually gather the first few sentences from the web page whatever they are.
Search engines also look at “alt” tags. These tags were originally used to describe what a picture is. This was most useful when the upload/download speeds where much slower, and is not really relevant for that purpose anymore. Who do you know that surfs now with images turned off. However, it is very useful to those who are vision impaired. Screen readers just like search engines read this tags and can pass along valuable information to your readers. So do use them. It may be law, I’m no lawyer so don’t quote me, anything you can do to make your pages more accessible is not only courteous, but it makes good business sense. More in the next post….
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