Home service businesses encompass a wide range of companies that deliver their services to the client’s homes. The diversity of services is striking, from cleaning and backyard maintenance to full-scale construction.
Naturally, organizational growth and increasing income for different businesses within this diverse group demand specific marketing strategies. However, home services lead generation remains a priority for all. This article offers a comprehensive guide to maximizing the number of potential customers and enhancing lead conversion for home services. Additionally, we’ll look at the list of the best lead generation service providers.
Why Is Lead Generation Important for Home Services Businesses?
Lead generation is the lifeblood of any successful home services business. It serves as the cornerstone for growth, connecting your services with potential customers actively seeking them. By effectively generating leads, you expand your client base and create valuable revenue opportunities. In the competitive landscape of home services, a consistent flow of leads ensures a steady stream of potential clients, allowing your business to thrive.
Moreover, lead generation enables you to target your marketing efforts, reaching those most likely to convert into satisfied customers. It’s a proactive approach that maximizes your marketing ROI, guiding your business toward success.
Whether you’re a seasoned contractor or a budding entrepreneur, prioritizing home services lead generation is the key to unlocking the full potential of your business.
Effective Lead Generation Strategies for Home Services Businesses
Website Conversion Optimization for Improved Home Service Lead Generation
Having a website is important. However, failing to optimize it for the purposes of your home services lead generation will put the initial site-building efforts to waste.
Firstly, make sure all web pages load instantly.
In a modern age where users expect bite-size content that can be digested in two seconds or less, time is a pricey asset. The load speed is also a major factor in the user experience. With every additional tenth of a second that your website takes to load, the likelihood of conversion diminishes, with the major threshold for the bounce rate being three seconds. Websites that take five seconds to load lose three times as many users compared to those loading in three seconds.
Source: Semrush
Consider other elements that contribute to user experiences on your site, such as well-thought-out navigation, high-quality visuals, and legibility of the text. Remember that your site’s usability is also crucial for its visibility on SERPs. The sites with poor performance will not just get increased bounce rates, but they can simply not appear in the user’s search window at all.
Finally, equip your website with the tools specific to your industry to generate more home service leads. For example, if you aim to attract moving leads, craft a convenient online calculator to offer prospects a price based on their needs.
Local SEO Strategies To Get More Home Service Leads
Increasing visibility among the local audience is the primary instrument for various business types, as is crucial for home service leads. When searching for home services that need to be done immediately, the users will look for local businesses, expecting a quick reaction from them.
At the same time, home service companies value local reputation and are more likely to perform high-quality work. Additionally, they may offer a friendly pricing policy, being able to cut down on travel expenses.
Local SEO can really make a difference in boosting construction and commercial cleaning leads among homeowners or handyman leads from local businesses. Here are the main reasons why generating all types of home service leads will greatly improve with enhanced local SEO:
- Local home services advertising is a cost-effective way to grow home service leads. Instead of targeting a large audience with a low CTR, you only reach out to people already filtered by geographic location.
- Users who look for local home services are more likely to buy as they are not just exploring prices on the market.
- People often look for nearby businesses for regular cooperation, making local SEO highly effective for acquiring cleaning leads and landscaping leads for long-term contracts.
- By optimizing local SEO strategies, you’re competing with other local businesses, increasing your chances of securing home service leads.
The following are the factors that matter to the success of lead generation for local businesses:
- Optimize your website content and metadata for the local keywords.
- Create a contacts page on your website.
- Acquire backlinks from other local businesses, partners, and sponsors.
- Organize and participate in local community events, such as fairs, festivals, charities, commerce meetings, and local sports events.
- Advertise on local platforms, including social media forums, radio, and television.
- Create content related to your local niche. For example, if you aim for roofing leads, connect local climate factors to roofing choices.
Ensure that the lead lands exactly on a page dedicated to a service advertised at a point of sale. The relevance of the landing page content is one of many crucial factors for local SEO rankings and home services lead generation.
Content Marketing — the Cornerstone of Home Service Lead Generation
Your website content may be the primary source of information about your company to those who haven’t used your services yet. What they see, hear, or read on your site may be detrimental to growing the number of your customers.
Content marketing has many purposes, such as establishing your business’ expertise in the occupied niche, enhancing brand recognition, and building customer loyalty. So, how exactly do you use content marketing to bring in more high-intent home service leads? Among the many methods, employ the following:
- Create educational material for homeowners digging into home maintenance or improvement topics while emphasizing aspects of your industry. For instance, a plumbing contractor looking to attract plumbing leads may discuss piping installation as an important stage of house construction.
- Create DIY repair videos to help homeowners perform small-scale repairs. This proactive approach will foster loyalty from your audience and establish contact with potential home service leads through interactive commenting channels.
- Share your success stories of challenging projects. Include before and after illustrations to demonstrate the potential impact of your home services.
- Use graphs and charts to support your content with factual arguments. Explain the financial benefits of investing in home improvements, encouraging the customers to make informed decisions.
- Ensure that every piece of your content leads viewers to relevant CTAs, such as scheduling a free consultation, offering a quote, or encouraging them to begin a buyer’s journey. Employ specific web design techniques, such as pop-ups, floating bars, and buttons, to present call-to-actions exactly when and where they’ll be most effective for home services lead generation.
These techniques are fundamental for optimizing your content. However, to maximize home services lead generation, consider the needs of your specific audience.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Ads for a Steady Stream of Home Service Leads
The pay-per-click advertising has some undeniable advantages: your business gets instant visibility on search pages, the payment bills come only for prompts that engage in the customer’s journey, and the precise targeting allows reaching a specific audience.
With that said, some people don’t like to be bothered by paid ads that they feel are intrusive. Plus, they may be quite expensive. In the case of the home service, the average CPC price on Google pages is $6.55 per click.
So, is it worth using PPC ads to get more home service leads?
The answer is definitely yes. While home service businesses pay more for PPC ads, their conversion rates are also higher than the average, with over 10% CR. The paid-per-click ads, with their precise targeting settings, benefit businesses operating within a specific location.
Additionally, users often search for home services urgently, forgetting about their distaste for paid ads. In this scenario, PPC advertising proves a sure instrument for getting HVAC leads when users encounter heating, ventilation, or air conditioning issues.
If you feel like you’re paying too much for home services leads, you can always limit the daily number of clicks you’re willing to pay for or adjust other settings to manage your paid ads.
Leverage Social Media Ads To Bring in More Home Service Leads
While social media ads cannot guarantee conversions, they can be used to increase your business’s visibility. For example, the average cost of an ad that gathers 1,000 impressions on Facebook, the most popular platform in the U.S. and worldwide, was $7.19, and the average CR was a little more than 1.3%.
Even with such conversion rates, the price for home service leads acquired through social media ads may be much lower than if gained through PPC ads on SERPs.
Regarding the general guidelines for using social media, it is crucial for home service businesses operating within specific locations to participate in local social media communities and forums. They offer excellent opportunities to showcase your work, engage in discussions through commenting systems, and receive reviews.
For instance, social media ads can attract people to your portfolio of landscaping projects on Instagram, contributing to generating landscaping leads. Managing a Facebook blog where you explore different types of green power sources and target audiences interested in alternative power solutions can boost solar leads.
Don’t forget that the nature of social media platforms allows users to share information easily. So, use ads to promote high-quality content that will show your expertise while being educational, engaging, and informative.
The only downside of being active on social media is if the company gathers predominantly negative reviews and more people read them. Business owners must solve their fundamental problems before advertising for home services lead generation in a vibrant virtual environment.
Boost Online Reviews To Get More Home Service Leads
Online reviews are exceptionally valuable for successful home services lead generation. There’s nothing more convincing than an honest evaluation of a business by a fellow customer.
Moreover, when the users have already engaged with your company, purchased your services, and are in the stage of evaluating your services, they will often look for supporting thoughts from existing user reviews to be more confident about their position.
To leverage the user reviews potential for growing home service leads, follow the next steps (it goes without saying that providing excellent services is a must):
- Bring up your archives. Employ email campaigns targeting your past customers, politely asking them to share their thoughts about history with your company. Remember that reaching out to them contributes to their ongoing experience.
- Use the occasion of reaching out to your former customers. That’s an excellent opportunity to remind them about your business — re-engaging past clients is a solid method for generating quality home service leads. Offer discounts, upgraded services, and free consultations.
- Share positive user reviews across different platforms. Monitor user feedback on your social media accounts, your company’s website, and niche forums, and copy-paste them to all the online platforms you manage.
- Streamline the review process. Consider incorporating direct links, user-friendly forms, and clear instructions.
- Respond to all reviews if you can. Examine the negative reviews to improve your services, and explain why your company failed to address user expectations or offer a discount or compensation. Reacting to user feedback reassures customers that you value your reputation and prioritize user satisfaction.
Set Up a Referral System To Get More Leads
Word-of-mouth marketing can often be used as a primary home service lead generation strategy. First of all, when potential customers hear about your company from the people they know, they prefer to find out about that company rather than any other random option.
The leads you get from the referrals are high-quality, meaning conversions are more likely to happen because there needs to be less effort to provide the prompt with the feeling of trustworthiness. Moreover, an effective referral system can provide you with free home service leads.
However, you can enhance it through additional financing, such as providing referrers with incentives or investing in training your staff to establish referral groups to increase home service leads. Offer discounts to loyal customers’ friends and family to encourage more referrals.
Consider the following referral system examples for home services lead generation:
- An electric company reinstalling house wiring offers an ongoing customer to recommend it to friends and family, and in exchange for successful electrical leads, presents their customer with a discount on a final bill as a referral fee.
- After finishing a project, a home remodeling contractor presents a client with referral cards containing contacts and pricing details and grants sufficient discounts to prospective clients who show those cards. If the customer has a good experience with the contractor, the contractor can get remodeling leads from the customers’ friends and family.
- A landscaping company designs a referral system where existing customers refer their neighbors, create landscaping leads, and receive vouchers for free lawn mowing or a snow removal session.
Update your GBA to Boost Lead Conversion for Home Services
Google Business Account (GBA) is a free framework for presenting your business on Google. Once the users discover your company through Google search, they are presented with essential information, such as working hours, location, and thumbnails of relevant photos. The benefits of using GBA include:
- Increased visibility on Google SERPs
- Reviews submitted on GBA contribute to your positive reputation
- Engaging with customers by responding to reviews and posting updates
- Enhancing local SEO by providing Google with address details
- Instantly presenting users with contact information and working hours confirmed by Google
Given that business owners and customers collectively contribute to building the GBA forefront by uploading photos, ratings, and shared experiences, businesses with such accounts are 94% more likely to be viewed as reputable.
Regular updates and optimization of your Google Business Profile (GBP) are crucial for growing home service leads. Post many project pictures to attract home improvement leads: even if users aren’t actively seeking improvements, seeing your projects may spark interest. A construction company without updated photos has fewer chances for residential construction leads than one consistently updating its GBP portfolio, signaling an active and trusted business.
Offer Seasonal Promotions To Attract More Home Business Leads
Home service companies can benefit from offering seasonal promotions. For example, HVAC companies may provide discounts on heating system check-ups before the winter season. Landscaping services might offer promotions for spring lawn care or fall cleanup. These promotions may instill a sense of urgency, encouraging existing clients to schedule services at specific times of the year and helping to optimize the company’s workflow while getting more home service leads.
Additionally, seasonal promotions can help keep the business active throughout the year. A roofing company might provide special deals on roof inspections for businesses during seasons with less demand for roofing services. Such a strategy will provide income during off-peak seasons and create high-quality commercial roofing leads.
Collaborate With Related Businesses for Enhanced Home Lead Gen
Getting referrals from related businesses is profitable for generating home service leads, and it works best through mutual collaborations. In this arrangement, you provide your customers with referrals to other businesses, and, in turn, other businesses do the same. These referrals work wonders by establishing trust in your business before the customer even cooperates with you. This is because those other businesses refer you to customers with whom they had a positive experience.
Certain pairs of businesses are perfect for referrals. For instance, an interior design firm can provide your company with painting leads, and referrals from a construction company have the potential to generate electrical, plumbing, and pest control leads.
Collaboration with companies not in the home service industry can also prove beneficial. For example, a real estate agency referring your company to people who bought a house will help you generate maintenance leads. If the new owners want to renovate the house, these referrals can result in home remodeling leads.
Send Out Direct Mailers To Get More Home Service Leads
An even more precise targeting by geographical area is possible with direct mailers. And why else is it beneficial for home service businesses? Because it also allows targeting homeowners. These categories combined — location and homeowners — provide an ideal demographic slice for many home service industries, particularly for acquiring the painting, plumbing, solar, roofing, landscaping, and remodeling leads.
On the practical side of employing a direct mailer campaign for obtaining home service leads, employ these instructions:
- Explore what the target audience needs by learning their type of housing and demographics.
- Create engaging visual materials that explain what your business does, including testimonials and photos of past projects relevant to prospective buyers.
- Ensure professional design of the materials to make them eye-catching, informative, and concise at the same time.
- Make a clear offer explaining pricing on a project, offer a discount or a free consultation.
- Have a clear call-to-action (CTA) — ask people to call you, visit a website, or take other actions.
- Track your direct mailer campaign to analyze it and improve for more effective home services lead generation.
- Follow up with another mailer campaign, emails, or calls to increase home service leads.
Host DIY Workshops for Home Services Lead Generation
Hosting DIY workshops can be an effective strategy to generate home service leads and build relationships for future sales. Essentially, you organize a workshop to demonstrate or teach a particular home-related task or project.
For instance, if you’re a gardener, you might host a kitchen garden workshop. While for a home repair service, a workshop on basic home repairs like fixing a leaky faucet would be relevant.
These workshops not only position your business as an expert in your field, but they also provide value to participants, building audience loyalty. When these attendees require professional services in the future, your business will be top of mind. Plus, they’re likely to recommend you to friends and family, thereby increasing your pool of potential home service leads.
Moreover, you can collect attendee’s contact details for future marketing efforts or even upsell your services during or after the workshop.
Top Lead Gen Websites & Platforms for High-Quality Home Service Leads
Many businesses, big and small, use dedicated online platforms specializing in lead generation for home services. These websites function as online marketplaces where customers can find and contact various service providers. They often use algorithms to match customers with service providers based on their specific needs or provide advanced filtering functionality.
Some platforms function as home services lead generation companies* and integrate payment features and customer relationship management, while others can serve as free lead generation websites. Let’s review the top five of them.
*Phonexa cannot be held responsible for the conduct of the listed companies, as these are independent companies unrelated to Phonexa. The content reflects the personal opinion of the team.
Houzz
| Monthly Visits | Page Per Visit | Time On Site | Bounce Rate | Direct Traffic | Search Traffic | Paid Referral Traffic | Referral Traffic | Social Traffic | Mail Traffic |
| 12,510,384 | 4 | 175 | 0.62 | 34.39% | 58.05% | 0.31% | 1.64% | 2.60% | 2.85% |
Houzz is a modern, user-friendly platform for home services lead generation that serves as a hub for home improvement and design professionals, connecting home service providers with potential customers. It is also a popular source of inspiration for users considering home improvements, as browsing multiple professionally designed portfolios is a breeze.
The home service providers’ profiles feature ratings, user reviews, and platform-issued badges, signaling the provider’s trustworthiness. The listings are sorted according to various filters and ordered according to the profiles’ ratings and positive history.
However, the intense competition from experienced home service businesses may result in slim chances of being noticed by users for those new to the platform.
Considering its popularity and functionality, Houzz could prove beneficial in reaching a broader audience and generating various types of contractor leads for bigger home service businesses.
Pros:
- User-friendly interface
- Complete business profiles with portfolios, reviews, and ratings
- Large user base
Cons:
- Overly competitive for newcomer businesses
Reasons to use it for home service companies:
- Houzz offers high user traffic for companies who already have loyal customers and know how to display their past projects most appealingly.
Porch
| Monthly Visits | Page Per Visit | Time On Site | Bounce Rate | Direct Traffic | Search Traffic | Paid Referral Traffic | Referral Traffic | Social Traffic | Mail Traffic |
| 277,022 | 2 | 63 | 0.67 | 37.02% | 52.50% | null | 6.12% | 2.34% | 2.02% |
Porch is a specialized platform connecting companies seeking home service leads, boasting a massive database of providers.
However, the way prospects connect with service providers differs from Houzz. Porch.com is not optimized for browsing portfolios and operates with a multi-stage funnel where users define service types, workloads, and addresses. This approach may generate fewer leads for contractors, but it ensures users see only providers perfectly addressing their needs.
Moreover, it’s an excellent starting point for emerging home service companies, as users often hire companies with just one or two reviews.
Pros:
- Large providers’ base
- Advanced user-to-provider matching process
Cons:
- Not optimized for browsing many portfolios
- Generates limited leads for each contractor
Reasons to use it for home service companies:
- The search engine employs many details provided by users, ensuring better quality home service leads.
- The contractors new to the platform can convert leads if they match customers’ needs.
BuildZoom
| Monthly Visits | Page Per Visit | Time On Site | Bounce Rate | Direct Traffic | Search Traffic | Paid Referral Traffic | Referral Traffic | Social Traffic | Mail Traffic |
| 809,398 | 6 | 82 | 0.74 | 12.35% | 82.16% | 0.11% | 1.36% | 1.23% | 2.78% |
As an owner’s representative, BuildZoom guides property owners through the pre-construction process, offering premium services like contractor validation, bid collection, value engineering, and contract administration. Partnering with 2,000+ building departments nationwide, they maintain a vast contractor database and ensure permit data is regularly updated.
Additionally, BuildZoom’s review integrity team guarantees review authenticity. Contractors are evaluated on permits, completed jobs, reviews, years in business, licenses, and responsiveness. The platform excels in verifying contractors’ trustworthiness and offers a diverse pool of companies. However, its user base is smaller than that of competitors like Houzz, posing a challenge for acquiring home service leads in a competitive market.
Ideal for companies adaptable to pricing policies, BuildZoom proves effective for construction leads and cost-saving for users.
Pros:
- Large provider base
- Focus on the provider’s authentication
Cons:
- Not a large user base
Reasons to use it for home service companies:
- The platform manages customer-business relations and fosters the signing of trustworthy contracts.
HomeAdvisor
| Monthly Visits | Page Per Visit | Time On Site | Bounce Rate | Direct Traffic | Search Traffic | Paid Referral Traffic | Referral Traffic | Social Traffic | Mail Traffic |
| 4,302,861 | 4 | 155 | 0.48 | 44.26% | 52.10% | 0.10% | 1.93% | 0.80% | 0.81% |
HomeAdvisor, a well-established website for home service lead generation, boasts 20+ years of experience and a user base exceeding 30 million. It primarily focuses on connecting users with providers for small-scale tasks and home improvement lead generation rather than larger construction projects.
HomeAdvisor offers businesses significant control over their profiles and real-time budget adjustments, which is crucial for its pay-per-lead model.
However, drawbacks include being matched with a limited number of companies and the potential for low-quality leads. Businesses should carefully weigh the pros and cons, considering HomeAdvisor’s optimization for pest control, moving, handyman, and other leads for home care services, before deciding on its suitability for their lead generation investment.
Pros:
- Ability to adjust prices for each project
- Large user base
Cons:
- Provides users with only a few home service providers for each task
- Possibility of generating poor-quality leads that don’t convert
Reasons to use it for home service companies:
- HomeAdvisor is optimized for use by businesses offering one-time services.
- Contractors willing to lower their prices have more possibilities on this platform.
Thumbtack
| Monthly Visits | Page Per Visit | Time On Site | Bounce Rate | Direct Traffic | Search Traffic | Paid Referral Traffic | Referral Traffic | Social Traffic | Mail Traffic |
| 4,752,968 | 4 | 220 | 0.46 | 43.87% | 46.17% | 1.34% | 2.72% | 3.59% | 2.31% |
Thumbtack has a large user base, with over four million customers looking for services ranging from home improvement to personal training and photographers, providing a significant pool of potential leads for home businesses and some exclusive home improvement leads. Unlike other websites similar to Thumbtack, where companies are offered to contact among the selection of home service leads, customers get to choose which companies they will contact, and the companies will be automatically charged, even if the user doesn’t proceed with the order.
Many companies do not like Such a policy, especially starting ones that can’t afford to waste money on low-quality leads. If you go through Thumbtack reviews, you’ll see many companies being salty about their experience with this home business leads platform and questioning the quality of home services lead generation acquired there.
On the other side, end-users regard Thumbtack as one of the best home service websites and prefer its user-friendly interface and the overall quality of the contractors found on the website.
Pros:
- Offers more home service types than the competitors
- Large user base
- Excellent browsing experience
Cons:
- Strict pay-per-contact policy
- Companies are not allowed to select leads
Reasons to use it for home service companies:
- Thumbtack benefits companies who can sacrifice paying bills on contacting prompts while waiting for a profitable deal.
Certainly, these are not all home service lead generation companies available online. For a comprehensive list of leads generation services, navigate to our dedicated blog article.
Common Mistakes To Avoid When Trying To Generate Leads for a Home Services Business
If the company fails to generate home service leads, it’s crucial to implement all of the above strategies and eliminate possible friction points preventing from growing a client base one by one:
| Neglecting online reviews | Ignoring or not actively managing online reviews can harm your reputation and deter potential home service leads. |
| Overlooking local SEO | Without local search engine optimization, it is harder for customers in your area to find your services. |
| Ignoring website optimization | A poorly optimized website may lead to a higher bounce rate and fewer home service leads. |
| Failing to use social media strategically | Inconsistent or ineffective use of social media can result in missed opportunities for engagement and home services lead generation. |
| Underestimating the power of user referrals | Overlooking the value of satisfied customers recommending your services can result in poor home services lead generation. |
| Not utilizing local partnerships | Missing out on collaborations with local businesses, especially from related industries, limits your potential referral sources. |
| Lack of specialization in marketing efforts | Failing to tailor marketing strategies to specific niches may result in less targeted home services lead generation. |
| Neglecting customer follow-ups | Failure to re-engage with past loyal customers may result in missed opportunities for repeat business. |
Understanding The Importance of Lead Tracking For Home Services Lead Generation
Lead tracking involves monitoring and analyzing home service leads and their sources to determine the most effective strategies. Businesses can focus on areas that yield better results by identifying what channels bring high-quality leads and allocating resources accordingly.
Basically, lead tracking insights serve as a compass for optimizing marketing strategies, improving email campaigns, enhancing website performance, and refining sales processes. These refinements result in a better return on investment rates and the overall succession in the competitive home services market.
To optimize your home services lead generation efforts it’s best to use an all-encompassing lead management tool, like LMS Lync. This robust product will closely scan lead details to analyze and optimize the web campaigns resulting in increased conversion rates.
Real-time data from the LMS Lync lead management tool allows for identifying home service leads that need to be contacted immediately. Quick distribution of leads to relevant representatives decreases lead response times and multiplies chances for conversions.
Take Control of Your Home Service Leads With Phonexa
If you are looking for a suite of instruments to manage various home services lead generation strategies for your business, consider partnering with Phonexa. As an enterprise-grade software for performance and partner marketing, Phonexa offers top-notch tools embedded in a user-friendly interface for fine-tuning lead management, call tracking and distribution, bookkeeping automation, streamlining email campaigns, exploring user behavior on your websites, and more.
From landscaping to construction businesses, all home services companies can get real-time data reports, receive and deliver leads on the go, and maximize their ROI by using Phonexa’s products.
Explore pricing on an all-inclusive package of lead management solutions, or book a consultation to learn more about Phonexa.
Frequently Asked Questions
How can I use сall tracking to convert more home service leads into customers?
Call tracking data, such as call duration, combined with other metrics help identify high-intent home service leads that can be converted immediately.
What are the best sites for home services lead generation?
While many platforms assist companies in generating home service leads, the most popular ones are Houzz, offering the best browsing experience for clients, and BuildZoom, which offers an advanced system for company verification.
What are the distinguishing characteristics of home service leads?
Home service leads have a higher average cost than other industries and showcase higher conversion rates.
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