small businesses

3 Ways HomeAdvisor Is Unfair to Small Businesses

Last Updated: January 25, 2017

There’s one complaint about HomeAdvisor that we hear over and over from our clients: It feels like the game is rigged against small appliance repair companies in favor of larger companies with greater resources.
We’re here to tell you you’re right. Here’s why.

1. You Miss Out on Too Many Jobs

We’ll start off with the most obvious pain point: You can’t possibly respond quickly enough to leads.
The only way to be successful on HomeAdvisor is to respond immediately to every single lead that comes your way. This is doable for larger companies that have a receptionist answering the phone and responding to e-mails all day. In fact, they find a lot of success with it. But what about smaller operations like yours?
If you’re only a one- or two-person operation, you don’t have the luxury of a receptionist. Instead, you have to balance your work with answering the phone and tracking down leads yourself. Unfortunately, as you know all too well, it’s virtually impossible to capture a lead while you’re on the job. After all, how are you supposed to pick up the phone with your hands behind a dryer or squeezed underneath a garbage disposal trap?
To put it in more frank terms: A small appliance repair company like yours isn’t going to land a job unless you happen to be free at the exact moment the call comes in. This is just one way big businesses get a huge leg up on you.

2. You Pay Too Much

As if the unrealistic demand on your time wasn’t enough of a hurdle, here’s another one: the cost. Of course, you agreed to pay a certain amount per lead when you started working with HomeAdvisor. However, we’ve heard from many of our clients (who are small business owners like you and former HomeAdvisor customers) that leads are often shared with as many as 5 or 10 other businesses. Think about what that means:

If leads are shared with 5 different businesses, then that means you have a 1-in-5 chance of closing each one. In other words, you’re actually paying 5 times as much for every lead you finally do close.

In addition to that, clients have also told us that HomeAdvisor occasionally charged them more than the agreed-upon price per lead. Has that ever happened to you?
Again, if you’re a big business with a big budget, unpredictable costs may not be an issue. However, smaller companies like yours can really feel the burden.

3. You Get Terrible Leads

The high cost might be an easier pill to swallow if you knew you were getting quality jobs out of it. But you’re not, are you? Even when you’re miraculously able to capture a lead, there’s a good chance the prospect on the other end is looking for a service you don’t even provide!
This is because it’s in HomeAdvisor’s best self-interest to send you as many leads as possible, quality be damned. You’re paying per lead, so the more leads HomeAdvisor sends you, the more money it makes. It doesn’t matter that those leads are barely relevant to your business.
So, just to recap:

You have to take time away from work to track down leads.
Leads are not cost-efficient or reliably priced.
Some of the leads you get return zero income.

Doesn’t that sound like you’re losing money?
It’s easy to see why only larger companies can use HomeAdvisor without worry. You, on the other hand, really feel the costs of HomeAdvisor’s services.
No wonder HomeAdvisor has received more than 1,000 complaints with the BBB in the last three years alone!

You Can Get Online Marketing That Matches Your Needs

Prospect Genius created an online marketing approach that avoids all of the above pain points. We treat your goals as our goals, and your success as our success.
Unlike HomeAdvisor, which just gives you a small listing in their massive directory, we offer flexible options that can provide top-to-bottom online promotion for your business. With a CoreSite, we’ll build you a fully functional website that’s yours to keep. With Directory Dominator, we’ll promote you on countless different online platforms. With SocialStream or SocialBuzz, we’ll post for you on social media. The goal is to help ensure you’re discovered in every corner of the web.
With Prospect Genius:

When someone discovers your website or Google Maps listing and dials your phone number, they’re calling you directly.
The whole transaction is just between you and your customer—we don’t interfere.
You don’t have to race a handful of other businesses for the same job.
You can respond as soon as you’re able to without worrying that you’ve automatically lost a job.
The best part? Our approach doesn’t favor big businesses over small ones. Everyone has an equal shot at success.

An adviser is just someone who tells you what to do. Why not play by your own rules? Prospect Genius offers you all the tools you need and puts you in the driver’s seat. We offer a cross-section of online marketing tools that will match any budget. See what other business owners are saying about us—or better yet, give us a call for a free assessment from one of our representatives! If you’re willing to give us a few minutes of your time, we’ll happily listen to your company’s needs and figure out if we have a solution that fits.
Stop feeling powerless against the big guys, and start taking matters into your own hands!
Call now at (800-689-1273).

How to Keep the Holidays From Ruining Your Online Marketing

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

It’s no secret that most of us stretch our budgets a little thin over the holiday season. With parties to host and gifts to buy, money disappears quickly. And for many small business owners, the slightly blurred line between personal and business finances means the holidays can impact some of your company’s operations—like online marketing.
If you’re feeling the squeeze of the holidays on your small business’s budget, it’s fine to tighten your belt—but don’t let it affect your online marketing. Canceling your marketing campaign temporarily or skipping a payment may reduce your expenses in the short term, but did you know there can be seriously negative consequences? The fallout will outlast the holiday season and your savings may turn into losses.
How can that be? Keep reading to find out.

Canceling Your Campaign Sets You Back for Months

Canceling an SEO-based campaign, even just for a month, can jeopardize your future profits. To explain how, we’ll use the way Prospect Genius works as an example.
When a client cancels their campaign with us, it’s our policy to immediately take down their website, pull down their listings, and halt all lead generation services. (Most advertisers have a similar cancellation policy.) Your business will stop receiving traffic and leads right away. So canceling your campaign for the holidays will likely cause you to stop getting new customers for at least a month, or however long it takes for you to restart your campaign.
There’s more. Now, whenever you decide to restart your online marketing, you’ll have to wait another few months for your web presence to ramp up again. Why? Because SEO is not something you can drop and pick up where you left off. As soon as you stop SEO, everything goes back to zero.
As Prospect Genius clients may recall, there’s typically a 90-day buildup period after you start a new campaign. This ramp-up window is unavoidable, regardless of how many times you’ve started and stopped your online marketing. So after all is said and done, you lose several months of business even though you only canceled for one month.

Skipping a Payment Is Hard to Bounce Back From

Another thing that some business owners do is let their marketing payments slide for a month. They think it’s the harmless alternative to canceling entirely. While it’s true that making a late payment is better than canceling, it’s far from harmless. For example, when you miss a payment with Prospect Genius, your account is partially disabled until payment is received, causing a dramatic decrease in leads received.
But the real kicker comes later: After delaying one payment, most business owners find it difficult to get back on track with their monthly billing cycle. This is because they now only have a couple of weeks, instead of a full month, to save up for the next payment. Often, this begins an unfortunate pattern of falling behind that’s difficult to stop.

What Can You Do?

We aren’t trying to scare you. We understand there are peaks and valleys in every fiscal year and that the holidays can be especially trying. If money is tight, here are some things you can do that won’t hurt you in the long run:

If you’re doing AdWords or any other PPC campaign, pause it. While you can’t turn SEO off and on again easily, PPC can be started and stopped with ease.
Budget wisely. Plan out all of your income and expenses for the month to see how much money you’ll realistically have for gifts, decorations, food, and, yes, marketing costs.
Pay in advance. If you think there’s a chance you’ll overspend on holiday goods and not have enough money at the end of the month to pay your bill, be safe and pay your bill ahead of time—before your money runs out.

Remember: You’ve invested a lot in your online marketing. Don’t let your web presence come crashing down by canceling your campaign or not paying your bills. You might save a monthly payment, but it will cost you much more down the road.
Questions or concerns? Please don’t hesitate to reach out for help.

Why All the Smartest Small Businesses Have a Custom Domain

Last Updated: September 15, 2016

Here’s a word of advice you may not hear from other marketing teams: Own a custom domain for your small business.
We’ve seen too many small business owners get burned by not having one. The best way to preserve your web ranking, presence, and overall marketing efforts is to purchase your own, custom domain that contains your exact business name.
In this post, we explain the importance of owning your custom domain and the hazards of not doing so. We also offer suggestions for what to do when you can’t get your own domain. Let’s dive in!

Domain vs. Website

First, what’s the difference between a domain name and a website?
A domain is another word for a web address, while a website is the collection of files and pages that appear when you visit that domain. For example, “bobsappliance.com” is a custom domain, which visitors type into the URL bar in a web browser to view Bob’s Appliance’s website.
Here’s a simpler way to look at it: Think of your domain as your street address and your website as your house. The street address tells visitors where they can find your house, but it’s not the same thing as the house itself. Likewise, the domain tells visitors where to find your website, but the website is an entirely separate entity. Make sense?

Owning Your Domain Is Ideal

Now that you understand what we’re talking about when we talk about domains, we can get into the nitty-gritty of how to handle yours.
The most important thing to know? Owning a custom domain is ideal. It provides protection from competitors and makes you look like an established, successful business.
And here’s the thing: You don’t even have to do anything with it! Just by owning the domain, you’ll keep others from taking it (which is especially useful if there are any other businesses nationwide with a similar name). You could also opt to just use your domain for your e-mail address so you appear more professional.
Or, if you’re already working with a marketing team that has created a separate website for you, you can simply redirect your custom domain so it leads to this preexisting site. No need to create a whole new website for your custom domain if you already have one!
If you don’t know how to register and purchase your own domain (although it’s simple to do online), have someone else do it for you. This person could be your marketer, a trusted employee, or a tech-savvy family member—as long as they’re competent and trustworthy.

PRO TIP: Have a custom domain but not sure if you own it? Check if you have a username and password for it. If you’re able to access and log-in to your domain, then it’s yours.

What If You Don’t Own Your Custom Domain?

We hate to sound like we’re fear mongering, but we need to emphasize how critical it is for you to own your own domain.
If you don’t own your custom domain, then it’s up for grabs. That means it could potentially fall into the hands of one of your competitors. Here’s what could happen as a result:

Your brand starts sending traffic to your competitors. People go to your domain (bobsappliance.com) looking for your business (Bob’s Appliance), but they don’t realize they’re actually connecting with a different business.
With control of your custom domain, your competitor can also pose as your business on Google Maps. Google will believe it’s you because the domain contains your business name.
If your competitor is particularly nasty, they’ll be empowered to write incorrect or overtly negative things about your business on the website attached to your domain. So people will visit your website looking for you, only to read bad things about you, instead. We’ve really seen this happen.
If you can’t regain control of your custom domain, you may have to start all of your marketing over from scratch. This includes getting an entirely new business name and domain, since your current one is now associated with a totally separate entity.

How to Prevent Domain Disaster

Want to avoid the nightmare scenarios above? Registering your own, custom domain name can save you a heck of a lot of stress, money, and lost business. Annual fees for custom domains can be anywhere between $10 and over $100, and they’re worth every penny.
However, what if, for some reason, you can’t have a custom domain? For example, some marketing companies may not let you have your own, or another business with the same name in a different state might have already claimed it. So what should you do?
When owning your custom domain isn’t in the cards, these are the next best options:

Get assurance upfront (in writing, ideally) from your marketing team that you will be permitted to take your domain with you after your contract ends. This is absolutely crucial if your domain contains your business name.
If you can’t take your domain with you and you cannot have ownership of it, then you must use a generic domain that does not contain your business name. A generic domain will look something like, “electriciantexas.com,” which you can easily move on from because your business name isn’t attached.

Act Quickly!

The bottom line? If you currently do not own a custom domain for your business, buy one now. Owning a custom domain not only makes your business appear more established—it also secures your business’s web presence.
If someone else does have control of your custom domain, they essentially have control of your entire web presence. You need to move fast and reclaim it before any damage is done. Reach out to them and try to work it out. If they refuse to return it to you, check with your state’s laws to see if there are any legal actions you can take. And if you cannot own your custom domain, make sure you take the necessary precautions to protect your business’s brand.
The longer you go without owning your custom domain, the more immediate the risks facing your online ranking and presence can become. You can’t afford to wait.

Is Yelp's Review Filter Hiding Your Positive Reviews?

Last Updated: June 7, 2016

Are you like the countless other small business owners who have been feeling frustrated—to say the least—with Yelp’s review filter?
It’s okay if you are. Prospect Genius certainly is, too.
Half of the frustration comes from how much Yelp’s review filter obviously favors paid advertisers. The other half comes from how skillfully Yelp seems to be covering it up.

Have any of these happened to your business?

Some of your customers have left you positive reviews, but they’ve been filtered out and hidden from your page.
You don’t have many negative reviews, but for some strange reason, these are the reviews that don’t get filtered out.
Yelp has called and offered to “help” with those hidden reviews if you just sign up for their advertising services.

We don’t know about you, but something doesn’t feel quite right. Of course, Yelp refutes any favoritism towards businesses that pay for advertising versus those that don’t. In fact, Yelp has dedicated an entire “Advertiser FAQ” page to doing just that.
But are Yelp’s claims what they seem? Yelp certainly chooses its words carefully. Let’s take a closer look at a couple of these claims and find out.

1. Yelp Doesn’t “Remove” Reviews…

…But it does filter them out. And filtering is as good as removing them, because filtered reviews are completely hidden from your page.
We have heard from other small businesses that Yelp’s review filter has a tendency to hide negative reviews for paying advertisers and to hide positive reviews for those who aren’t paying.
Obviously, this isn’t an exact rule for popular businesses (like trendy restaurants) that have hundreds and hundreds of reviews. In those cases, the sheer volume of positive reviews wins out. But when a business has a smaller following and isn’t a brick-and-mortar establishment that attracts a lot of in-person visitors, the number of reviews is much smaller—which makes the review filter all the more potent.
For example, Prospect Genius used to have a Yelp page (which has since been deleted), and we ran into this exact problem. We had several five-star reviews, all of which were buried by the filter. Meanwhile, the one and only negative review was left front and center on our page, causing us to have a one-star rating. To make matters worse, the negative review was written by an individual who had also used his own name to write positive reviews for his own business. Isn’t Yelp’s review filter supposed to be cutting down on this kind of shady behavior?
And it’s not just us. We’ve spoken to numerous clients and other small business owners who have had strikingly similar experiences. We’ve even been told by multiple clients of ours that Yelp called them and offered to “help” with negative reviews if they would sign up for advertising services.
FYI: You can read any business’s filtered reviews by scrolling all the way to the bottom of the displayed reviews and clicking on the tiny, grey link that says something like, “23 other reviews that are not currently recommended.”

2. You Don’t Automatically Get “Five Stars” for Paying…

…But you probably won’t get fewer than three.
On its “Advertiser FAQ” page, Yelp says,

“If advertisers could control their reviews, then you’d expect them all to have perfect 5-star ratings on Yelp. Spoiler alert: They don’t.”

This is true. They don’t all have perfect, five-star ratings. But how often do you see a Yelp ad for a business with fewer than three stars?
Our theory is, when a business becomes a paying advertiser, Yelp filters out just enough of their negative reviews to give them a sufficiently favorable rating. Since filtered reviews don’t impact a business’s star rating, this would do the trick.
We tested our hunch by searching Google for Yelp advertiser listings. (You can try it yourself by using this search term: site:yelp.com/biz “yelp advertiser”.) We pored over 21 pages of results and counted how many Yelp advertisers had each star rating (1 through 5). To keep our data consistent with Yelp’s, we rounded up half-star ratings to the next whole star. So 3.5 stars became 4, 4.5 stars became 5, and so on.
The results may shock you, but they shouldn’t. Out of a total 210 Yelp advertisers, 202 of them had ratings of 3 or more stars. That’s 96%.
Here’s a breakdown of our findings:

Our data shows Yelp advertisers overwhelmingly receive high ratings:

5 stars: 79%
4 stars: 16%
3 stars: 1%
2 stars: 0%
1 star: 1%
Hidden: 2%

Now compare this with data from Yelp’s fact sheet, which accounts for all businesses, not just advertisers:

5 stars: 44%
4 stars: 23%
3 stars: 11%
2 stars: 7%
1 star: 15%

When you take a look at all businesses, the distribution of star ratings seems a bit more even. What does that tell you?

Conclusion: It Pays to Pay

We obviously aren’t privy to the algorithm of Yelp’s review filter or what its sales team’s strategy looks like, but we do know that Yelp’s paid advertisers appear to have unlocked the secret to success. Statistically speaking, you’re more likely to get a good rating on Yelp if you become an advertiser.

The Four Most Commonly Misunderstood PPC Metrics

Last Updated: April 16, 2015

Confusion
Look. Online advertising isn’t easy. Not only is it time consuming—it’s downright confusing. Why else would there be an entire industry made up of professionals who have devoted their days and years to studying the nuances of online advertising? If it were easy, every business owner would be doing it themselves, and everyone would be successful at it. Unfortunately, that’s just not the reality.
PPC is a prime example of how confusing online advertising can be to the uninitiated. With so many metrics and data points to look at, the majority of DIY users often wind up misunderstanding what they’re looking at, or they put too much emphasis on a single metric.
Here are the four most commonly misunderstood PPC metrics and what you should really know about them.

1. Click-Through Rate (CTR)

Click-through rate (CTR) measures the ratio between people who see your ad and people who actually click on it. If you only focus on CTR, which is presented as a percentage, then you’re not seeing the total number of people who are actually looking at your ad and engaging with it. A percentage is not representative of the big picture. It doesn’t give you actual numbers, and it certainly doesn’t tell you whether or not you’re getting a good return on investment.
For example, let’s say you have a 90% CTR. That sounds incredible on the surface, but what if it turns out that that 90% is really just 9 clicks out of 10 impressions? Already, you realize that those numbers aren’t very good. But it gets worse, especially if your goal is to be closing jobs and generating more revenue than what you’re paying for PPC. In this scenario, if we consider that converting clicks into customers at a rate of 10% is the standard, then you’re probably only gaining one new customer per month at best. As it turns out, that 90% CTR isn’t good at all. But if you hadn’t looked at other data points, then you would’ve had no idea and you would have continued to throw money at a flailing campaign.
Conversely, you could have a 1% CTR, which seems pretty low at first glance. However, it could turn out that you’re actually getting 100 clicks out of 10,000 impressions. And when you apply the 10% rate of converting clicks into jobs, then you should be getting around 10 jobs per month. That 1% CTR isn’t so bad, after all.

2. Cost per Click (CPC)

Cost per click (CPC) is exactly what it sounds like—it’s the amount you pay for each click. You can set your own CPC budget to not go over a certain dollar amount (either per click or as a daily average each month) if you’re concerned about keeping costs low. However, it’s important to note that focusing exclusively on your CPC will lead you to ignore other important factors, like industry standards. If your company is in a high-demand industry, then all of your competitors will be paying a high CPC. You’ll need to adjust your budget accordingly if you want to remain competitive. Saying that you only want to spend $10 per click, no matter what, won’t do you any good.
Focusing solely on CPC might also stop you from thinking outside the box when it comes to ad spending. First, think about why you want to keep costs so low. Is it because of a small budget? There are better ways to handle a small budget than by arbitrarily setting CPC limits. For instance, you could focus your ads on super-specific, targeted keywords that won’t cost too much but will get you better leads. You could also spend a higher amount for a shorter period of time (like $30 per click for the first 9 days of the month) instead of paying for clicks the entire month. If that’s still too pricey, then you might want to opt for the more economical advertising options on Facebook instead of using Google AdWords.

3. Monthly Spend

We have a lot of clients who wish to set a constant number (usually around $300) for AdWords spending each month. For budget-planning purposes, this makes sense to us. But we have a lot of clients who also say that they want their $300 budget to be spent evenly throughout the whole month. This doesn’t make as much sense to us. Frankly, it’s a terrible idea.
To a person who doesn’t deal with AdWords and countless metrics on a daily basis, it probably seems like a reasonable request: You want to make sure your money lasts the whole month. But that’s not really how AdWords works. If your budget runs out by the twentieth day of the month, that means lots and lots of people were clicking on your ads. In other words, your ads were successful.
Plus, with all of the data we collect on a daily basis, we know that there are natural spikes in impressions throughout the day and week. We want to be capturing as many clicks as possible from these spikes—but if you’ve put a cap on the amount we can spend per day, then your ads won’t reach their full potential. It’s important to stick to a monthly spending budget, but you should be flexible when it comes to how those dollars are used.
Moreover, if your budget does run out early, you’ll get the chance to decide whether you want to expand your budget before the end of the month. This would allow you to reach even more people than you anticipated. Remember, the more you spend, the more people you reach. And isn’t that the whole point?

4. Ad Position

It’s a very common myth that having the #1 ad position is the ultimate advertising goal. In truth, you really don’t need to have the #1 position—and you might spend way too much money trying to do so. Being high in the ad rankings is not always best. In fact, there have actually been studies reporting that position #10 gets more clicks than positions #4-8. It’s a surprising finding, but it makes sense when you think about your own browsing habits. Don’t you usually scan right over the middle of a page, focusing mainly on the top and bottom? As it turns out, that’s what most Internet users do, too. In many cases (especially when your monthly budget is the most limiting factor), there’s no sense in draining your budget trying to get your ad in the higher positions.

See the Forest for the Trees

The bottom line is that you have to make sure you’re looking at the full picture in addition to individual PPC metrics. While AdWords metrics are extremely helpful when taken in the right context, remember that there is inherent value in raw data, as well. The more numbers you look at, the more accurate picture you’ll have of your campaign’s performance.

Prospect Genius