Transcription
In 2025, there have never been more ways to advertise with your home service or blue-collar business on the internet. Every home service business owner is dragged in every other direction, thinking that they're going to find the magic bullet to get the phone ringing in their business. And what typically has happened, and what has happened to me in the past, is spending thousands of dollars on advertising avenues that aren't very effective.
There's another way. And so, in this video, we're going to go over a master list ranking all the ways that you can generate leads on the internet from worst to best. And the goal for this is for you to determine what's the best place for you to put your money in your business. Using the experiences that I've had in my own businesses, I own two home service businesses. I'm in the middle of selling off one of them. I have a Christmas light business that does $800,000 in two months in sales. I have a permanent lighting business that we just launched, and I'm in the middle of selling my junk removal business that we scaled to lower six figures while just keeping the employees of the lighting business employed year-round.
This is ultimately what I've done. In my opinion, I don't think it's gospel. This is just my experience. I haven't had a nine-figure exit. I'm just sharing what has worked for me up until this point and hopefully will help you make decisions for your own business. But if you disagree with me, let me know in the comments. If you agree with me, let me know. But without further ado, let's get [Music] started.
All right, starting with the D tier. These are the ones that, in my experience, are the worst places you can park your money. I'm going to walk you through all of them and then explain to you why I don't think they're very effective, with some caveats to maybe some exceptions. These would be all of the lead-gen pay-per-lead sites. So we're talking Yelp paid ads, Home Advisor, Angie, House, or any of the other ones that charge you per individual lead and don't offer instant booking features. And again, we'll go over another one in a little bit, but these are the ones that I think are the worst places you can park your money.
Now, that doesn't mean there's not going to be people watching this video that have used them profitably. I've even used Home Advisor profitably in my Christmas light business. The issue is how profitable it is and how scalable it is in your system. Now, here's a few reasons why I don't think they're very good. Their entire business model is they have people scraping new business listings, new LLCs filed, new articles of organization filed in each state, and they hammer new business owners. That's their main source of lead generation for new customers. The issue is they're doing that because every experienced business knows that they suck. The reason they suck is because all they're doing is the same model that all of these doc websites did in the early 2000s that made them a lot of money.
So, if you think about it, Zillow, Redfin, Angie, Home Advisor, Yelp, Thumbtack, all of these are largely the same model. And the model is they got really good at SEO in the early 2000s, so they rank high on the organic search results for just about everything. They have multi-million dollar SEO spends. So, if you go Google window cleaning in Scottsdale, window cleaning in Seattle, pressure washing in Florida, and you scroll past the Google Maps listing, you're going to always see Angie, Home Advisor, Thumbtack, or something else because they have really good SEO.
What they do with that SEO ranking is they generate leads essentially now for free because they're at the top of the rankings, and then sell you the lead for a premium. The issue is, if you're on that side of the table on the transaction, you're the loser, loser, loser, loser, loser. They did all of the hard work ranking high and they charge you a premium for spoon-feeding you the lead. And so, it's not overly scalable because the quality of lead is questionable. You have to manually dispute everyone that doesn't get back to you, which operationally becomes a nightmare. And they're sending that one lead to four or five businesses, sometimes some markets two or three, but they're typically sending it to four or five businesses.
So, if I already have a 50% close rate on generic marketing, whether it's inbound organically and anything else, and then I go pay Angie $40 for a lead, and they send it to five other businesses, what do you think your close rate's going to be on that? So they're making $40, $50 times five if they send it to five businesses, so they're going to be making $200 to $250 on these transactions, and you're going to be lucky to close one to two of those out of maybe five to 10 because you're going to be put automatically into a bidding war where you're just names on a screen. There's no way for you to differentiate. And the people using those sites are typically worst-quality entrepreneurs.
Now, the one exception I will make for this is if you have an ultra-high ticket home service. So, if you're a roofer, if you're a plumber, if you're an electrician, these lead-gen sites have proven to be a little bit better on those because you have so much margin to work with. But even with these higher ticket businesses, there's going to be better ways to park their money than that. But they do tend to be more effective if your average ticket is really high.
All right, all right. Where's your ticket? All right, moving on up to the C tier. This is where we're going to have. They're still not great, but they're a little bit better in my experience than the D tier, which I would basically tell you not to do anything on the D tier and probably not do anything on the C tier. But this is again, from my own experience. The C tier is where I'm going to categorize Thumbtack and Yelp. Free Thumbtack, specifically, is also charging you per lead, and they're doing the same thing. The issue is Thumbtack tends to be a little bit better on the refund side than those other sites, and they have a little bit more flexibility for you to build brand. You can, you know, have a profile photo on there, you can talk about yourself, it'll show how many times you've been hired. And so it's better, but better for newer businesses.
And the reason I put that in the C tier is, like, if you're brand new, you can make a Thumbtack account tomorrow and just generate phone calls automatically for a lot less. They're not going to put you into a contract like Home Advisor and Angie do. Now, because no one would pay them after the first week if they didn't lock people into contracts. And so that's why Thumbtack is a little bit better. You're still going to pay per lead and everything else.
Now, Yelp, probably 10 years ago, would have been a lot higher on this list. But Yelp now has become just horrendous. They're a money grab, and they're terrible for businesses. Everybody gets called by Yelp 10 times a day when they own a business. For that reason alone, for how much they call me, I want to put them in the D tier. But because it's free and some Boomers still actually look at Yelp, you want to at least get, you know, a handful to 10 to 20 Yelp reviews, uh, as like just so you have a presence there. It's another place with your website to be linked on the internet. But I wouldn't put a ton of effort into it, and I would not give Yelp any money. But it's another review site that still some people use. But I mean, just look at Yelp's stock price and tell me how good that business is running. That means if the stock is going down.
So, moving up to the B tier. The B tier is specifically where I'm going to say you should probably be doing most of these. But if you still are like, brand new in a business, you can probably pick or choose a couple and lean into them. But the B tier is where I'm going to categorize organic social media, Google Local Service Ads or Google Guaranteed, and then also email retargeting.
Now, let's talk about organic social media first. The reason I put it in the B tier and not the A tier is when it's fully running and generating organic leads and you've actually built an online presence on your social media, it's probably S tier. The issue is getting it to that point is really difficult. Like, I've been pouring effort into organic for like two or three years now, and I've just now started to generate organic leads in my social medias. And so the reason it's not higher is because it's harder to get it going. Thus, I'm going to put it in the B tier. But once you get it going, it can be incredibly effective because there's no better form of a lead than a free lead. But even if you're not generating a ton of organic leads from your social media, it's still important to be active because when you do eventually run ads, Facebook and Instagram ads, people are going to click your profiles a lot. So you've got to make it look like somebody's home.
Moving on to Google Guaranteed or Google LSA. This is the one that Google essentially charges you per phone call that they generate for you or for a messaging conversation. Now, most businesses don't even have messaging conversations turned on because they pay per combo, and people very rarely get back to you, and it's harder to get refunds from Google on leads that are just dead. But then Google LSA, Google Guaranteed, when they generate phone calls, they can be really good. It's just really expensive. The one reason I think it's positive is because Google makes people show proof of insurance to be able to run Google Guarantees, and they're clearly really pushing that on top of the Maps pack. Because Google's goal is to give consumers a quality result. And so, if Google's going to give you a scammer all the time, it's going to look like a bad look on Google. And so what they've done with Google Guaranteed is they've made people show proof of insurance. They have you upload a bunch of documentation. And so consumers know that the people they're calling on the Google Guaranteed are going to be more quality.
But on the flip side, Google's charging a lot for that. Like, in my junk removal business, we were getting phone calls on Google Local Service Ads for like $75 a phone call, whether we were closing them or not. So on a lower ticket item like that, it wasn't penciling very well. But on higher ticket businesses, it can be really good, or if you're in a market that's less competitive than the market I was in, the cost per phone call is going to be less.
And then the last one is email retargeting on the B tier. Email retargeting would be higher, but again, similar to organic social media, it takes a while to get going. And so, in your day-to-day business, you need to be collecting emails of every single quote request or job booked because you can go back and email retarget them. At the peak of our junk removal business, we were generating about $3 to $5,000 a month of work just off of email retargeting our book of business from the past three years. That was an unbelievable thing that was taking me 10 minutes a month to do, and it was consistently generating us leads. The issue is it just takes a lot to get going. So, if you only have 500 emails in your database, you're not going to really get a crazy return on investment there. But once you start getting a few thousand, 10,000, 20,000, this can become an unbelievable lead generation source, and you want to automate it.
So, I use Snappy Leads to automate all my email retargeting. Now, it takes our entire book of business and drips them automatically. Happy New Year emails, Happy Valentine's Day emails, a random monthly one that, like, I don't even have to do anything. It just plugs and plays, and that's been effective for me. But again, you have to be able to be tracking emails to be able to even optimize this feature. So you need to be collecting emails on the front end. But again, it's B tier solely based on the fact that it's harder to get going, but it's a snowball. And so the more emails you get, the more you're going to regrab. People think about, like, when I was in college, I ordered a Domino's Pizza in 2013 from a place two minutes from the street from my college. I still get a weekly email from Domino's because they understand that they collected my information once, and then they're going to consistently, consistently, consistently hammer me. Even though when I get that email, I might not be in the mood for a pizza, but long-term, they know if they just keep staying in front of me, in front of me, eventually I'm going to convert an order. Want a piece of pizza.
Moving on up to the A tier. The A tier is the ones that I'm either using in one of my businesses or both of my businesses consistently, and they absolutely should be implemented in any business trying to grow. Again, my businesses are not $100 million or anything like that, but these are the things that have helped us go from $500,000 in a two-month sales period last year to $800,000 this year. A lot of that growth comes from these A-tier options. So this is going to be your paid Instagram and Facebook ads or Meta ads. That's been an unbelievable tool for us to grow and all of the businesses. There's going to be Google Pay-Per-Click ads, so actually the sponsored post at the top of Google where you click and you get charged per click. And then the last one being the traditional website SEO.
So, starting off with Facebook and Instagram ads or Meta ads. If you've watched any of my content, you know that I'm a big fan of Facebook and Instagram ads across any home service business. The reason I like them so much is that all of the things that we're talking about here, it's the only one that generates leads. So first name, last name, email address, whatever you want, but then also builds brand at the same time because it's touching all of the community with your brand frequently. But if you force Instagram and Facebook ads to only show in high-income areas, you can choose pretty aggressively where you want to target your brand. So I don't recommend running ads on like a 30-square-mile period. I like picking the rich areas first. But again, the only reason this isn't S tier is because there is a little bit of a learning gap. But I do not think you should pay Facebook or Instagram ad agencies at this point because you can learn how to do it pretty easily. We teach you how to do it in a Home Service Accelerator. I've taught like 200-something people how to do it, and it is an unbelievable tool. My own business got a 10x return on ad spend in the holiday season last year. So we spent $10,000 and some change, got back $100-something thousand. It's all tracked. I've posted videos about it. It's an unbelievable tool if you use it properly.
So I like to run video-style ads with my face in them on Facebook and Instagram or Meta. Again, this is the exact structure we run for most of our ads, and there's a little bit of variation in creatives, but it's always: you call the location you're advertising first, you explain who you are, you talk about what you do, you explain why you're different briefly, and then you typically have some form of expiring coupon or value proposition at the end. That's been the formula for us and a lot of other people in Home Service Accelerator that has absolutely crushed for people. Junk removal guys, window guys, plumbers, electricians, Christmas light guys, doesn't matter. They seem to work pretty much across the board if you do them right.
Now, moving on to traditional SEO. So this is not Google Maps SEO, this is traditional SEO. So you scroll past the ads, you scroll past Maps, you scroll past the Google Guarantees, Google LSAs. It's like those top 10 lists. The reason this probably was S tier 10 years ago is there was a lot less competition for space. Now, I debated putting this B tier or A tier, but because it's still lasting forever once you rank high and you keep posting blog posts, I think it's important. But it's really difficult in crowded markets to actually rank high in the traditional old-school SEO, which is why it's A tier. It's still incredibly effective. One of my businesses ranks extremely high on them, but it's really difficult to get it going. For example, I paid an SEO agency in my junk removal business for like two years and never cracked the top 10 on the front page for any of my keywords in traditional SEO. But I did in the one we're talking about in the S tier.
So for this, if you have the money and you're a bigger business, you should be investing in traditional SEO. But if you're a newer business, I don't think it's the best use of your money right now because it is a lot of work to rank high. And then the last one on here, it is a more expensive option, but it is the most scalable option in my opinion, and that's the Google Pay-Per-Click ads. That's the one that says sponsored on the top of, you know, when you're searching something on Google, where you're paying Google per click. Now, this one's a lot harder to learn how to do on your own. I have a friend who set up mine and monitors it for me, but I would use a Google Pay-Per-Click agency if I didn't have that friend in my corner. I just want to be transparent about it. I run them myself, but only because I have a connection that helps me do it.
Now, the way these work so well is they're typically the top thing on Google. So knowing that you're paying per click, you have to have a landing page or your website set up properly to track them, but that gets really good results. So I got about a 5x return on ad spend on my Google Pay-Per-Click campaigns in my lighting business this year. It was good. But to be completely honest, the reason it's not S tier anymore is it used to be a lot higher. And that has been the case across all of home services between 2020 and now. Google Pay-Per-Click used to be king. It used to be the god tier. It was the best thing you could ever do to generate paid leads in your business. That seems to have changed as the home service businesses have been flooded. A lot of private equity money came in post-COVID because private equity companies actually look for businesses that make money now, and not just going unicorn hunting like they were in COVID when money was free to borrow. And so what's happened is we've got a lot more institutional money coming in. Thus, they're just looking at Google Pay-Per-Click ads as numbers on a screen and just cranking it. And so it's harder for younger businesses to compete. But it's still really good because you can control your budget, you can get high-intent customers. But you have to have your sales process dialed in to run these paid campaigns. Like, if your speed to lead is not dialed in, meaning you're answering the phone on every ring, you're getting estimates out same day or next day, you're going in person same day or next day and giving people answers quick, this will not be a profitable marketing avenue for you. So you have to have your systems dialed in before you go down this path. Trust me, at the top of your game, you crushed men like him.
And finally, drum roll please. The S tier in 2025 with absolutely no exceptions, I will not argue with anyone about this, is the Google Maps SEO listing. This is the Maps pack, and getting your Google Maps SEO dialed in is the best thing you can do in your business. And the reason this is S tier is because it is free. That's number one. It is free, and it is a high-quality lead generator.
Now, what we're seeing in 2025, but don't take it from me, take it from all of these guys who are absolute demons at running Google Maps pack SEO and agencies, but also guys that are doing it themselves. I've talked to both ends. The most common thing we're seeing now is you want to have a pin on your Maps listing because Google Maps is clearly being pushed by Google. Anytime you Google something, you'll see the Maps pack ranked higher than than even some of the ads. Now, so they're clearly pushing it. The reason why you want to have a pin is because Google's going to take the proximity of the person's searching that for that service and show them pins that are closer to them in that area.
My Christmas light business ranks in the top one to three across the board in all of our target areas on the Maps pack, and that has become the best lead-gen source for us, and it's completely free. The way you want to get ranked higher is you got to get a bunch of reviews. You have to get, like, if you don't even have a listing right now, drop everything, stop this video, and go get a Google Maps listing. You have to find a way to get approved. You have to get it. It is the most important thing you need to do. This has been the biggest game changer for us. We get a ton of photo reviews, we get a ton of regular reviews. Every single customer that we work with gets hammered to leave a review. We want to make sure that we have a ton of info in the page, it's fully filled out. Your social medias are linked to it, your Instagram, your Facebook, your TikTok, your YouTube, all of that gets linked to it. You have it linked to your website. You have a phone number that's actually accurate. Your hours need to be posted. Even if you're not open on Sundays, say you're open on Sundays so that people don't click the open now button on Google Maps and you don't show up if they're searching for something on Sundays because you're not open. You should still just have your hours listed as open, even on Sundays.
And also, on top of that, the reason this is so amazing is once you get ranked higher, it's free leads forever. This is where the majority of the traffic on Google is going. And the reason it's S-tiered is because new businesses can rank on this really fast compared to every other SEO thing that we've talked about. If you just invest in it and constantly pour, pour, pour effort into it, there is no better way to generate leads because you're not getting on the hamster wheel of paying, paying, paying all the time. And the work you do in it lasts forever. So the more you get ranked, the harder it is for someone else to come in and beat you. And so the more you can get into this now, the better your business is going to be long-term.
At the peak of our junk removal business, we were getting a ton of commercial work straight from the Google Maps listing. And so, if you look at, like, the math on running Facebook ads or Google Pay-Per-Click ads, typically you're going to be happy if you get like a 4x return on ad spend, meaning you spend $100, you get $400 back. You spend $1,000, you get $4,000 back, maybe even better. If you're getting two, three, $4,000 a week or a month from the Google Maps pack, it costs you nothing. And so your business becomes a lot more stable and profitable by not generating all of your leads from paid avenues only. That's extremely important to note. So, if you don't take anything else away from this video, invest, invest, invest in your Google Maps listing. Invest in making it look good. Invest in getting reviews. Invest in looking like somebody's home there, and you will make more money.
Now, if you like this video and you want to see more about the in-depth processes of my businesses and how we've helped about 250 other home service businesses in the last 10 months scale up their marketing, scale up their sales, scale up their operations using the same processes that got me in my temporary lighting business to $400,000 a month and 30 employees, there's a link in the description to go to the Home Service Accelerator booking page. You can talk to us about how maybe we can help you. And then if we find out that you qualify and that we think you're a good fit, we'll invite you in, and we can go from there. See you there.