Thumbtack vs Home Advisor vs Angie’s List vs Yelp

hannah • September 25, 2018

What do Thumbtack, Angie’s List, Home Advisor, and Yelp have in common?

They’re all local business directories that each offer a unique combination of local business search, reviews, recommendations, and lead generation.

In this article we’ll focus on comparing Thumbtack vs Home Advisor, Angie’s List, and Yelp and explain how you can use these local review sites to grow your business.

Using Local Review Sites to Boost Your Market Position

You got a fantastic idea, and that idea has given birth to a unique, qualified, and reputable business. However, before anyone can use your services, they need to know it exists. Local social review sites online can be an excellent way to raise your contractor marketing awareness to your community, but which one do you use and for how long? We will compare for of the leading options for promoting your business to increase your site’s local SEO and your sales.

Angie’s List

The oldest option of the four is Angie’s List, founded in 1995, as a means to provide a connection between contractors and those in need of their services. It was literally built from the ground up, as the founders went door to door to gain new customers to post reviews to their site. In 2017, they reported having 2 million subscribers.

Home Advisor

Launched in 1998 as ServiceMagic, Home Advisor (as it would be rebranded in 2012) arose as a competitor to Angie’s List, combined with home development cost estimate tools that helped customers to determined the total cost that they would need in order to complete their desired project. Whereas, Angie’s List provides an educated list of professionals, this service puts it in context of total project funding.

It is provided for free to homeowners and for cost to contractors that wish to be listed in the local professionals. Indeed, a contractor could be saddled with a 300 dollar annual fee plus up to that much, monthly, for contractor referral fees. However, it does provide services that attract customers, like the ability to schedule appointments with the contractors, directly on their site; and it does have a very well used customer base for their services.

Yelp

Yelp was created by two former Paypal employees in 2004, as a means of allowing customers to post reviews about local businesses, and it exploded into a site of 148 Million reviews by the end of 2017. These reviews can be searched from computers or from mobile devices on their application, so it provided a means for local businesses to gain positive reviews by customers for their area

Yelp provides a lower cost option to customer interaction than Angie’s List. When you find your business listed by customers in it’s database, you can claim your business page for free, and you can use that connection to communicate with them. However, enhanced and promoted sites come at high financial cost. Getting your customers to add high stars to your listing can boost your future calls.

Thumbtack

While much smaller than the others on the list, Thumbtack has the distinction of being known for less traditional services, allowing for connection of those wanting local fulfillment of needed tasks that might not be present on the other service websites. However, Google Capital believed in the site enough to invest 100 Million dollars into the company in 2014.

Conclusion

Which local directory site is better for business? Do these websites really work?

The answer is YES they work, but it depends on your business.

Angie’s List merged with Home Advisor in 2017, making any comparison of Home Advisor vs Angie’s List the comparison of two parts of a whole company, and both have been hit with charges of issues with security and contractor licensing. However, it does not seem that the issues have impacted the attraction to customers, and they provide a stable means of foundation for your service launch in your area.

It must be remembered that all of these sites serve the launch purpose for your business. Each of these sites have built themselves up by work of mouth, hard work, and hustle. That is what it will take to become successful, as well. As you put forth your best foot forward into the community service pool, that service will speak for itself. Soon, there will be less need for the added cost of paid promotion and more time can be spent on providing quality service, fulfilling the dream that began the process at the start.

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