I would love to hear any thoughts on a business listing services. I have done a few manually, but I’m sure I will need to buy the service at some point.
like yext?
I never tried em.
They’re prices were ridiculous just for typing your info in.
They wanted 500 dollars a year for the bare minimum plan I would go with.
Why every year?
All they have to do is type it in 1 time and its good forever
I ended up doing all mine manually last year and then updated them all with fresh and better SEO’d info this year
If you look at the business model of alot of online services, what do you see?
Subscription based, the real money is in repeat customers that you do not need to advertise year after year to get. You only have to attract new customers to maintain growth.
Take that lesson and apply it to your pressure washing business and you have a profitable business if your cost structure is setup properly.
This model doesnt so much apply to residential service as it does commercial. If you put part of your efforts into Residential and develop the Commercial end with customers that are guaranteed repeat business month after month, then you have yourself a nice little business with no seasonal downtime and a solid income stream.
I know this is a little off topic, but they do the subscription based service for a reason, they are smart, they do the work once and get paid many times over the life of the customer.
As far as if it is worth it, I have not had much success with any of those services, my pool business web site received about 75% of its traffic from Google. Why pay for a listing service that may only bring you one or two calls a year.
IDK if I’d call it smart as much as I’d call it preying on the “weak”.
As soon as I saw that I knew they were a ripoff, but that’s because I’ve done enough homework on online marketing
How do you see it as preying on the weak?
If they offer a legitimate service that you want to purchase, it is not their problem that you can’t afford it. They most likely have lots of customers paying that price every day or they would not be charging that price.
I wouldn’t worry as much about business listing services and focus much more of my attention on your website’s positioning on Google. This is much more valuable as it cannot be bought and establishes trust, market positioning, and authority to your company/brand.
Perhaps not preying on weak but certainly capitalizing on a lot of folks non-understanding of how internet works. They sell dreams of getting a butt load of calls and make the novice new business owners think it is extremely difficult or resource intensive. I see same with Software as Service schemes as well. They tell you that space on server is expensive etc. I’d rather buy a program and own than rent. Most of the time they claim it for the cost of server. I host 30 websites on one $6/month account. No way is storing a few customers info costing $30-40-50/month.
Just because a company has lots of paying customers, does not mean they are good. Just means they are good at SELLING. Groupon is a good example. I don’t know many folks that have been able to make it work for their business but Groupon is killing it. It is because they make $$ whether or not they deliver on boasted benefits. They are telemarketing biz talking new/gullible/desperate folks into a deal. Yellow pages too. Big grossing revenue companies but that isn’t an indicator that the service they pitch is worth the $$ they charge. Advertising/marketing companies are only industry that I know of that won’t offer guarantees of their claimed awesome services. They get paid even when they don’t deliver. You and I have to actually go wash a house to collect a check. They make outlandish statements but wont guarantee the return. So, what are they really selling other than a dream or gamble?
Very tight with my $$ after all these years of losing $$ on empty promises. Take marketing into your own hands to get best ROI.
This is why I like the honest ones like Anya that will look at your situation and say “I can’t do any better than you are already doing” or the ROI won’t be there to pay to be number one in an area that only gets 4 searches a month" etc.
I have been pitched to be number one on google for $500/month in areas that only get 25 searches/month for a term. Really? They weren’t honest or knowledgable enough to say it would be a bad idea to pay that much.
All that said, I think Anya has a relationship with Yext that allows her to save folks $$.
I have never paid for any of the listing services but have taken advantage of dozens of free listing services, many which have tried to sell me upgrades which I did not buy.
I have not found one listing service out there what has been worth paying for. The traffic coming into my sites has been so small that it just not worth it.
Like I said earlier, Google which I paid nothing for has been the #1 driver of traffic, that and a good quality web site.
I’ve signed up on most of the directories yext offers to sign you up for (just for backlinks, seo, etc).
did it in less than a day and saved myself $20 a month PER DIRECTORY submission that they wanted.
I’d say about 20 or so directories I’m on.
20 x 20 = $400 a month = $4800 a year.
For what??!! to type my info into a directory 1 time!!!
If you’ve got the money to blow, I say go for it.
Otherwise, just spend a couple hours one sunday, and use that 5k somewhere else
I was thinking there would be some service you can pay 100$ and they list you in a bunch of directories.
Theres about a million things I could do for SEO to my website, but surprisingly it shows up in the local maps section for the terms (Pressure washing company, Pressure Washing Service, and pressure washing business) in some prime areas.
For the organic search results it is way way back though. But I’m hoping that has a lot to do with google sandbox.
The site kind of sucks but I’m gonna change out all those pictures. I didn’t have good ones, but I’m in the process of fixing that. And doing some you-tube videos. Apparently doing you-tube videos is really helpful.
if it costs that much I won’t mess with it.
Those links from the “500 links for $100”
guys can hurt you in the latest algorithm updates.
great thread
There are guys you could find to submit you to directories for cheap.
Try freelancer.com maybe.
I haven’t tried em but I hear they’re good for many services.
You always be best served to invest and develop the seo on your website first. Links don’t mean a thing if they go to crappy content. Add a post or 2 of relevant content each week to your website and in time you’ll see it get picked up. I currently have 509 pages indexed and rank very well locally. Still always room for improvement though too. I also agree on the Youtube vids. I use them to “take another slot” in the top 10.
Sorry to bump this post but how exactly did you maximize your traffic using Google? I was about to subscribe to marketing service but their fees are ridiculous, if I can do the samething manually I’d rather spend the time than the cash.
I have been looking and collecting business directories and I’ve been manually adding my listing to them. Actually, there are quite a lot that offer free business listings. For me, it’s still okay if it’s free but there are others who have a wide audience and higher DA so I think that would be worth listing your business too. I have a short list so if you’re interested, I don’t mind sharing. Also, I just noticed there’s also actually “Heroes Power Washing”. That’s funny cause ours is “Hero Power Washing”.
