Many clients ask me where ServiceMagic gets all of its leads from. It’s a great question. Because so many home improvement companies look to ServiceMagic, understanding how they generate their leads should be an obvious interest.
No surprise, ServiceMagic is less than candid on this subject. That’s because the discussion opens the Company to uncomfortable questions that they’d prefer not to answer.
Over the next couple of posts, I will dig into how ServiceMagic generates the leads they sell you…and the implications for you and your business.
One key source of leads feeding the ServiceMagic machine is ServiceMagic.com. This Web site gets several million visitors per month, and ServiceMagic has cleverly designed it to convert visitors into leads at very high rates. 5%? 10% More? That’s a number that ServiceMagic guards closely.
Compete.com is a service we use here to gauge estimated traffic on various Web sites. Below is a graph of the traffic to ServiceMagic.com over the past 12 months:
This chart shows a traffic flow very similar to that of the remodeling industry overall. High traffic in the spring when homeowners are considering work on the exterior of their homes. Less traffic in the summer when they go on vacation. Death between Thanksgiving and New Years. And then a pick-up in traffic in February and March.
The only economically practical way to drive this amount of raw traffic is through organic search. That means ensuring that the Web site ranks very, very well for a large number of relevant home improvement keywords.
Indeed, the folks at ServiceMagic are masters at search engine optimization. For more than a decade, they have worked aggressively to secure top Google search rankings for many thousands of different home improvement search terms.
Thousands? Yes. The vast majority of which don’t come with a lot of visitor traffic individually. But rank highly for many thousands of these terms and now you’re talking about serious numbers in aggregate.
ServiceMagic is a master at what Internet marketers call the “Long Tail”—getting a Web site to rank highly for these low-traffic terms. These terms often contain 4+ words, such as “new windows + Durham, NH”:
Note the top-ranked listing—none other than ServiceMagic. To rank so highly for “new windows + Durham, NH”, ServiceMagic developed a page on ServiceMagic.com around this very specific search term.
And literally thousands of other pages built specifically to rank for other terms much like it. The proof is in the results, because these pages produce Web site visits by the millions.
So there it is! ServiceMagic relies on organic search rankings as a key source of traffic and leads. But as we’ll see in future posts, those rankings represent just a portion of the company’s lead volume. I’ll address ServiceMagic’s use of broadcast e-mail next time around.
Homeowner Connections Through Performance Online Advertising
