Yelp ads for contractors: when paid leads pay

Every contractor we work with gets the same call a few times a year. A friendly Yelp sales rep, a count of how many people looked at the page last month, and an offer to put the business in front of more of them. Some owners sign up on the spot. Some hang up on principle. Neither is a decision.

Yelp can be a good lead source for trades. It can also be a steady drain that nobody measures. The difference is rarely the ad itself. It is what the page looks like when someone lands on it, how fast the business answers, and whether the owner knows what a Yelp lead turns into.

Start with the page you already have

Before a dollar goes into Yelp ads, the free business page has to be worth sending people to. Ads buy visits. The page decides what the visits become.

Claim it if you have not. Then go through it the way a stranger would:

• Categories. Pick the categories that match the work you want. A remodeler listed only under a broad contractors category misses the people searching for bathroom work specifically.
• Service area. Trades that go to the customer can set the area they cover. Draw it around where you want jobs, not every town a truck has ever visited.
• Photos of real jobs. Before and after shots from your own phone, the truck, the crew. Yelp users scroll photos before they read anything, and stock images read as a company with nothing to show.
• The about section. When you were established, what you specialize in, whether you are licensed and insured, what you do not do. Plain sentences.
• Hours and phone. The number should ring somewhere a person answers. If you use a tracking number, call it yourself and make sure it forwards.
• Request a Quote. Turn it on if your category has it, and decide who answers. Yelp shows your response time and response rate on the page, so a slow reply is visible to the next customer as well as the last one.

The free page also travels further than owners expect. Apple Maps shows Yelp ratings and reviews for many businesses, so a neglected Yelp page reaches iPhone users who never open the Yelp app at all.

On reviews, Yelp runs the opposite way to Google. It asks businesses not to request reviews, and reviews gathered through a campaign tend to get filtered. Reply to what arrives, publicly and calmly, and let the page earn the rest.

When paying for Yelp leads makes sense

Yelp ads are charged per click against a budget you set, and they place your business at the top of relevant searches and on competitors’ pages. That is worth buying under specific conditions. In the accounts we run, it tends to pay when most of these are true:

1. People near you search Yelp for your trade. This varies a lot by city and by category. Search your service on Yelp from a phone in your area and look at how many competitors have recent reviews and activity. A category with a handful of stale pages usually has few searchers.
2. Your page already converts. A solid rating, recent reviews and real photos. If unpaid visits are not producing calls and quote requests now, paid visits will not either.
3. Someone replies within the hour. Many quote requests go to several businesses at once. The first useful reply usually wins, and a reply the next morning is often talking to someone who has already booked.
4. The job value can carry the cost. A plumber whose average ticket is a drain clearing has less room for paid clicks than a roofer or a remodeler whose jobs run into the thousands.
5. Google is already working. For most trades a well-kept Google Business Profile, as Google My Business has been called since Google renamed it in early November 2021, plus Local Services Ads and search campaigns come first. Yelp belongs on top of those once they are steady, not in place of them.

If fewer than three of those hold, put the money into the page and the response time, and look at ads again in the spring.

Judging lead quality, not lead count

The number Yelp reports and the number that matters are different numbers. Yelp counts clicks, calls, messages and page visits. Your business runs on booked jobs.

So follow every Yelp lead to an outcome for at least two or three months:

• Was it inside your service area, asking for work you do?
• Did you reach them, and how quickly?
• Did it become an estimate, and did the estimate become a job?
• What was the job worth?

Patterns show up fast. Some trades find that Yelp messages are mostly price shoppers comparing five quotes while the phone calls are the real buyers. Others find the reverse. Some find that one category brings good work and another brings requests they have to turn away, which is a reason to narrow the ad targeting rather than cancel it.

Compare cost per booked job, not cost per lead, against what your Google campaigns produce for the same work. If Yelp costs more per job but brings a type of customer you want, like larger projects or repeat commercial clients, it can still be a good buy.

And keep ads and reputation apart in your head. Paying Yelp does not change your rating or which reviews it recommends.

What to do this month

• Claim the Yelp page, fix categories and service area, and add a dozen photos of real jobs.
• Turn on Request a Quote and name the person who answers, with a target of replying inside an hour.
• Reply to every review from the past year, the good ones and the bad ones.
• Search your trade on Yelp from your own area and note how busy the category looks.
• If you already run Yelp ads, log every lead to a job outcome for the next sixty days.
• If you do not, decide against the five conditions above rather than on the next sales call.

For many trades outside heating and plumbing, the weeks from mid-November to the new year are quiet enough to sort this out before spring. We treat Yelp as one channel among several for home services companies, and our Yelp ads management begins with the free page, because that is where a paid visit is won or lost.