My builder ect

Usually a waste of money, a lot charge you for useless leads then your struggling to get your fee back, not personal experience but know a few who have registered with them, maybe some areas are better than others. The general consensus is to stay well away from them.

 

Wise advice.

 

What gives me a coronary about these sites is their pre-determined fees for opting for a lead, amongst all the other cack they peddle. How can anyone tell me that a penpushing spotty faced office oik is experienced to decide what a lead fee should cost a tradesman, based on the value of the job? Someone could post up a full rewire lead, and the office oik will ascertain that it's worth a £50 fee (or thereabouts), Joe Soap pays the fee, the customer cancels or gets Dai from the club to carry out the work, no refund is given and the whole exercise a costly fruitless sham. In my opinion these sites are the pondlife of modern advertising.

 

Worse thing about them is that the average person thinks they are a credible organisation, its a bit harsh when people have heard of checka trade.com, Rated people etc but have no idea who NICEIC or NAPIT are!!! We pay our money to be registered with these organisations and they don't put much back into advertising themselves to the public. It's a joke really.

 

Just booked my 1/2 day assessment renewal for April, I have been with them for 5 years and this is the one and only time I ever see or hear from them. They take your money and that's it, then nobody has ever heard of them when you mention it. Everyone has heard of Which trusted trader, I pay an additional £75 for Trustmark registration and once again a complete waste

 

That is so true, I worked offshore for years and it seems to me there is more emphasis put on this Part P and paperwork rubbish than there is working on an oil rig, we only had permits on rigs to contend with. I am wondering if it is because so many people are working in houses that are not qualified sparks why they are so hot, at least on a rig everyone knows your qualified so tend to let you get on with it? Not sure but its all I can think,

 

I am a chippie and to be honest mybuilder works for me, I price jobs up to £3k and usually pay around £12.00 for a lead, the beauty is that if you are not first to buy the lead you can see who your competitor's are and where they are based (one bloke in my area quotes for £500.00 jobs and lives 200 miles away!), if you start with small jobs you can build your profile comments up. ratedpeople though is a different story, they charge me £15.00 a month just to be on their books and then their lead prices are around 3 times that of mybuilder (Someone posted the same job on both), I was going to leave about six months ago so they gave me a £50.00 credit to stay, and I still have £20.00 of it left, I am trying to leave at the moment and have told them not to take any more money from my account but they are not making it easy.

I have a website which is not too dear and pay for it to be optimised, it pays for its self over and over every month, hope this helps

 

Good point, my website generates more business than it costs, I have mine optimised too which although expensive, does the business.

 

Yes, I pay around £28.00 a month for optimisation, but as with all advertising if it works well it does not matter what it costs

 

My average advertising is around £200 per month, went from around £400 so dropping steadily, you soon get to know what works and what doesn't, advertising your services can be extremely costly, get it right and it pays for itself.

 

Know of a few trades using A boards to advertise their trade, place outside where they are working & chained to something secure.

 

Hmm. As part of the day job, I look after content on a 100 page website, and I can tell you on-page optimisation is little more than making sure that your body copy has all the "words" in that target your business accurately. (plus a few tweaks like naming images, and page naming etc) Changing content using e.g. wordpress is a doddle - no different to using something like MSWord - in fact prob easier. What you are trying to do is anticipate the search terms someone might use to find you in your area, and making sure those words appear on your site without artificial repetition. If you are in a very competitive market you can also use paid "adwords" to get a google ad at the top of the page. If you are very specific, you can get highly targeted ads without too much wasted cost. e.g. you might have adwords "electrician - semi-detached - rewire - basildon", and ALL the words have to be there in the customer's search to get the ad shown, so in this example only someone specifically looking for that search would see you - and it would cost a £1 or £2 for the ad to be shown. Adwords is an auction, and the trick is to bid high enough to get o the top of the page, but make sure you have very tight control of the adwords so you don't spend on irrelevant searches. You can have as many word combinations as you want. What you don't want is adwords associated with "broad searches" - e.g. "electrician" "basildon" separately, or your ad might get shown for someone looking for flower arrangers in Basildon, just because they searched "Basildon" and you have an ad connected to that search term. If they click it, it costs.

Off-page optimisation is about getting talked about on social media, getting your site linked to by others and linking out to others, so if you use, for example, only MK fittings, link the word "MK" to their site so your customer can see their site as a link from yours. These external links gain brownie points with Googles algorithms as to who's sites have "authority".

Having said all that, if you think whoever is working on your site is doing a good, value for money job, and not just taking the money, then why not, it does take time (a huge amount of time in my case) whether you do it yourself or pay for it.

 

I advertised 15yr ago in yellow pages was carp got 2 jobs of it never advertised since and never been short of work don't even have a website, I reckon best advert is word of mouth

 

checkatrade and rated people and other scam artists are a sham, they don't check anyone or rate they full of ****

 

That's what I heard, I am ****** off that everyone knows them rather than our so called trade bodies. How does all householders know checkatrade and not NICEIC or NAPIT,

 

That down to NIC and napit taking our money and paying themselves fat wages and not advertising I mean surely it to everyone ones benefit that they get word out