3 Reasons you Need to Start Focusing on your Angie’s List Reviews and Listing

Love it or hate it, Angie’s List has just become a critical part of your home service business’s online marketing strategy. If you haven’t heard, the creators of Angie’s List—the popular online review site—have recently made their first-tier membership free.

It looks like they finally realized that nobody wants to pay for things online, so they’ve given potential new members a way to access their reviews and listings for free. (Because really, who thought that charging people for something they can find elsewhere online for free was a good idea?)

Anyway, despite being a paid service, a lot of people used it and came to depend on Angie’s List for guidance when choosing their home services online. Now that it’s free, there’s good reason to think that even more people will join their already respectable member base. In fact, they have such good rankings online that we’re anticipating that even more people are going to be using their listings (not to mention leaving awesome reviews).

What does that mean for you?

Well, as a business owner you probably already know how powerful it can be to have a strong online social media presence and lots of good testimonials and reviews. In case this is news to you, businesses that have a presence on social media, optimized websites, and good reviews tend to do better in general than those who do not incorporate these tactics into their marketing.

In this online age, following trends can be critical. Studies have found that as much as 88% of consumers trust online reviews as much as they trust a personal recommendation from a person they actually know! (source) That means that having plenty of reviews online is a decisive factor in whether or not they’ll choose your local business over others in your area. If you’re not using Angie’s List already, this is a good opportunity to give your business a boost. So, for those that don’t have a listing with Angie’s List yet, here are a few things you’ll need to know to get started.

Angie’s List Reviews Are Pretty Good

Angie’s List is known for being the place to get some of the best online reviews for home service contractors available. Their entire brand is built on reviews and many people are already aware of this.

The only downside is that it was a service you had to pay to use. Now that it is free to access these reviews, it’s more important than ever to have customers leave you a review on that service. This means that you’ll need to set up your listing on Angie’s List right away, if you haven’t already.

It’s Free to Claim Your Listing

We’ve established that reviews are important, so you are going to want to make sure that you claim your listing if you haven’t already done so. That’s right, you may already have a listing claimed and not even know it. Yext and other agencies like it who manage local listings can and will claim your listing for you.

Claiming your listing is as easy as going to their website and signing up. You will be able to make and/or customize your own business profile and monitor your reviews.

Sure, this may seem like extra work for your marketing department, but the payoffs in the end (in reviews and new customers!) will be worth it. Even if you’re not interested in making a new commitment toward managing your online reviews on yet another platform, it’s a good idea to gain access to your listing.

Once you have access, you can ensure that your contact information and the services you provide are correct. You would be surprised at how much business an inaccurate listing can cost you, so it is always a good idea to double-check when opportunities like this arise.

Your Company Can Rank

With roughly 3 million members and an additional 10 to 12 million visitors to their site, Angie’s List is definitely one of the largest players in the home services game. More importantly, they have a great ranking system. The ranking system is based on certified customer information, which can actually help you.

If you have a listing with them, your company’s name can show up in the search engines when people search for you. No matter what type of search your potential customers are doing, being listed multiple times is a great way to increase your brand’s online presence.

Take a Look

If you’re still on the fence about joining, now is a great time to join up yourself and have a look around. These days, online reviews can make or break your business. Even a bad review can be seen as a good opportunity, however, if they are handled correctly. The most important thing about managing your reviews online is to be sure to respond to them quickly and calmly. If the review is good, thank your customer for taking the time to leave it. They’ll feel appreciated and be more likely to call you back in the future.

If a customer leaves a poor review, that can be a good opportunity to not only address that issue personally but can also alert you to aspects of your business that might need an overhaul. Either way, responding to reviews is a good way to engage with customers and demonstrate your customer service.

The bottom line is that you need to have a reviews strategy for your business. If you don’t have one, you need to implement one now. If you already have a strategy in place to get and manage reviews, it’s still a good time to consider adding Angie’s List to your portfolio. If you need help we have even created a guide on how to set up your Angie’s List page.

We are going to be keeping a close eye on Angie’s List over the next year for sure because we feel that there’s a good chance that Angie’s List will become an even more important part of home service marketing. No matter what the future holds, you must start an Angie’s List strategy now.