The Coming Long Island Home Services “Gold Rush” of 2024

As a native Long Island web design and marketing company, Logic Web Media is proficient when it comes to helping businesses succeed. Our team of professional account managers has been at this for quite a while, and we’ve even picked up some tricks along the way. This brings us to a trend we have been seeing since COVID came into the mix.

Long Island just experienced a flood of high-income first time homeowners like never before. They moved out here from the city, overpaid for a flip house with straight cash, and have absolutely no experience whatsoever maintaining a home in the suburbs. Sprinklers, gutters, hot water heaters, central air, a pool, a lawn – They never had to worry about any of this crap before. They don’t even know anyone yet to ask for a recommendation when something goes wrong, and things are about to start going wrong.

If you can become their hero now, you will have them forever. But how do you make that happen?
 

The Challenge of Home Improvement Leads

Chances are you’ve already wasted your time with paid ads options like Angie, Thumbtack, Home Advisor and the rest – Spending $60 a pop for the same “lead” as a dozen other people, and by the time you get it, the job was already done by someone else 2 days ago.

Or maybe you’ve tried running some local print ads. Those might work… or might not. The truth is you really have no idea because there’s no reliable way to track it.

Cesspool Pros, an Ads client of Logic Web Media, has its truck outside a homeowners house ready to pump a cesspool.

At the end of the day, there’s a hundred different things you could try if you had endless time and bottomless pockets. But let’s get real; The lowest-hanging fruit is (and will probably always be) that person who walks in the front door from work and sees a creature crawling that shouldn’t be there, picks up their phone and says “hey Siri, exterminator near me.”

Or how about that new homeowner from the city who wakes up shivering in the middle of the first cold night we get next month because their shiny new house came with a rusty old boiler that just failed? They pick up their phone, type in “24/7 emergency plumber”, and dial the first one that feels right.

Beyond “Leads”
Securing Jobs in the Competitive Long Island Market

Those are the bread-and-butter ideal jobs. Notice how I didn’t use the word “leads”? You need jobs, not leads. And there are thousands of them available for the taking every day on Long Island. All you have to do is answer the phone, and they’re yours. Well, not so fast…

The Google Ads Dilemma

First, you have to be willing to pay for that click. Then, like everything on Long Island, those clicks are expensive and the competition is high.

Google loves to tempt small business owners into a costly DIY nightmare where you just fill out a few fields and let Google magically write, manage, and optimize your ads for you. Before long, you find out the only “magic” is them making your money disappear.

This has left many owner/operators hesitant to ever use Google Ads again, and rightfully so. We hear it all the time; “Yeah we tried Google Ads. It didn’t work for us.” But as that conversation continues we inevitably learn that they were either trying to do it themselves, or let Google do it for them. Either way, that’s a losing formula.

Firstly, how would you feel if an internet marketing agency showed up to fix your broken hot water heater? That’s precisely why you shouldn’t be running your own Google Ads.

Second, Google is not a person with your best interests in mind. It’s probably better to think of Google as a big, evil computer in California that is programmed to spend your money.

Whether it’s us or someone else you trust, you need a human being on your side to keep that thing in check. Google Ads is definitely the most reliable way to acquire new customers for nearly all home service providers, but it has to be done right, preferably by someone who understands what you do and where you do it.
 

The Unique Dynamics of Long Island’s Market

To call Long Island “a unique market” would be a massive understatement. Business owners come to us all the time with poorly performing Google Ads accounts looking for help. More often than not, we discover they’re being managed by someone on the other side of the country, sometimes on the other side of the world.

Radius targeting doesn’t work on an 8 mile wide strip of land sandwiched between a city, an ocean, and two other states. A landscaper from Massapequa doesn’t want to mow any lawns in Montauk. Queens isn’t Long Island, even though it’s on Long Island.

If you weren’t from here, you wouldn’t even believe it. And it’s just as confusing for all those people who just moved out here from the city and are searching right now for help with their homes today.
 

Logic Web Media: Navigating Long Island’s Home Service Market

Logic Web Media is a native Long Island web design and marketing agency. Our PPC team specializes in getting local home service providers actual jobs (not leads) who pay today and become customers for life.