When this year’s Remodeling Top 550 rankings came out, the team at Spectrum jumped on the data to try and determine some of the factors that make the best the best. We hope that our insights will help you improve your own remodeling company’s bottom line and make those who are already searching for your business more likely to reach out and contact you.

We analyzed the 154 top replacement contractors in the country, focusing mostly on the number, quality, and source of their online reviews. Here are some of our results.

With Reviews, More is Better

We know you’ve probably heard this before, but we can’t emphasize it enough: the more reviews your business has, the more likely a potential customer is to take you seriously. External reviews make your site more likely to catch someone’s eye, and consumers tend to trust each other more than the your representation of your own company.

Of the companies analyzed, we found:

As you can see, it’s rare to make the list of the top remodelers without any online reviews on the most popular platforms. In addition, companies with reviews tend to take in about three times the revenue. Of those successful companies, they averaged slightly more than 30 reviews across Yelp and Houzz.

Wondering how many reviews your customers want to see? We surveyed them to find out! Download that study below.

Different Review Platforms

We looked at remodeler success on two of the most popular online review sites – Yelp and Houzz. Yelp has an infamous, secretive filter that they use to determine whether or not to endorse or publish a user’s review. In our analysis, we noticed that Yelp’s filter seems to create results especially biased against home remodeling companies:

The average home remodeler is likely to receive a score over 50% higher on Houzz than on Yelp. If you’re deciding where to invest your energy, it looks like the same companies tend to perform much better on Houzz, so look there first.

Reputation Management

Remodeling is a business built on trust, and your reputation gives you a head start in building that trust. Clearly, it looks better for your online presence to have better reviews. But if the clients you’ve done a good job with aren’t showing up on Yelp, redirect them to Houzz. You can offer the same incentives as you normally might—and should—be offering to your satisfied customers to leave a review for your services on Houzz.

So there you have it! A quick overview of the industry’s most innovative companies. If you’re interested in reading what homeowners are looking for in your reviews, we did a study on that! Feel free to dive in and download that below.