Thumbtack.com’s SEO Benefits

Thumbtack is a great website when listing or searching for certain services. If I were looking for a babysitter or dog walker and stumbled upon a Craigslist advertisement for an individual who linked their Thumbtack profile as proof they had clean criminal background and verified information I would be more likely to hire them. However, for most of the keywords I researched in Dallas/Fort Worth, Texas their rankings were not high enough to generate traffic warranting premium advertising on the site – in other words, I would expect the majority of their Dallas traffic to be service providers with very few people in search of services.

Thumbtack SEO Benefits

Thumbtack reviews profiles and uses Acxiom to perform background checks on service providers. What gets me about Thumbtack is that they do NOT list your address on your profile and they no-follow your link to your website. When they claim to perform a human review on every profile, you would expect the link to be “approved” by them and the link should not be no-followed. They can VOUCH for your website, because they reviewed your profile and the accompanying website links.

That is not to say that there is no SEO benefit from Thumbtack, their is a benefit to having a completed Thumbtack profile with plenty of unique content, but they are diminishing the SEO value of their listings.

Local SEO benefits

With just your phone number, business name, and city/state on your profile you will be generating a local citation, which will benefit your local listings.

Conclusions

Thumbtack is worth investing a small amount of time towards writing a long and unique profile, but for the majority of our clients we will not recommend their taking further action on the site at this time. It’s like MerchantCircle, create your profile and forget their premium advertising options.

If you offer your services on Craigslist and want an affordable way to show potential customers that you are a legitimate business, do pay for the premium background checks and validation. You can then use a badge showing that you are a “Gold” member on Thumbtack and that they have performed a complete background check on you and validated all of your information. I would put more trust in someone showing me that their information has been validated and a background check performed, than someone displaying a Better Business Bureau badge for which they paid $600 for an all but guaranteed A+ rating.