The Guide to SEO for Home Inspectors
What is SEO and Should I Care as a Home Inspector?
You’ve probably received the emails, random phone calls, and maybe even suggestions from your fellow business partners about how “SEO will bring additional customers to your business” and how “SEO is so important for home inspectors” and “So-and-so competitor has better SEO than you”. You’re probably wondering “What is SEO and why is it so important?”.
You’re not alone, we get this question a lot. First off, SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization”. That term may not mean a lot at first glance, so let’s break that down in a simple manner. SEO for home inspectors specifically is a process that is used to make your business “visible” and “easy-to-find” on search engine platforms like Google and Bing. The goal is to have your website show up on the first page for a search query on Google like “[Your city] + home inspector” or “Raleigh home inspector”.
To acquire that coveted spot on the 1st page, it is important that your webpage addresses a person’s question or search query better than other sites. Then, once that potential customer reaches your page, you want to make that person’s visit a great experience to keep them on your site. Search engines like Google pay attention to that behavior to determine if your site is the one that should stay in those top results.
SEO is also an organic (non-paid) strategy, meaning that you do not have to continue feeding a platform like Google or Facebook with advertising money to continue drawing customers to your business. In that right, all visitors that click on your site from SEO efforts are coming from “organic search” results.
5 Reasons Home Inspectors Should Invest in SEO
We have had the pleasure of working with several great home inspectors to help them drive more leads and acquire more customers using different forms of digital marketing such as social media, email, and paid ads. Each method was effective in its own way, but the tried-and-true method that was always the best for our home inspection partners was SEO. They really knew their stuff about the home inspection world and just needed the SEO secret sauce a.k.a. an SEO strategy. Here are a few key reasons why we recommend SEO for home inspectors.
It’s Where Your Customers Are
More than 50% of all website visitors find websites via organic search, which shows how much people rely on this online route to find information and services. This stat also shows why an effective SEO strategy is the best way to help your ideal customers find you. And that’s the beauty of SEO, its purpose is to make your business easy to discover and interact with for people who are already looking for your services.
The Results Come Quick for Local Businesses
Any SEO worth their salt will tell you that SEO won’t bring a ton of business in overnight. That said, they will come quicker for home inspectors because you are competing with a smaller group of local competitors. With dedicated efforts, we’ve seen home inspectors reach page 1 as soon as 1-2 months. That local focus allows you to get hyper-focused on targeting the customers near you using local SEO which can help you get organic traffic and leads for your business relatively quick!
You Don’t Have to Pay for Customers
Unlike paid advertising, you do not have to pay every time someone clicks and visits your site. This can get very expensive and hard to maintain over time. With SEO, once you optimize your site and improve your rankings, you can consistently draw in traffic and paying customers over time.
Visitors Are More Likely to Become Customers
Studies show that on average, 40% of all company revenue comes in via organic search traffic. As we mentioned earlier, SEO puts your business in a position to be found where people are looking for your services. This makes those people much more likely to be quality leads and ultimately, paying customers.
Most Home Inspectors Aren’t Doing This
According to our own internal survey, 87% of home inspectors we’ve worked with were not using an SEO strategy before we partnered with them. This immediately puts you in a position to succeed and reach the top spot by having your own home inspection SEO strategy.
Our Process for Home Inspection SEO
In nearly a decade of experience building home inspector SEO strategies and pushing our clients to the top of the search results, we’ve come up with a proven method to improve SEO for home inspectors.
In fact, we’ve put together a proven 10-step process that you can follow to get your home inspection business ahead of your competitors in organic search.
1) Keyword Research
First and foremost, you must know what keywords you are going to target. It is one of the most important steps in general when optimizing SEO for home inspectors. These keywords are terms that consumers will search when looking for a home inspector like yourself and can be focused on the services you provide, information you would like to provide, localized keywords and more. Some examples of service-based keywords would be “home inspection”, “foundation inspection”, “mold inspection”, etc.
To get more information about keywords, we recommend using Google’s Keyword Planner tool to determine how often people search that for that term and to find other related keywords you can use for your website to acquire more traffic.
Transactional keywords: Your transaction-based keywords are the ones you will use to attract customers who are looking for a home inspector to work with (i.e. “home inspection”). In most cases, the home inspectors that we’ve worked with are targeting certain locales or regions, so we add a “location-qualifier” to the service-based keyword to make it a local keyword. It will be important to target local keywords because consumers are more likely to search for a home inspector in the area that they live or intend to move to. Targeting a local keyword will also help you rank well in the local 3-pack (example below) that appears near the top of a local search results page. For a home inspector in the state of Connecticut, a local keyword might be “home inspection Connecticut” or “roof inspection ct”.
Informational keywords: It will also be important to build credibility and brand awareness by writing great content in the form of blog articles and FAQs. These informational keywords such as “how much does a home inspection cost?” should be used in these forms of content to introduce your business to people who are still early in the buying process. These people may anticipate needing a home inspection soon but are not quite ready to find a home inspector. By introducing them to your business early with this content, they are more likely to work with you rather than your competitors down the road when they are ready to find a home inspector.
2) Set Up Google My Business page
One of the best tools you have at your disposal is Google My Business. GMB is a free tool that Google provides to help you manage how your home inspection business appears across Google, both in search results and in Google Maps. This is a powerful resource you can use to share an overview of your company and attract customers to your brand who use Google. We recommend creating your Google My Business (GMB) page if you have not already.
It will be important to handle the following items for your GMB page:
Verification: You must verify your GMB page before the information you add to it can be shared with the public. The most common form of verification is a postcard with a verification code sent by Google.
NAP: Your name, address, and phone number must be consistent between your GMB page, your website, and everywhere else your business is listed. Outdated information in any of these fields can cause inconsistencies with your business listings and hurt your business’s local search rankings.
Website URL: Add your preferred website URL to your GMB page. This could be your homepage if you have one physical location or a relevant local landing page if you have multiple locations.
Business Categories: Set your primary and secondary categories based on the products/services that you provide. For home inspectors, this could be “home inspector” and/or “building inspector”.
Business Description: Include a brief description of your home inspection business. It is helpful to include relevant information such as your location, a couple of services you offer (excellent place to include target keywords), and what makes your business stand out from your competition. If you have received awards, then you could use phrases such as “award-winning”. If you have been in business for a considerable amount of time, it helps to mention the number of years you have provided home inspection services for your business to improve your credibility.
Business Hours: Have accurate business hours listed in your profile for local ranking purposes because Google favors businesses with complete, accurate and relevant information. If your business hours line up with what someone is searching for, then it is going to be more likely for your business to display in local results.
Photos: The photos used to represent your business help form the first impression of your business online and help a potential customer determine whether they want to visit your business. Photos also help potential customers determine if they are in the correct physical location. It will be important to at least have your logo set in your GMB profile and an image of the front of your physical location.
3) Content Optimization
In the world of SEO, content is king, so you will want to have detailed, yet approachable content on your site. This content will help search engines like Google and your potential customers know more about your business and the services you provide. This is your opportunity to convince Google that they should rank you well and that people should trust you with their home-buying or selling process.
Start with the most important page on your site: your homepage. Then, focus on your service pages and any local pages you create to target specific regions or cities. Your keyword research will really come in handy for this step. Each page should have a target keyword that it is focused on which will be included in your on-page copy, titles, and in the meta content of your page. For example, your page focused specifically on mold testing may target the keyword “mold testing” + “[region you provide that service in]”. Using North Carolina as an example, the keyword phrase may then be “mold testing NC” or “mold testing Raleigh NC”. It is key to avoid having thin content (less than 300 words) on page to be able to rank in search results. Google is a fan of long-form, useful, and relevant content.
On local landing pages, you will want to make sure you have the physical address of your location and the specific phone number used for that location. It can also help to include a map of where your location is and other location-specific content related to that region.
4) Build Citations
A citation is an online reference of your home inspection business that includes your business name, address, and phone number (NAP). It is crucial to have this information about your business be consistent and complete across the internet.
There are many online directories and sites that you can leverage to quickly acquire citations. You can list your business on national directories such as Facebook and Yelp, local directories such as your local Chamber of Commerce’s website, and directories specific to the home inspection industry such as Porch. It is especially useful to include this information within membership directories such as InterNACHI if you are already a member.
5) Build Backlinks
Backlinks are links to your website from other websites. They are a source of credibility to search engines and help to drive people to your website via links. Now, you may be asking how you can acquire these backlinks:
Content Creation: The best way to acquire backlinks is to write great content on your website. You can write blog articles and FAQs related to keyword terms people are searching for. Similar to how we’re writing about “SEO for home inspectors”, you might want to write about “How to Prepare Your Home for the Winter” or a “Home Inspection Checklist”. This will make it more likely they will find your business, and if they find your content helpful or informative, they may link to it from their website for reference.
Outreach: Reach out to vendors and other business partners that you have worked with or engage with currently to ask if they would be willing to link to your website. This is one of the easiest methods for home inspectors to quickly gain backlinks.
6) Reviews
Social proof such as reviews and customer testimonials are both a great way to improve your local rankings and also make it more likely for a person to trust your business. In fact, 93% of consumers read online reviews before making a purchase. Review also make up 13% of Google’s local search algorithm, so they act as a major factor to help you become more visible in search results.
Build a review acquisition and monitoring strategy: Ask for reviews from your customers after a job well done either in person or over email. Then, monitor these reviews in platforms such as Google and Yelp and respond to both positive and negative reviews to engage with your customers. Doing so makes them feel listened to and makes it more likely that the next person who reads these reviews will work with you.
7) Internal Linking
Search engines use links to find pages on your site, so a well-connected site makes it easier for search engines to discover and rank your site in search results. These links from one page to another on your site also help consumers find the awesome content that you have created such as your blog articles and your service pages. This helps in your effort to appear more credible and trustworthy and to ultimately help people convert into customers.
8) Improve Site Speed
One of the most important factors Google uses to determine how they should rank your website is how fast your site loads. Google wants people who visit your site to have a great experience, as should you, and a large part of that experience is making sure that your pages load quickly.
It may be beneficial to work with your website developer to improve your site speed, but there are several things you can do to perk your site up. If you are using WordPress, there are several plugins you can use to quickly speed up your site.
Image Optimization: Large image files can easily slow down a page, so we recommend using an image compression tool to reduce the file size, therefore making them load faster. The tool we generally recommend to our home inspection clients on WordPress is WPRocket.
Server speed: A site is only as fast as its webserver. Have your webmaster look for performance blockers such as slow database queries and a lack of memory and fix them.
File Compression: Using a file compression application like GZIP, you can reduce the size of many of your resource files on your site.
9) Use Structured Data Markup
Structured Data Markup is the vocabulary that search engines use to easily understand the content on your site. Implementing this structured data markup within your site can help you acquire unique features in search results called rich snippets that help your site stand out. If your site stands out and takes up more real estate in search results, studies have shown that people are much more likely to click to your site over your competitors.
There are several types of markup that would come in handy when improving SEO for home inspectors such as LocalBusiness, Review, and Service markup.
Review markup, for example, highlights the reviews that you have on your page and can help you acquire review snippets in search results like in the following example:
If you are using WordPress for your website, you can use plugins such as WP SEO Schema to easily add structured data markup to your pages.
10) Monitor & Optimize
One of the biggest mistakes that home inspectors make when improving their SEO is thinking that the results will come immediately and giving up quickly. SEO is a long-game and can take months before you see results depending on many factors.
Monitor: The best thing to do is monitor your results as you optimize your site using data in the tools that Google provides to you. You can keep track of progress in Google My Business, set up your Google Analytics account and review metrics, and use Google Search Console to see exactly what keyword terms people are using to find your website. There are also other SEO tools such as Moz, SEMRush, and Ahrefs you can use if you really want to dig deep into your keyword rankings, track backlinks, among a plethora of other cool ways you can use these tools.
Optimize: Using the information from these tools, you can determine what is working and what isn’t and continue to improve your website based on that data. That may look like continuing to write great content, including your target keyword more often on page, speeding up your website, and much more.
Our experience optimizing SEO for home inspectors has shown us that it is one of the best methods you can use to bring more people to your website and turn them into customers. It is the process of not only improving your on-site experience, but also your online presence on places other than your own website.
SEO is also just one method to capture more business for your home inspection business. There are a variety of marketing techniques home inspectors can use to drive more business.
Would You Like Help With SEO?
At Jules & Gems Media, we’ve spent years perfecting the formula to help home inspectors improve their SEO and draw in more customers via Google and Bing. If you would like our help with SEO, you can contact us for a quote or more information.