Inspector Marketing with Spectora

hello and welcome I'm Mike I'm Kevin and we are the founders of SPECT Ora today we're here to talk to you about home inspector marketing we are here at the internachi house of horrors in Boulder Colorado and we are happy to tell you all the different ways that you can get business as a new home inspector my name's Kevin Wagstaff I'm one of the founders of SPECT Ora to give you a little bit of my background I was a real estate agent here in Denver for six years so I saw a lot of home inspection reports worked with a lot of home inspectors and that helped inform our experience with building spectra I also worked at home adviser on their dedicated SEO team so I learned a lot of what the big companies do to get business to their websites and kind of how they operate so we're bringing that to you guys here today and my name is Mike Wagstaff I am the software engineer and designer behind the spektr platform so if some of you end up using our platform I'm the guy that wrote all the code that runs all of it prior to that I was a software engineer as well as a user interface user experience designer for companies both large and small you'll see some of the fortune 500 companies I did consulting for I also worked with a lot of small scale startups and so what I bring especially this presentation is some of that business sense of that design sense on what you can do as a new business to get more leads to get more clients to build a very healthy business practice based on things like good website design good use of all the resources that you have at your disposal technology wise if you haven't heard about us yet spec torah is basically an all-in-one home inspection software platform we build both the report writing software to use so mobile apps when you're on site as well as the web platform that you'll use to deliver your reports to both your clients as well as the agents it includes a lot of different tools in terms of how to market and run your business so we'll talk a little bit about the use of automated emails the reminders that go out before your inspection the follow-ups that you send out after your inspection and how you can use those as part of your business process we'll talk about integrated payments online agreement acceptance that's all kind of baked into our software online scheduling is something that we include in all of the websites that we build we all so do had campaigns SEO services and email newsletters for our inspectors so we work with thousands of inspectors every single day to help grow their business and that's kind of an advantage point that we're taking as we're giving you these tools these are the things that we see that have helped the successful home inspectors that we work with grow their business amazingly fast as new home inspectors many of you will face a lot of challenges getting out there and encountering competition these are things that we see work that get guys earning six figures in the first year maybe expanding to multi inspector companies very quickly so that's kind of the perspective and the reason you should listen to this presentation if you want to know more about our software spec tour comm is where to find out more but for now we'll just dive into all the useful tips for you alright so how do you get business as a new home inspector it's a question we ask every month at our classes and some of the common answers are agents agent presentations coffee meetings with agents some people go directly online some of you guys will hit social media very hard to start there's lots of different ways you can get business so we just want to give you all the different ways that you can get business first agent presentations is gonna be the big focus we're gonna start with that first because that's obviously something as new inspectors you guys know you need to be doing right away the second bucket we're gonna talk about is paid advertising that's something some of you might be thinking about doing but if you need to learn more about it we'll get into the specifics of it and the third bucket is your medium to long term business which is online marketing and SEO and so that's when you google something the ten blue links that show up we're all used to clicking on one of those that's SEO and how you rank there and the hope is to give you guys a blueprint of how you're gonna start your business immediately and get those first few inspections and then move into those medium term of how you're gonna get the next maybe dozens or hundreds of inspections as well as how you're gonna fill up your pipeline for the long term so that you can stay in this business for many years to come and keep in mind we've designed this track based on what we've seen work from experienced inspectors that we work with so this is a natural progression of going from agents to paid advertising to online marketing you don't have to do all these but this is just what we've seen work well first we start talking about agent presentations so this is usually the first thing you'll do to get in front of those agents initially and get those first few inspections this is often the best way to hit the ground running with a new business when we ask the question of what are you going to do for your presentation or what are you gonna do to make an impression on agents the answer we usually get is all bringing my business cards and flyers and drop them off so newsflash they're probably just gonna get thrown in the trash you don't want to do the bare minimum so we want to talk about how you're going to be different and how you're gonna differentiate if you're in a competitive market like Florida that some of you are in you're gonna need to think outside of the box and think about how you're different than all the other inspectors in your market so that's going to require some creativity and we want you guys to keep in mind throughout all of this think about what every other inspector is doing it's very easy for inspectors to go and leave some business cards in real estate agents office and so we're just gonna really encourage you throughout all of this to be different to think outside the box and so when it comes to being different oftentimes we're here okay bring food every everybody recommends that inspectors bring food to a real-estate agents office guess what the most common one is donuts and so we're encouraging you to say all right what can I do that's different than what all the other home inspectors in my market are doing to try and get the agents attention we're not saying you necessarily have to bring fruit bouquets but think about what's different what have we heard that's worked from some of our inspectors that are doing quite well yeah so we hear Yeti mugs pens pads coffee mugs think of things that agents use every day so think about brand impressions so it's a game of getting your logo in front of as many agents as possible you'll see on the screen up here we also have an article that an inspector wrote that helps agents out so you're really thinking about how you can either provide value in some way or provide some brandable materials that they'll see every day when marketers do research they find that you need at least seven brand impressions to truly register in your potential clients mind and so think about that as you go you're not just trying to get in front of them once or twice trying to get in front of them seven times and so if that involves leaving them a mug that they're gonna see every day well hey after a week they really are gonna think about your brand when they think about home inspectors pens and paper of course you can get creative here because of course want you to think outside the box another way you can be different is your actual report so of course this is the deliverable that you're gonna leave your client your agent with and so what you see on the screen here on the left is your usual old-school checklist box and so keep in mind that in a lot of markets the active home inspectors might still be using that or even pen and paper we see a lot of inspectors that are switching from carbon copy pen and paper to software now so if you have a modern report with a very readable format maybe it's web-based maybe it's using photos videos these are ways that you can differentiate yourself I know that with specter inspectors they've had great results going around to different agencies and showing the modern report and saying that they're getting leads just off of that because we designed it basically to appeal to the the modern home buyer in the modern real estate agent in terms of usability user friendliness and this hasn't traditionally been a marketing tool but in today's day and age this has now become something you can mark it as being unique and different and so I wouldn't underestimate the power of a modern clean report because agents they want to save time and they want something that's easy to understand so think about your whole business of how it's all marketing it's all your marketing and of course you know whether it's weeks or months down the road your client may pull out your home inspection report to refer back to something maybe what type of material are my pipes what is something that I need to fix that I remember from the maintenance checklist and so just keep in mind that that reports also another way to create lasting brand impressions that might pay dividends many months or years down the road so make sure that you choose your report format wisely is the takeaway from this slide all right so there's a whole lot of other reasons an agent would try this slide is a little busy but of course since you have the slides you can parse it on your own I'm just a few that we want to touch on here if you're making your agents life easier that's a great thing all agents want to save time everybody's busy so if you're sending them reminders of the upcoming inspection if you're sending them follow-ups just to see if they have any questions those are great ways to not only stay in mind with your agents but to just make their lives a little bit easier they feel like you're on top of things and just reflects great upon your business the repair addendum starter in most states this is something that gets delivered after the home inspection if the software that you utilize helps them do that that's gonna be a great way for you to tell them I'm gonna save you time it's gonna be much easier to work with me as a home inspector than my competition the takeaway is just think deeply about the reasons why they really would use you over someone that they're comfortable with and Trust and think that they don't owe you the business they don't owe you referrals you have to really give them reasons to use you and it's usually making their life easier what else during your time as an agents what else would you say were things that really elevated home inspectors in your eyes there was a number of things that I used an inspector once because he sent me a good email campaign a well done MailChimp email made me feel that he was professional and on the ball so I used him for that another inspector I really connected with personally and I felt like he was good with clients on site and a third inspector the report was really modern and easy to read so there's a number of reasons and it's gonna be different for each segment of agents so really just have to kind of look at your business holistically and make sure that you're up to date with technology and also putting professional stuff out there and of course we don't want to underplay the importance of the people's skills some of those soft skills we see things on here like they like you you make the clients feel great on-site and these are super important a lot of these come down to personality differences but I would say to those of you that feel like you're really good with people walk your clients through during the inspection we have some guys that invite their clients to come through and follow them around on every inspection they are almost acting as if they're the educator of the home and that gets great reviews clients love that agents love that for other inspectors maybe they'll have the client agent join them during the last half hour of the inspection to go over results and maybe that appeals team or if you want to really focus on the house before anybody arrives without somebody looking over your shoulder so kind of get a sense of the type of inspector you are and consider that when it comes to how you market yourself and what you promote as your unique value propositions one thing that we haven't mentioned here yet free information in the form of continuing ed courses training newsletters we've had some inspectors that get certified to do continuing education credit hours in their state for realtors and so I guess you talked to him how did he say the one that we're talking about here has gotten all the stalls business from this yeah check with your state see if that's something you can offer the requirements may not be as strict as you think but this is an easy way to grow your business phenomenally if you can provide that seee because it's something all agents need to do so you want to be where they are current inspectors are tiring many of you will live in markets where there's a changing of the guard happening a lot of inspectors are getting out of the business demographic factors they're retiring and so this is a phenomenal opportunity new inspectors I think right now have so much potential because they can not only scoop up the business that is being left out there on the table but you can leverage like modern tools that maybe the competition hasn't been doing we hear from a lot of Realtors that modern reports are a breath of fresh air just using technology to coordinate schedule these are all things that you can leverage as a new inspector coming into the industry so just keep in mind that you have tremendous advantages even though there are established inspectors in your market and one line I'll leave with you guys a bonus tip here is one that I heard that works really well the agent is saying I don't want to be your number one inspector I don't want to be your go-to guy I just want to be your number two you're gonna get your foot in the door because they're current inspector or even their top two or three are gonna be busy and then they try you out and that's where you can win them over with all the other things we're talking about here but it's a good line to say I just want to be your backup inspector and of course we talked to hundreds inspectors every day we have thousands of inspectors that we interact with and so if you have any questions about more things you can do in agent presentations we answer questions all the time on specter comm we have a chat hole so you can always hop on and ask us questions if you'd like further info on this topic so big takeaways from this be prepared if you're going into an agent presentation just know how you're gonna be different how you're gonna offer value to the agents and come in they're just ready to wow them and you want to be different differentiators always think about that I don't want anyone going on an agent presentation until you have three ways that you're different from inspectors in your market and then also add value it sounds simple but really think deeply about how you're gonna make an agent's life easier give them information entertain them it's got to be something other than hey I'm an inspector and I need business a lot of modern marketing nowadays is giving value before you get value and that's gonna be a theme throughout our presentation and it starts even in the in the agent presentations where you're coming through and saying here's not only food or maybe free gear but here's a bunch of things that I can offer you as an agent to make your life easier so keep these things in mind as you are swing by agent offices and we think you'll be off to a great start alright so next we're gonna shift gears and go into what often becomes that medium term after you've gotten your foot in the door with some agents maybe you've gotten a few paid inspections under your belt you're wondering how am I going to get the next several dozen several hundred inspections so that I can truly make a living and pay the bills with this and one thing that we find to be the most effective way to get inspections now is paid advertising so for those of you unfamiliar with where ads are or what is an ad or isn't an ad here's a view of the Google search results where on the top there you see paid advertising slots so you see four ads there and your market if you search for home inspector your city you'll probably see a number of ads there and if you're in a good-sized city and then down below you see the organic results and that is where you you do not pay to be there so at the top you pay for those ads when someone clicks down below is SEO which we'll get into later in the presentation so of course Google does research and they find that you get basically two - one for every dollar you spend on Adwords and so that varies of course by industry but we have seen many inspectors get a lot more money back than they put in when it comes to using paid ads so we definitely encourage people to experiment with and consider it of course mobile ads look a little bit different than ads on the desktop but we want you to know that they function in the same way and you set them up very similar ways of course you can get calls on mobile and so that's one thing that we'll talk about as we go through how to set up ads correctly alright so here's some examples of if you are writing ad copy and creating these ads on your own that you want to keep in mind if someone's managing this for you you want to make sure they're doing these things so you want to use numbers and emotional words in your ads so in this one it says save up to $150 that just catches a consumers eye and makes them want to click to learn more and you also see the phone number there in open hours so you really want to draw them in with these things that are different and unique compared to other ads and some of you may decide you don't want to take calls after 9 p.m. some of you may have opened now always because you want to get calls a lot of this is up to you and you set this up when you're setting up your profiles as well as your ad campaigns we'll talk to you a little bit more about how this looks and here's another example of using the words trust and this is a big purchase asking a question do you need a home inspection these are little techniques that Google ad professionals use so if this is something you're going at on your own definitely write in and let us know if you have questions it's something we're happy to guide on but there's definitely techniques where you can get these clicks and book inspections from these ads so we're gonna just go through a case study to kind of exemplify what we're talking about here and so one thing that we do for all of the ad campaigns that we rerun for our inspectors is create custom landing pages and the reason is because we want to track how effective the ads are so if you're setting up your own ad campaign you don't necessarily want to send it to your home page because then it's just gonna be mixed in with people finding your home page through every other means that you have out there so by creating a custom page on your website where an ad leads to lets you know exactly how much page views are coming in from that particular ad and on the landing page it's always best to make it easy - whether it's request a quote schedule an inspection basically do the thing you want them to do which is get you a lead and before you pay for any advertising or run any ads we always recommend a landing page because it constrains options there's no menu you'll notice on this page there's no footer it really gets the home buyer to do what you want them to do which is get a quote or book an inspection so with this particular inspector they ran an ad for 18 days and they had 74 total clicks so that means that somebody actually clicked on the ad or clicked on the phone number to call them so 74 leads which is pretty amazing for they spend one hundred eighty six dollars and so depending on how many of those 74 leads you convert that can end up being quite a bit of money if your average inspection is between 300 and 500 dollars and keep in mind it's a numbers game when it comes to ads right so if you get 74 clicks you know some of those will be bogus clicks and then a small percentage of them will be very legit home buyers looking for a home inspection so as you can see here got two requested quotes from that so two people filled out that conversion form saying I want to book an inspection and also 20 phone calls so you have to believe out of these numbers that if you were to do this you would get a couple inspections from this and that's typically the return on investment we see now as you'll see here 22 leads and 18 days very powerful numbers and another important stat here is that over 7,000 people saw the ad so even if they didn't click on it that's still a brand impression for you in your market and so keep in mind it's not just the the clicks but constantly running ads is a way to get people to think about your brand to think about your company and maybe they click on the ad next month maybe in two months and so it's part of I think a holistic long-term strategy for growing a business is to have ad campaigns running and one thing we often hear is that oh I never click on ads do people actually click on ads and believe it or not they do it's a small percentage and it typically happens when people are looking to hire somebody so keep in mind that when someone's looking to take action to hire home inspector they're more likely to click on an ad so it's it is an effective route Facebook ads are another place to run ads and so here are a couple examples of some of the ad campaigns we've ran for our inspectors on Facebook what do you what do you think about Facebook ads in general so I think they're good for brand impressions only in some markets we've seen inspectors book inspections from running ads on Facebook so traditionally social media is a place for people to be entertained or to connect with other people so you can run ads there that are good typically for agents so if you want to connect with agents that can be a good cheap place to get those brand impressions so they see your logo they see your brand over and over and it's typically going to be more cost effective than Google Ads they might follow your page as well and so that's an opportunity for you to do maybe newsletter marketing down the road and so we don't recommend maybe the new inspectors start immediately with Facebook ads but it's something to consider as you get a little bit deeper into the business and this just illustrates how cheap it is to do it if you did want to test it out I think spending $50 or $100 to test is always a good rule of thumb as with everything we're telling you don't believe us let's test it out and see if it results in more business I think it's a great point markets vary tremendously across the country across the world and so with anything that we say here your mileage may vary and cost for ads vary response rates on ads vary and so I think it's important to keep in mind that these little tests throw 50 bucks throw a hundred bucks at something see what happens try something else and then continue to do the things that work that's a great strategy for anybody if you go in the forums you'll hope here people bash pretty much anything you want to try and bear in mind that is for their particular experience in their particular market and so just know that there's tremendous variation and with any strategy there's gonna be little tweaks that you can make that make or break it working so keep in mind that there's probably not professionals doing a lot of these campaigns that these home inspectors may speak about so test it for yourself here's some more targeting aspects on Facebook you can target people in a certain city people that have just bought a home within 25 miles of where you live so there's a lot of good deep targeting that you can do on Facebook just know that that's available and it's a tool for you there but you want to do something that's local relevant helpful or funny you cannot just post need a home inspection on Facebook that's gonna be end up being a waste of your money yeah just remember that it's a different context people search on Google for a home inspector when they're ready to hire so it makes sense to try and get that inspection book right then on Facebook you are looking to give them something else that makes them just engage with your brand with your you know whether it's your Facebook page or your website more so just bear in mind that these are two very different platforms with different purposes for advertising so here's a quick Facebook case study now we mentioned Facebook is not great for booking inspections in this particular case we had an inspector in Florida that ran an ad for new construction inspections and it did particularly well so he we made a landing page for him and he generated a good amount of leads so we put the buttons on there and you see 14 people clicked through to the landing page and it only costed him $1 67 per click so while we're saying hey it doesn't usually lead to inspections in this case it did so that's why we say test test test because we tracked it well and we key got two conversions and two inspections from this so if he breakdown he spent only $23 on ads over a thousand people saw the ad so a thousand 1166 brand impressions and he got two inspections out of it so $23 he got back 600 that's a pretty good return on investment that's something he is definitely repeating and continuing to utilize and we've gone we've worked with him to further optimize it to increase it even more since then so this shows you some of the potential as well as some of the reasons why you can experiment with different things in your market all right so lead-gen sites a lot of you probably have been approached or will be approached by some of these sites you see here it's another thing where we really preach to test it out if you think it could be a viable option to get inspections the home advisors of thumbtacks of the world they have good market places where people actually visit and go to hire an inspector so I wouldn't just trust whatever you hear from a handful of inspectors I would actually learn a little bit more feel free to ask us we have experience with a lot of these sites but test for yourself and see if it has a good return on investment all right so just to recap some of the main points here again each market is different so focus on the return on investment for any given Avenue that you're trying there's always gonna be the emotional side of paying out money before you receive money that's the nature of advertising and it's a nature of marketing so just make sure that you're kind of removing the emotion from it and just looking at purely from a numbers game if I spend this much how much do I get back try that out with each one and continue to do the ones that work and one point here that inspectors often don't think of is that if you pay to get a lead from a lead generation site or paid advertising you also have an opportunity to meet another agent through that who could give you more referrals in the future so keep in mind that it could be a 2 for 1 or 3 for 1 on this investment all right so now we are gonna talk to you about search engine optimization so this is kind of a fancy word for Google ranking where do you show up when somebody searches so for those you're not familiar here's the traditional search results page as we talked about earlier the ads are on top so you pay to be there when someone clicks and then you have the Google Maps three-pack is what you'll hear it as where Google has an algorithm that determines where you rank there locally and then you have the ten blue links that we're all familiar with and that's the organic search drinking's so of course it's really great to be on that front page when somebody searches for home inspector your town because then you're just gonna get a lot of what we call organic leads people are just finding you without having to pay for anything this is how you create a long-term sustainable business where maybe homebuyers are finding you directly instead of just listening to their agent recommendations often agents will find you directly when they're looking for a new home inspector this is how I found an agent actually when or how I found a home inspector when I was looking for a new home inspector I actually googled home inspector Denver and found one that had a good web presence there so let's talk about why SEO is important clients are researching you guys and they're searching for you you have to remember that any time an agent gives a recommendation to a home buyer what are they doing they go and type you either your brand name or they search on their own and do their research so this just illustrates that there is well over a hundred thousand searches on average every month for something home inspection related so people are searching for me and these numbers are from Google themselves so that is further proof that people are going there let us know if you'd like to know numbers for your particular town or city because of course the search volume you know sometimes it's in the hundreds sometimes it's in the thousands per month those are all leads that you could potentially be getting if you rank highly and this information can be found by you guys on your own if you create a Google Ads account it is kind of difficult to set up so just let us know if you need any help with that another reason clients and agents are researching you so even if an agent gives a referral to a home buyer so for example when you were my realtor you gave me some referrals the first thing I did was Google them and that is for better or worse the Millennial market that's how they validate if somebody is good and legit they'll go and look at you online and so you'll see an example somebody that's maybe neglected their online presence on this slide right now instead of a logo or a picture of him as the inspector he has just some trees in front of his house this is because he didn't create his Google my business profile and add his image that he wants to display there so I think a big takeaway is if you do nothing else go home make a Google my business profile and this is where you get to set up the image that will display the name of your business the opening hours the contact information so is all within your control you tell Google what to display when somebody searches for you something else you'll notice there's not that many great reviews for this particular inspector he maybe hasn't been asking for reviews when he was a client and so when somebody else searches they might not think that he's as good of an inspector as he is so just know what your search results page looks like when you google your own brand name because that's what a real estate agent is gonna do after you do an agent presentation so that's also very important on the agent presentation front and neglecting your online presence can actually lose you business a lot of inspectors don't even know how much business are losing by not paying attention to their online presence this is just an example that if you're not paying attention to your website in your online presence Google will actually show other businesses when people are searching for you so keep in mind that Google knows if you're not really presenting yourself how you should be online and they'll they'll find someone else for the home buyer agent to hire it's a reiterate I think it's really important we search for a particular home inspection companies brands it showed us that as well as a competitor that ranks higher that has better reviews and so Google is basically saying hey I know you're searching for this person but maybe you want to talk to this person instead because they're better and so you have to pay attention to your online presence or else you'll just never hear from those folks that aren't getting to your website so the bot the bottom line here guys we don't want you to have less reliance on agent referrals the average tenure for agents is less than three years so just keep that in mind if you have great agents that are going to be referring your business that may not be the case next year and so the focus on this presence allows you to grow your business and sustain your business over time yeah the last thing we want is for you to have just one or two agents that send you all of your leads and if one of them goes out of business finds a better inspector suddenly your reset down to the bottom and scrap him to get those inspections so a good healthy business model means that you're getting everything right you have agent referrals you have paid inspections you have direct organic results so these are the things that we're gonna talk about in this portion is how do you keep that healthy pipeline of business coming in so that you're not so reliant on just a couple people all right so ICO is important so we know that so how does it work so a lot there's a big mystery reception out there that google's algorithm is this wild rollercoaster that changes daily and one thing shoots you to the top or shoots you to the bottom it does change a lot but keep in mind it has moved out over time so it takes into account good habits and not necessarily one thing will boost you to the top and I think it's important to know that as the search engines constantly refine their algorithms either as a business owner you have to stay on top of that or you should be paying somebody that does stay on top of that so that you know the things you're doing are still the best things that you can be doing to rank higher because like anything it's a constantly evolving ecosystem and so you know as a business owner I'm sure that's not what you want to hear is oh this is one more thing I have to keep up with so of course consider your time versus your money and where you want to allocate each and one thing I'll tell you is I that was my full time job at home advisor was to keep track of algorithm changes and so while it doesn't have the drastic swings it does change and what the importance level of certain tasks changes over time and that's something i watch daily in search results so it definitely is a full-time job and something worth investing time or money into one huge takeaway here is that it does not happen overnight anymore there were days not that long ago maybe 10 years ago and somebody would say hey I'm gonna get you to the number 1 page in Google and they could by just blasting a bunch of keywords onto your website by maybe submitting your website to hundreds of directories and so that was the old days there's still a lot of these kind of more questionable methods that are being marketed nowadays to home inspectors and so our whole goal here is we're gonna go over the things that you should be doing and if people that are trying to sell you SEO digital marketing services aren't doing these then either they're you know snake oil salesmen trying to scam you or they're just not up-to-date with the latest in SEO and how it works and so they're trying to apply old tools to the new environment and it's going to end up being a waste of your money so if nothing else we hope that you're more educated consumers because it's not about gaming the system anymore Google is heavily incentivized to deliver quality results that reflects real world legitimacy of the business and so we're going to talk to you about what it means to appear as a legitimate business in the digital world just like you want to appear professional in the real world every time you meet somebody you want to come across as a professional home inspector you have to do the same thing digitally nowadays and so yes we'll get into now what these key components are and one one point on that I'll quit you guys I'll save you time the number one thing you're going to get pitched is guaranteed first page ranking on Google keep in mind they don't specify which keywords and how long that typically just means for your own business name which you're going to rank first for anyway after a few months so just keep in mind if any one promises that it can happen overnight they're probably just snake oil salesmen then it's probably not going to work out so we're gonna dive into each one of these in more detail just right off the bat a top SEO ranking factors are content links your website citations and reviews and so we'll dive into each one of these and see what they mean and kind of educate you so that you know what you're getting should you end up paying for marketing services so this is where you want to be this is the goal to tie it all together those factors are all the things that helped you get here and that's where you want to rank so all these different tasks are gonna help you show up on the Google Maps 3 pack not just one thing that someone tells you to do it's a combination of things that get you there yeah it's a long-term game when we are talking to prospective clients for SEO digital marketing services we let them know this is something that you have to kind of hang tight with for six to nine months that's how long it takes to establish legitimacy just like in the real world you can't just come in and say I'm the best at something and then instantly be recognized as the best you have to earn it and so this is why we don't recommend SEO maybe to brand new home inspectors at least not paying for it you can start to lay the groundwork start to get the foundation for your digital marketing presence with a good website but this is that long-term game this is how you're going to be a successful inspector for years to come all right content so we're gonna dive into one of the most important factors that Google tells us to their algorithms so content is text images videos on your website so anything like the pages on your website service area pages and blog posts so any text on your website we're calling content so once some of the keys here as one of the most heavily weighted factors is using keywords naturally on your site do not just write home inspector Denver or home inspector Jacksonville 100 times on your site that could get you penalized you want helpful content on your site's pages so think of really about talking to your customers and your agents when you're writing content for your site blogging is a big one we do for our home inspectors for SEO plans it's something every inspector I think should be doing from the start whether it's spending 20 minutes a week dedicating to it or hiring someone and then off-site content guest posting may be getting an account on activerain or social media so when we're doing these presentations I think the question we always get is well what do I know what do I write about what do you tell them I tell them you know more than the average home buyer a hundred times over so everything you're learning this week and everything that came from your prior experience in construction or roofing or plumbing you can write a 300 word article on any of those topics and it's going to be helpful to someone so keep in mind you have a captive audience with your home buyers and agents that you can send them these articles so you're not just publishing it and hoping someone reads it you actually can email it to them you can put it in your follow-up emails or your reminder emails so everything you learned this week and some can be a blog post and I think this also ties into the content marketing that will dive a little bit more into as you write blog posts that's a good reason to send newsletters maybe to all of the past clients and agents that you've ever worked with and that's a brand impression and it's useful information that might think the home buyer might think oh I remember at this home inspector was great I'm gonna recommend them to a friend who's just about to buy a home or the agent who's about to refer home inspectors for another purchase they're gonna think of your name again and so content is a great reason to reach out instead of just sending out yet another email saying hey don't forget that I'm a home inspector and I'd love your business this is giving them value first and so you know some examples of good articles what to expect from your home inspection that's something that all of you can write and some of those differentiators that we talked about earlier whether you're the type that is gonna walk through and educate the client about the home or whether you're somebody that's gonna just really focus on quality we have some inspectors that only do one inspection per day and they say I've blocked off my entire day for you and so that's their differentiator they charge a little bit more for it but it's something that helps sell and differentiate from the other home inspectors in their market and you'll get to learn your most common issues that come up on a home inspection each one of those should be in an article that you prepare homebuyers with before they meet you on site but just think about being helpful and these should be quality and you should do it consistently those are gonna be the keys to really help you out all right so links is another big deal when it comes to SEO outside of content this is the most heavily weighted ranking factor basically a link is any other website that includes hyperlink something that's clickable that goes to your website and so this can be for example a real estate agency that you work with often maybe they have a preferred vendors page and if you click on that page they have a list of home inspectors you want to be on that list some of them will do it for free they might you might just be able to ask them hey we've worked together a lot would you mind putting me on that page and they say of course so keep in mind that this is not always something you have to pay for for a lot of agencies they just do it yeah and good content actually helps you get more links to your site so the better articles you write an agent may just link to it on their own but it also gives you some good content to come to them and say hey would you mind linking to this article I think it'll be helpful to your clients you can outreach to people for getting these links and so just think of all the places that are in related industries that might link to you you don't want to go to industries that don't really make sense so maybe you have a friend that's a dentist there's no reason for a dentist to be linking to a home inspector site and so that's not something that you would necessarily want because you might even be penalized it might look legitimate and like you're trying to kind of game the system and so you want it to be related you know real estate agencies may be lending offices and then we also do some competitive research for our marketing plans and if there's software out there where you can actually look at your competition and see who links to their site to help give you some starting points to start for your link research yeah so that's some of the more advanced stuff if you have questions about that feel free to reach out to us it's something that we include in some of the marketing services we do for our customers so we talked about getting links there's easy links out there that you can get so there's some directories that you can just sign up for and ask them to add a link to your site and they add it I mean there's a couple other places like forum signatures all you should have a link to your website in your forum signature and we talked about agent and partner pages associations and organizations often linked to your website and then third-party sites so if you do sign up with a home advisor or a thumbtack just keep in mind they also usually link to your website so there's a side benefit there and you don't necessarily need to be paying home advisor for their services you can just create your profile on home advisor fill out the name address and phone number and that's an inbound link and that helps you just appear as if you're more legitimate business because you're listed everywhere in one caveat we always say never to pay for links chambers of commerce are an exception because you're paying for membership in a chamber and they tend to link to your site so that is actually a very valuable link as local chambers and associations but never pay out right for someone to just link to your site it's kind of a fuzzy line there all right so a website of course this is a big deal all of you need a website it's it's very very difficult to do business nowadays without a website the there's several components to making sure your website is successful and usable and does what you want it to which is gets you more business the user interface is a big deal if you search for home inspectors in your market you may find a lot of them that look like the one on the left this is a website that was probably made 20 years ago they haven't really updated their color scheme the fonts are hard to read if you look at on mobile you're having a pinch and zoom and so that makes it difficult to use and the most people I think at least in our age bracket if they get to a site like that they immediately swipe back and we'll go to something else and so as new home inspectors which many of you are you have an awesome opportunity to create a brand new modern site maybe like the one on the right that's a very user friendly very modern feeling very usable and all the sites that we build we include two different kinds of links on the top one is - the phone number so there are definitely people that they just want to call they want to schedule home inspection and we want them to have that opportunity most website traffic now is on mobile devices and so it's very important that you give them that ease of being able to click to call now of course the the Millenial on the other hand will probably avoid using a phone at all costs and so for that reason we online schedulers that we embed in every website we build if you're using SPECT or that integrates directly with your spec taura account so that somebody can fill out all the details about their property their contact info what services they're after and that becomes a booked inspection you can get paid get agreement signed directly and so we try and make it easy for whatever the demographic whatever the generation that's operating in your market they're able to do what you want them to do that's what we call a conversion conversion is either scheduling inspection or giving you a call you guys just have a unique opportunity and all I'll say is make sure that you don't skimp on the website because your competition may have sites that you see up here on the slides just make sure you really press that advantage as much as you can by getting a modern clean website and not necessarily going with your neighbor's nephew that could save you a few bucks yeah that's a great point mobile friendliness another huge factor when it comes to websites like I said most traffic over fifty percent is on mobile devices nowadays if your site requires pinching zooming maybe it's the buttons are too small to actually tap then you might lose business there and you might not even know and so make sure that your site is responsive that's the kind of website lingo a responsive site means that it looks different on a big screen versus on a mobile screen and so with all the sites we build when it's on a small screen the buttons are bigger they're easier to tap the font is a little bit bigger you're able to read it you scroll through it everything is very optimized for the mobile experience and it is a factor in Google's algorithm now so keep in mind if your site is not mobile friendly you can actually suffer in the search results and you'll see in the example here big clear buttons because when someone's on a phone they're ready to hire not necessarily read through your site page load speed it matters a lot now Google has updated their algorithm to include this recently and so again use professionals your website is gonna be your initial presentation to a lot of people as soon as they hear about you they can search for you and your website is gonna be what maybe they judge you on in terms of if you're a legitimate business and so your page load speed is going to matter not only for if they just click back because they want to wait for it to load but also for Google ranking factors I think there's some research if it takes longer than one second you end up losing like 50% of your traffic and so just keep that in mind maybe next time you're out of Wi-Fi if you're you know just on LTE service do a search for your site on your phone see how quickly it loads up this is a important stuff something to keep in mind if you for those of you that are thinking about building your own website or having something else build it make sure you're paying attention to PageSpeed I take advantage of being new we've said this several times here's some examples of sites that you maybe don't want to be the site on the left the color scheme is difficult to read there's a lot of colors going on there it just isn't as inviting to the eye and the user will probably leave on the mobile screen you can see their scroll bars you're gonna have to scroll around to read the same paragraph that's tough the one on the top right very crowded we definitely want you to display all the badges that you've worked hard to earn but you don't want it to be so cluttered that people get very overwhelmed when they come to your site and so and then the one on the right the color scheme is difficult it's gray on black the images they don't pop so instead of being these pages maybe try to be these these are some sites we've built that we hope are very open very modern feeling they invite you in they work well on mobile devices they kind of constrain the users options the one on the right is a form that just has a few choices and then you click to schedule or get contacted and we still want to integrate all your internachi badges in a very elegant way but we've try to reduce clutter and overall agents and clients just end up liking this better and you can use this as a marketing pitch so when you're making Asian presentations and you have a site that looks like this you can use that as a differentiator so as we go back in the talk it's another way to stand you the standout yeah and a lot of this isn't just opinion but this comes from making thousands inspector websites and as well as all the research that's done it's a good user interface and good user experience these are the things that keep a potential client on your site longer or get them to become paying customers and so there's a ton of research on this we keep up with it all we try to ensure that our websites are giving the most bang for buck to all of our inspectors all right next we'll talk about citations so this is just your business information listed on other sites across the internet so keep in mind here consistency is the key so when you create accounts in other places just make sure that your business is listed the same in terms of the phone number address in the way you name your business yeah this would be as if you were asking somebody's closest friends where he lived and you got four or five different answers you would think that maybe that person's kind of a shady individual and you wouldn't trust them as much same goes for your business you want the same exact thing listed everywhere and make sure that comes right down to like whether you list LLC or incorporate it at the end you want the same phone number in the same address you don't want it to look like you're a fly-by-night place that's just trying to game the system by having different listings everywhere that you are and you only need them in a couple of key places across the internet you don't need to blast it out to thousands of websites just the main core ones that Google relies on are the most important so reviews this is the last area we'll talk about and is obviously very important for your business and how you grow it bottom-line more positive reviews and more places matters Yelp and Google are the ones that we believe you should focus at the most on they seem to have the best return so here's this nice stat that 93% of consumers read online reviews I don't think that's a surprise to anybody but keep in mind even if you get a bad review it doesn't completely take you out so you need to remember that people will still use you three point three I believe is the minimum rating that people would consider engaging with yeah if you have less than that then maybe people are gonna turn away well we always say because we always get the question what do I do when I get that crazy customer or that crazy agent that just leaves a bad review for BS reasons we say hey don't worry about it so much keep getting positive reviews you should be asking for reviews constantly so that when you if you have hundreds of reviews one bad reviews not gonna really matter as much on your average if you only have two reviews then obviously that one bad review can dramatically affect it and so the idea is to constantly be asking for reviews this is just a screenshot of our software we have automated follow-ups that ask everybody for reviews up to three times after the inspection this is what we found the best way to get reviews at least twice you should ask just remember that agents are busy clients are busy they're in the middle of what's probably one of the biggest purchases of their life and so they don't always think about reviewing you even if they thought you did a phenomenal job and so this is actually a setup of a case study will dive into where he set reviews to go out I can't quite make out text maybe a few hours after a few days after and then about a week and a half after the inspection and what he found instead of just asking once but asking three times his reviews just shot through the roof he is getting tremendous results he's now expanding he has two inspectors working for him it all happened within a year just because he got a lot more reviews and you guys can't be shy about this I want to say as new inspectors you're they're probably gonna be hesitant to want to ask for reviews but have confidence in your ability to connect with people so even right away these homebuyers may maybe don't know you're brand new and so you give them a good experience let them know you'll be sending them an email to leave you a review otherwise send them to a contact form on your site we'll get into that in a minute so this is the case study we talked about when we first started working with him I think he had less than a dozen reviews and we started tweaking his marketing as well as asking how he asked for reviews and we played around with the different timings tweaked the text on how he asked for reviews and now he has over a hundred he is getting a lot of organic business so he feels great not having to worry about agent the same few agents always referring to him and so this is just something that is very possible - very possible very quickly just make sure you're asking for it he got over his initial fear of asking too much and like we said in the previous slide be okay asking three times and spaced it out because people are busy and they'll just ignore the email if they've already left you a review or if they don't want to but don't be afraid to ask because that's how you grow your business and reviews aren't just for SEO people are willing to pay you more money if you're a more highly reviewed inspector so of course I think all of you want to be the premium home inspector you can charge more you can work less that's that's the dream reviews are a huge part of that and so make sure that especially when you know you without a client or an agent tell them hey I'm gonna be sending you a link those can ask for review I really would appreciate it that's how my business grows the agents will get it because that's how their business grows as well and the home buyers will if they've appreciate your service they'll be happy to and so keep asking keep a focus on getting more reviews it's gonna help out your business alright now we're gonna move into just a few bonus tips for you on how to while your clients and agents with the inspection experience what we want to convey is that you're more than just the inspection you're gonna deliver more than just a report you're creating an experience for your clients and agents and it begins when they first reach out and contact you or first see your website and it continues maybe even years down the road as they continue to refer back to your inspection and they think back on all the help that you gave them with this big purchase so just keep the change your mindset you're more than just this one thing that you give them and to build a brand you really have to pay attention to all of these factors all these touch points of your clients journey and your agents journey interacting with you and your brand yeah and everything that you do every single touch point is part of your brand perception so we're going to give you a few quick tips on things that you can do to improve this so the ability to take payments and have your contract signed online is huge you're going to want to use some software that helps you do this you don't want to be the guy shows up fumbling with papers then you're having to worry about filing it some people are even getting less they don't like doing the swipe thing anymore they just want to take care of it online before they even show up as an inspector that's great for you to be able to have payment already handled before you show up because then you don't have to worry about hounding them for payments and so with our software platform that is all kind of baked in and integrated to where your customer can pay accept your agreement all online usually in under a minute and and then it's all taken care of for you we also lock the report so that they can't access it until they've done these things to protect you liability wise and so that's the other flipside to consider is that how do you protect yourself from somebody that just wants a report but maybe they haven't paid you yet or sign your agreement yet you know you can blame it on the software if you're using us and make sure that that happens and from an agent perspective use this as another differentiator to say hey I take care of our mutual clients quickly easily it's all online agents have been soaking it up and they really will love it so reminders education some of that content that we talked about earlier that you've been building these are great things that you can send to your agents as well as your clients to just stay top of mind to provide continual value we have some home inspectors that like to position themselves as maybe the the educator of a home the kind of home consultants and they do that by continually sending resources articles they've written quick videos they've shot on how to change your furnace filters how to change your swamp cooler filters things like this and that's just a great way to continue staying top of mind in both clients and agents and continuing that referral cycle that's going to build your business over time and a little SEO tip here everyone should be writing an article on what to expect or how to have make the most of your home inspection and link to it from your reminder email that you send to the client and also the text reminders agents love those yeah when we rolled out text reminders text follow-ups you know the the modern generation so much is done via text message so we definitely recommend looking at your software options saying which ones appeal to the type of audience I'm trying to reach and of course your report as we mentioned earlier it's a huge differentiating factor many of your competitors may be using long dense hard to read PDFs what we found when we were doing our early research with focus groups of clients and agents is that those just weren't liked they weren't usable they weren't understandable and so when we built our report we built a web-based format that feels very much like using a website there's boxes that blow up for photos you can view videos directly in the reports there's tools for the agent to put together their repair request list a lot of these tools are jump links easy filters are things that can set you apart of course we still have the PDF we still automatically generate that for you and you can use it and reference it and that's what maybe goes on file with your agents but what we found is that the modern report really helps the inspector differentiate themselves from especially some of the aging competition and agents are all about vanity so keep in mind agents love how a modern clean report looks and that's your audience and then keep in mind homebuyers they're used to using modern websites Facebook Pinterest all these other sites in this report if it looks closer to that they're gonna feel better about the transaction better about the report and it's a win win automated follow-ups we mentioned them in terms of getting reviews just want to reiterate here it's a great way to stay top of mind some people will send their automated follow-ups even a month or two after the inspection just to you know be remembered and maybe get that referral from somebody that thinks oh yeah that was a really good home inspection experience when my brother buys a house and in order for this home inspector so leverage technology there's no reason for the modern home inspector to be writing the same emails to every single client and every single agent on every single inspection it just doesn't make sense when you can automate this our email systems use smart placeholders so that you can fill out personalized information they will feel like personal emails but you only have to set it up once and it will work on every inspection you do there's lots of strategies here to utilize these just feel free to reach out to us and ask there's lots of good ways you can stay top of mind with agents and actually get client referrals bottom line as we said in the beginning you need to set yourself apart from your competition this is a competitive industry many of you are gonna be getting out there and realizing wow there are a lot of other home inspectors in my market what we see every day from our vantage point of working with bounces and inspectors we see what they're doing the ones that stay ahead of the game the ones that grow their business some of our inspectors in their first year get $150,000 like hundreds of inspections in the first year we this is where a lot of the information this presentation came from these are the things that they're doing and it takes work it takes some effort but by delivering that value by setting yourself apart from your competition by differentiating this is how you become a very successful home inspector it's not unrealistic to be hiring a employee within a year year and a half growing to a multi inspector company very quickly we see it all the time set aside the time money mindspace to put some thought towards these things it takes intentionality I think carving out time to actually work on your business because you're gonna handle the inspecting of the home just fine that'll get better but set aside the time to dedicate to the expect inspection experience your marketing advertising and you'll be alright so we know that a lot of this was very overwhelming to you especially as you're learning about the home so as we have been doing this class we've been doing it almost two years now and what we heard in terms of a lot of the common needs are yes inspectors need a website and they need software they need a Google my business and Yelp set up they want help with those automated emails maybe getting their online scheduler set up on their website and so we've put together a package for this you can find out more information on our website it includes all these things it ends up saving you about a thousand dollars overdoing them all separately we did this because we really want to help the new inspector start off right and stay in business if you stay in business we stay in business and so we do everything we can to help you not just with creating great software but with doing all the marketing with doing the things that we talked about in this video doing them right so that you can stay in business the biggest piece of feedback we get is where your tech team basically so it's things you probably don't want to think about that are our specialties and because you're in the internet G class we have a special deal with it or not so you get $100 off so that what is currently priced at $69.99 and all you have to do is reach out to us via our chat bubble inspector comm and say I was in the internet G class and we take $100 off of your jump start package so again with any of the stuff whether it's a software the website when you're ready to do paid advertising when you're ready to do SEO content writing we also do email newsletters now we do all these things for our home inspectors and our home inspectors are doing very well we get great feedback from it so we'd love to chat with you yeah thank you so much for your time and your attention today usually when we're doing this presentation we have a lengthy Q&A afterwards because of the video context of this we can't do that here but we'd love to answer any questions you have you can always go to Specter accom we have a green chat bubble on every single page on the site and we're happy to answer any questions about our software SEO digital marketing ad campaigns any of the things we cover today or even just general conversation about the platform Kevin and I are usually pretty responsive and we also have an excellent support team to just kind of give you the information we want you to succeed as a home inspector thanks so much for the attention guys we hope we gave you some actionable tips and some good takeaways but as Mike said if you have questions feel free to reach out we're always available for you alright thank you so much you

Channel: International Association of Certified Home Inspectors (InterNACHI)

Views: 5,914

Rating: 4.8857141 out of 5

Keywords: International association of certified home inspectors, InterNACHI, NACHI, become a home inspector, home inspection training, home inspection education, gromicko

Id: _x9aRbejTMk

Length: 57min 37sec (3457 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 19 2018