Why it matters: an inspection site earns its keep when a buyer two towns over, under contract and on a clock, searches for an inspector and finds you. Most sites are one page with a phone number, or a template that says "serving the greater metro area", a phrase no human being has ever typed into Google. The site looks perfectly good. As far as search is concerned it does not exist.
What we changed for Lou
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Lou Rubino runs Inspect This Home Inspections across Nassau and Long Island, thirty years building and renovating houses before he ever started inspecting them. The work was there. The website was not bringing him much of it. We built a new one from scratch:
- A page for every area he covers, rather than one page claiming all of them at once. Twenty-six pages covering the towns he genuinely works in went live at the end of August, and that work is still going.
- Online scheduling, so a buyer under contract can book at nine at night instead of waiting for a callback.
- Inspection reports he updates himself, without having to ring anyone.
- Licence and certification numbers on the page, where a nervous first-time buyer actually looks for them.
"One algorithm did a great job on my new web site design and development… They are also directing more traffic to my site resulting in more business."
— Lou Rubino's review, on Google
Why naming the towns is the whole game
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- A search engine can only match you to a place you have named. "Serving Long Island" does not match somebody searching for an inspector in one specific town. A real page about that town does.
- It is true of every local trade, but it bites hardest here: the buyer is on a deadline and picks from whoever shows up.
The bottom line
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- Judge an inspection site by what it brings in, not how it looks. Some sites need rebuilding. Plenty just need three pages that do not exist yet.
- If yours is not sending you anything, send us the address. We will look at it and tell you plainly what is wrong, and whether it is worth fixing.
Go deeper: we build websites for small businesses and run the search work that makes them findable, from Malvern, Pennsylvania. For what naming the right pages did for a different kind of business, see the Phantom Arcades SEO case study.