St. Catharines Home Inspection - My keywords
Well, taking a home inspection business and keeping it on the first page of Google is possible after all.
In 2010, I barely knew what SEO stood for. And now, it’s something I don’t think about that often.
I did spend a long time at it.
Home Inspection - Maple Trust Inspection Blog
I blogged some, but have trouble devoting time to it. It’s always one of those things on my list that never gets done. I guess that’s cause I’ve got enough business, and search rank to sustain things for the moment:)
Maple Trust Inspection Facebook Page
I don’t think it actually got me alot of business, but it did get me some for sure, and probably helped in the long run with ranking. I’ve got 83 page likes so far. I haven’t really promoted home inspection on Facebook at all this year.
Google+ page for Maple Trust Inspections
Lot’s of people were sure Google plus would take away Facebook’s thunder. Doesn’t seem like it happened. But using a Google service just might make the Google gods happy. I’ve got about 30,000 views and 140 followers, what ever that means. 
Linked In Page
Does anyone actually use LinkedIn anymore? Apparently I’ve got 43 connections and a smattering of “Endorsements” for my home inspection skills. Linked In has become a Facebook of it’s own over the years, with tons of new features. I don’t have the time or desire to use any of them though.
I’ve created public business profiles on yellowpages, yelp, local newspapers and all the usual suspects. Many business index yellow page like sites, end up scraping the info and listing the business by themselves.
I’ve uploaded videos to Vimeo and have a Home Inspection Youtube Channel for Maple Trust Inspections with over a thousand views.
Almost forgot the old twitter account at https://twitter.com/MapleTrust with just over a hundred followers.
There was actually quite a few more places that I made profiles, created backlinks and tastefully (hopefully) spammed the world. Here is a post that I put up on theInterNACHI message board back in 2011 in an effort to boost ranking. I even put up a local library book review on something like home inspections for dummies with a link to my site.
I’ve got google analytics set up. It reports around 200 unique visitors a month, and around 2000 over the past year.
It seems I’ve got about 33% new clients who found me online. 33% agents who use me on a semi regular basis, they seem to come and go some, and about 33% calls from friends and family of previously satisfied customers. This ratio seems to fluctuate some. While business levels do seem to reflect the “on and off” season strongly, it’s steadier than I’d have thought.
There has been ups and downs. When the website first went up, it ranked well. After the initial “glow” wore off (four months) I dropped to page 16 and had to go at it like gang busters for a couple of months to approach the first page of search engine rankings.
I even had my website security compromised last year. This made little difference to my website visitors. Invisible Spam links had been added to my website without me knowing. It took me weeks to get sorted out. I managed to roll back the whole thing and lose very little. Good thing I was doing back ups. The worst part of the ordeal was a “this website may have been hacked tag” which appeared beside my search results. I now keep my WordPress installation up to date for security reasons, and back up regularly. That reminds me. I should back up today
In 2015, I hope to blog more, to redirect my clients to my site to sign their online agreements (snag more hits that way), and to redesign my out bound emails, which look pretty weak on mobile phones due to <table> formatting issues, but realistically, I’ll probably be too busy doing inspections to bother. Or at least I hope so.
Google could pull the rug out from under me at anytime. But so far the Google God’s seem to have rewarded my efforts.
