Hey, there.
Whether you’re just learning about local SEO or planning your entire marketing strategy, citations on prominent industry publications, directories, and regional sites can be essential to your inspection business success.
In the next couple of articles, I’d like to share how citations can help you grow your online visibility while serving potential clients the information they’re looking for.
Specifically, we’ll address:
- What local citations are
- Why citations are important for local businesses
- How to choose the right citations for your business
- How to manage your citations
What Is a Local Citation?
A local citation is an online mention of your inspection business’s information. This includes your business’s name, address, and phone number (NAP), as well as other information like hours of operation and website. Below is a citation for Big Ben Inspections (an InterNACHI® member) provided by Yelp, which provides free accounts to inspectors.
A citation can be a listing in a business directory like Yelp or can be as simple as a social media profile. InterNACHI has an Instagram.
While online listings may not seem like they can bring much value, it’s important to approach citations from the mind of a user.
These mentions can help build your business’s online presence and (depending on where the citation is) enable visitors to leave reviews that act as social proof for potential clients. In short, citations can help build awareness for your inspection business and help convince people to give you a try.
Why Citations Are Important for Local Businesses
Local citations can help you reach potential clients on the directories and search engines they’re already using to find service providers or other local businesses. The business information they find there enables them to decide whether you’re what they’re actually looking for. And, creating the right citations for your business is a simple way to start your local SEO strategy.
Directories Usually Rank Higher in the SERPs
If a person were to search for a home inspector, they would probably like to see reviews, photos, and the service fee before scheduling an inspection. Different people may prefer different platforms, so you can’t always count on just having a Google Business Profile, for example, to provide new clients with the details they’re looking for. In this case, a client might instead visit a directory, like Yelp, or a social media platform, like Instagram, to find this information.
By listing your business on these platforms, you make the client’s next step of finding you that much easier. Additionally, these directories are often at the top of the search results for any type of local service queries. It’s a simple way to benefit based on the directory’s authoritativeness in the search engine results page (SERP), without having to put in all the work to compete against those same directories for the top spot.
Get Listed by InterNACHI®
InterNACHI® Certified Professional Inspectors CPI® can add up to ten listings, each at a different location. These listings will be used in InterNACHI’s “Find an Inspector” search engines. Add a listing today by visiting www.nachi.org/my/listings.
Add to Your Business’s Online Visibility
Although not officially confirmed by Google, citations are also important because they are considered a local SEO ranking factor, which means they help your business rank higher for relevant search queries.
While citations are unlikely to revolutionize your SEO, they are one of the elements that you, the local business owner, have some degree of control over, which you can use to make it easier for users to find you online.
Build Your Business’s E-A-T Profile
E-A-T stands for expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness, and it’s an important concept online as well as in the real world. Although E-A-T is not a ranking factor, the general consensus among SEOs is that making decisions based on Google’s guidelines surrounding E-A-T helps your inspection website do better in search results.
In short, E-A-T refers to demonstrating your business or brand as an expert on whatever it is that you offer, showing that you are a reliable source of information, and can be trusted on matters related to your industry.
InterNACHI® Certification Logos
InterNACHI® members can use certification logos to visually communicate their authority as the local home inspector, certified by InterNACHI®, the world’s leading home inspection organization. Download a certification logo today.
Having relevant citations can help build your inspection business’s authoritativeness and trustworthiness. It also gives customers the chance to leave reviews on multiple different sites. The more positive reviews, the more people are likely to see you as a reliable service provider, and the more Google is likely to trust your site as a legitimate business to place in the SERPs. This also helps build your business’s backlink profile, which can also add to your trustworthiness among clients and search engines.
Inspector Websites
This information is provided by Wix. InterNACHI’s Official Vendor for inspector website design (www.nachi.org/website) uses Wix to build fully-customizable websites for InterNACHI® members.
Summary
We just learned a little about SEO and local citations for home inspectors. In the next article, we’ll learn how to choose the right local citations for your inspection business. To get notified of the next article, leave a thumbs-up or short reply to this post, then choose to “watch” this thread, and InterNACHI’s forum will automatically email you when the next article is posted here.
NEXT ARTICLE: How to Choose the Right Local Citations for Your Inspection Business Website