6 Must-have Features of a Home Inspection Website

While professionals from most industries are leveraging digital marketing to generate leads online these days, the home inspection industry is still lagging behind. Most home inspectors don’t have a website, and even if they do, their website is usually not optimized for SEO and lead conversion. 

The truth is plenty of property buyers, sellers, and agents are searching for home inspection services online. You are missing out on free lead generation opportunities if you don’t get found by these leads online. 

Here is an example. Let’s say you are a home inspector based in San Diego, California. Do you know how many searches are being performed on Google for keywords related to your business? Here is a screenshot showing exactly this: 

I am using the free Keyword Planner tool provided by Google. You can see that there are about 700 keyword ideas for terms like ‘home inspector near me’, ‘home inspector’, and ‘home inspection agency’, generating roughly 7,000 searches per month on average. 

If you have a website, you can target these keywords and get free leads without spending a penny on advertising and marketing.

If you don’t have a website, check out this article to know how to set up one. If you have a website, continue reading on because, in this guide, I am going to explain how to optimize your home inspector website for leads and which lead conversion elements it must have: 

Call-to-action & lead magnet

A call-to-action is a piece of content that you provide to your website visitors in exchange for their contact details such as name, email address, or phone number. This piece of content is often referred to as a lead magnet in marketing. 

So, what type of lead magnet should your website have? Well, the lead magnet can be any type of content that your target audience finds useful. For example, what’s the first thing that buyers and sellers want to know when they are in the market? The answer is quite obvious. Sellers would want to get rid of termites before putting the property on the block, and buyers would want to make sure that the house they are buying is free of termites. 

So, you can offer a free eBook on ‘how to get rid of termites’ or ‘how to do a termite inspection’ on your website. The visitors will need to sign up with a lead capture form and provide their details to access this eBook. 

Other examples are: 

‘Home Inspection 101: Complete Checklist for Buyers’

‘How Much Does A Home Inspection Cost?’

These are just some basic examples to give you an idea how ‘call-to-action’ works. Take into consideration your target audience and their ‘pain points’ before you decide which type of lead magnet to have on your website.

SEO optimization 

A website is useless if your target audience can’t find it. There are plenty of ways to market your website including social media marketing and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, but the most cost-effective option is search engine optimization (SEO). 

Google and other searches rely heavily on how the pages of your website are ‘coded’ and which ‘search terms’ each page is targeting. Search engines take these elements into consideration when ranking web pages. SEO improves the chances of your website getting ranked higher in search results for your target keywords. 

Here at RealtyCrux, we provide home inspectors a free SEO report and optimize each and every page for increased visibility in search engines. 

UX/UI & mobile responsiveness 

The term ‘UX’ refers to User Experience, while UI refers to User Interface. Your website should have a great UX design and UI. It means the visitors should find it intuitive and easy to navigate your website and it should not take more than a couple of clicks to find the information they are looking for. It’s important because UX/UI is now a factor that search engines including Google takes into consideration while ranking pages for a search term. It also leads to a better conversion rate. 

The website theme colors, placement of different elements on each page, sidebar, and navigation menu are some of the elements that contribute to the UX/UI. 

Besides, your website should be mobile responsive. It should automatically adjust its layout, and proportions to display nicely on each type of device including mobile phones and tablets. 

Testimonials & other types of social proof

Your website must feature as many testimonials as possible. A nicely designed testimonial section is a must-have element for a home inspection website. If you have verified reviews on Yelp or your Google My Business listing, you should definitely highlight them on your website. 

You should also link your social media profiles including a Facebook page, YouTube channel, and Google My Business page to your website. Adding social proof to your website will help you demonstrate to home buyers, sellers, Realtors, and lenders visiting your website for the first time that you are a legitimate business and an experienced home inspector. 

Guided journey 

Does your website make it easier for leads to understanding how your services stand out? 

Maybe you can have an infographic that demonstrates how easy it will be for them to get a home inspection report in a few simple steps. How can they be assured of an accurate home inspection report? How is your report cost-effective? What home inspection methodology, technology or tools do you use? 

Homebuyers and sellers are usually under a lot of pressure. Your website’s homepage should take them on a guided journey and explain to them how your services can make the process easier for them. 

Landing pages

Once in a while, you might have an irresistible offer to promote through your website, maybe it’s some kind of unique selling proposition (USP) that makes you stand out from your competition. Since SEO takes a lot of time and effort, you can’t just create a webpage for that offer and wait for it to get ranked in Google. In these cases, paid advertising is the fastest way to promote offers and services.

For promoting your offer through paid advertising (Facebook Ads or Google Ads), you will need a landing page.

According to HubSpot, a landing page is a standalone web page, created specifically for a marketing or advertising campaign. It’s where a visitor “lands” after they click on a link in an email, or ads from Google, Bing, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or similar places on the web. Unlike web pages, which typically have many goals and encourage exploration, landing pages are designed with a single focus or goal, known as a call to action – or CTA, for short (we have already discussed what a CTA is).

Your home inspection website should make it extremely easy to create landing pages. You should be able to build landing pages on the fly.

Here at RealtyCrux, we built landing page templates for home inspectors, making it extremely easy for them to create a landing page within minutes.

Solution selling 

Write down the top 5-10 biggest challenges that your prospective clients face. 

Now, write down what solution you offer for each one of these challenges. 

Your website should highlight these solutions. 

You will be able to connect with your website visitors immediately if you are absolutely clear about their problems. 

As soon as prospective clients land on your website, they should be able to understand how your services can help them solve these problems. 

Lead nurturing 

The purpose of your home inspection website is to 

• get found in Google, 
• build trust, 
• educate your website visitors, 
• nurture, 
• and convert the visitors into paying clients

While we have talked about SEO, social proof, and lead generation in this article, let’s discuss how your website should help you nurture and convert the leads. 

Once you have ‘captured’ leads, you need to nurture them. 

For this, you will need to send them newsletters, emails, and promotional material at a set frequency. 

You will need to integrate email marketing or customer relationship management (CRM) software with your website. 

Integrating these tools is extremely important because they will help you increase brand awareness and retarget leads that have already interacted with your home inspector website. 

At RealtyCrux, we integrate email marketing tools and CRMs when we develop websites for home inspection agencies. 

Are you looking to set up a website for your home inspection business?

If you want to leverage digital marketing, the first step is to set up a website. A website helps you promote your business on many different marketing channels. You can create a landing page and promote it via Facebook Ads or Google Ads. You can also share URLs of your latest offers, announcements, testimonials, etc. with your email list. 

Here at RealtyCrux, we have designed websites for many home inspectors. We know what elements it should have for it to be effective. So, if you are looking to get a website, fill out this form and get in touch with us today. We will make sure that you go live with your beautifully-designed and conversion-optimized website within a week.