More Home Inspection Leads In As Little As 24 Hours

Time is money, and as a home inspector, you know that every moment counts. Whether you are up on a roof or crawling through a basement, you don’t have a lot of time to get new clients. However, building a larger client base is exactly what you need to do if you are going to be successful.

PPC advertising is an effective way to get phone calls in as little as 24 hours after you begin the campaign. By understanding how the system works, and expending a little time and energy, you will actually create more business for your home inspection company and more time to inspect houses in the long run.

THE BASICS OF PPC ADVERTISING FOR HOME INSPECTORS

PPC stands for Pay Per Click and is an extremely targeted, cost effective, and immediate way to get more customers. With PPC advertising, your company’s ads would be placed on top of a search results page as a sponsored link, and you will only pay to advertise there if someone clicks on your ad.

Pay Per Click advertising utilizes keywords and a complex algorithm that creates an ad auction, a bidding process that ultimately lands your business at the top of the page. Although not terribly complicated, it does take some time and energy to understand the best way to set up a campaign and how to properly manage it.

ADVANTAGES OF PPC ADVERTISING

There are several benefits to using PPC advertising that you can take advantage of:

• Quick Results: While regular search engine optimization (SEO) could take 6-12 months to garner results for your company, using PPC can net you phone calls in only 24 hours. This immediacy helps the cash flow for your home inspection business and gives you the confidence that you will be booking some jobs.
• No Penalties: Unlike SEO, there are no penalties as long as you play by the rules. PPC advertising is very upfront, the rules are very clear, and you will know exactly what you can and cannot do.
• Low Risk: Using the PPC advertising is very low risk because you decide exactly how much money you want to spend, and you only pay if someone clicks on your ad. This way you know exactly what your advertising budget is going in. You can also change the campaign as you go, so you can adjust to what works and what doesn’t.
• Highly Targetable: The PPC method allows you to advertise in the exact city where you want to advertise. SEO generally leads you to just a few cities while, with PPC, you can put your advertising in as many cities as you need and in the exact spot you think it will do the most good.

DISADVANTAGES OF PPC ADVERTISING FOR HOME INSPECTORS

Although PPC advertising makes good use of your advertising budget because of its targeted and specific methods, the immediacy with which you get results, and the lack of penalties, there are a few disadvantages to consider:

• Special Skills Required: Although setting up a PPC campaign is not difficult per se, it does take a few skills to make it a profitable campaign. You need to understand how to do keyword research, how to bid, and how to write high performance ad copy.
• Definite Time Commitment: The PPC campaigns are not just “set it and forget it” propositions. Once you start them, you need to keep tweaking and optimizing, so that you can get strong results that convert to more sales. If you want to reach more customers, you need to put in the work.
• Mistakes Can Be Costly: Although PPC ads are a great way to drive traffic to your site and ultimately gain you more customers, if you don’t understand what you are doing, you could lose a lot of money. You need to pay attention to the little details, you need to understand how PPC networks work, and you have to continually update your campaign in order to get the best results.

Here is a good example of the poorly managed ppc campaign:

PPC ADVERTISING TIPS FOR HOME INSPECTORS:

• Make the most of your landing page. It is one thing to get people to click on your ad. Once they do, you need a relevant, tightly connected message that will make the visitor contact you. Make sure it is on point.
• Use negative keywords effectively. Tell the search engine what your product is not, and you are more likely to narrow the search and get people who are interested in what you are selling.
• Understand the keywords. You get what you pay for. Exact match is more selective and more expensive while broad match is a much wider field and more reasonably priced. With a broad match, however, there will be a lot of irrelevant hits that will not lead to clients.
• Change the keyword match as you gain data about what works. Many advertisers start off with broad searches and once they see what works, move more to exact keyword searches.
• Fill out all the ad content. By filling in all the headlines, specific URLs, etc., your advertisement will ultimately perform better.
• Utilize all extensions available to you. From sitelink extensions to location extensions, each specific bit of information you enter into your PPC ad will get you closer to the bottom line: more customers.
• Change your bids. You can be very specific about where you want your advertising dollars to go. Even within the same city, consider the season and the needs of the user to target even further.
• Convert your advertising budget to mobile. As more and more people are converting their search to their mobile device, think about separating your ads and having a mobile-only campaign. This will help you keep up with the trends of searches conducted on a phone and should also net you more calls.

CONCLUSION

Home inspectors face a challenge in that you need to be out in the field working in order to bring in the money to run your business, and that means that you cannot spend all day chasing new customers. You also need to budget carefully since different times of the year offer different amounts of work, and yet the bills are all due each month.

PPC Advertising is a great way to pay for exactly the type of advertising you need, and to carefully target who sees your campaign. By tweaking the campaign as it runs, you are able to capitalize on what works and what doesn’t in real time, therefore gaining more clients. The results of PPC are outstanding, and you can start receiving phone calls in as little as 24 hours.