Houston Home Inspection 77074: Looking at Geotargeting and Blog Statistics
Yesterday, a Realtor called to ask if I could me him at a home in the 77074 zip code to go over an inspection report. I had not produced the report, but the inspector who had did not want to come out to explain his findings. The Realtor wanted to understand it so he could tell his clients which repairs are needed. Once finished, we began speaking about our blogs and the idea of how to reach a consumer in a specific area, geotargeting with SEO.
I heard on the news that roofing companies work within fifteen mile radius from their offices on average, and that most firms were looking for ways to increase their business in an area closer to their base. This is a beautiful idea, but it is not practical for my business. I travel over the greater Houston area. I would cut my costs if I could target a certain set of zip codes though, and the 77074 code is just below my own zip code region. I would love to be doing all of my work close to home.
The Realtor and I spoke about keywords and phrases that we were targeting, and I pointed out that various phrases for home inspectors were ineffective, since few people were searching for them. We spoke about having a better way to target a consumers in one spot, which resulted in the idea for the title of this piece. Most terms that I target are used when a person begins a general search, but when a consumer is looking at hiring an inspector, they do use some specific phrases to find the inspector that they want to use. Sometimes they do use a zip code to find an inspector who works in that area.
Towards the end of the month, I go over my site statistics in greater detail to understand how people are interacting with my sites. Google Analytics may be a great option for me, but I use the various programs which come with my hosting package from Siteground. I really like my hosting service, but I would like to check my bounce rate. Google’s program determines how long a visitor stays on a particular post/page, which I do not have. I do look at items like which pages are accessed, the terms used to come to my site, number of unique visitors/return visitors, and time spent on site (among other factors).
I analyzed my blog site and static site on the same day this month, which brought some interesting facts to fore. My blog site has 10 times more visitors than the static site. This is partly due to users being able to directly finding the information which they need. Where the static and blog sites provide the exact same article, the blog wins out in the search engines. Blogs have a tendency to do better with keyphrases that potential clients are using to find an inspector. (And yes, some people do use zip codes in their targeting for an inspector). Probably because of the quick results with a blog, I am seeing that visitors stay on my blog site nearly three times as long. Robots obviously visit the blog more often, but I did find a peculiar bit of data which I should dig into deeper: more people using Yahoo go to the static site over the blog. I have no reasoning behind that fact at this time.
It does show that for inspectors a blog site may be a better format to reach the consumer. There are so many variations of words or phrasing being typed into a search engine that a static site cannot compete with a blog site in providing SEO possibilities. I imagine that other service companies could benefit from such a move.
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