PODCAST TRANSCRIPT:

Ian Robertson
Hey, there IT crowd. Welcome back to another episode of Inspector Toolbelt Talk. So today I want to talk about something that I’ve noticed for years, and especially recently with the advent of AI search and things like that, I see home inspectors trying to chase what they call keywords of “home inspector near me”. Now I’m going to start this conversation off by saying that probably a couple times a month I have a client, call me, email me, message me, whatever, and say, hey, I typed in “home inspector near me,” and I was at the bottom of page one instead of the top, or I was on page seven, or, hey, great job. I typed in “home inspector near me,” and I was at the top of the page. And I see home inspector spend a lot of time chasing those quote unquote keywords of “home inspector near me.” I’m gonna tell everybody first off in this podcast, those are useless keywords, and they’re not actually even keywords. And I’m going to explain why and where it’s better to put our energy, and you’re going to hear me talk interchangeably about SEO and AEO. So one is search engine optimization, basically Google, let’s face it, for search engines, that’s really 99% of what we care about and AI, so, and I would say a good chunk of that’s going to be ChatGPT and others. So why is it not a good keyword set, or even a keyword set at all? And what should we do instead?

So first of all, let’s talk about those words, “home inspector near me,” because we’ll hear marketing companies talk about it all the time, and I say it’s the quintessential seven o’clock phone call from some guy in India saying, hey, I typed in “home inspector near me” and you didn’t show up. Or I’ll look at home inspectors websites, and they’re like, Ian, I keep pointing all my keywords towards “home inspector near me.” I’ll look at their meta descriptions. I’ll look at all their technical data, even like titles on their website are you looking for a “home inspector near me,” trying to get it show up for that? So first of all, “home inspector near me” is not a keyword set. It’s a query trigger. What’s the difference? So when someone types “home inspectors near me,” Google and others don’t use that phrase like traditional keyword set. So for instance, if we type in “bakery near Calgary,” okay, Google’s gonna know I need to find somewhere that has a keyword set of Calgary and bakery, kind of put that together, and we’ll also geo target it and see what’s going on. “Home inspector near me” happens right where that person is standing at that exact moment. So it triggers local results based on the searcher’s location. So for instance, even if this were a keyword set, no one would ever use it.

Think about it. If I’m buying a home, I’m usually not buying a home right next door to me. So if I’m on my device, I’m not going to type in “home inspector near me.” I’m going to type in home inspector and the city name. And actually, if you go to Google Trends, you can see what people actually search. They usually typically search, the highest volume keyword that we typically see, is going to be city name plus home inspections, and the second one is going to be city name plus home inspectors. It’s barely changed one way or the other, besides some nominal differences over the past 10 years, because if I’m in New York, I’m buying a house in Montana, I’m not going to type in home inspector near me. If I’m standing in the house, I’m not going to type an inspector near me, because it’s not like I’m looking for a bakery. I’m looking for a home inspector. I want to see who’s the best in the area. And I’m not going to drive over to that house. Usually, we’re looking at it later on, sitting in a coffee shop after we’ve made an offer, then we type in city name, home inspector. So even if it were a keyword set, no one would ever use it. But it’s not a keyword set, Google triggers a query, so now it’s going to show you local results, and it’s also going to show you queued results. So we’re standing there, and let’s say hypothetically, we’re at our house, and that’s what we use as our business address, and we type in “home inspector near me.” I’m right in my house. That’s the address I use, and it doesn’t even show me as any of the options. The local results, especially for Google, not so much for AI, but for Google, it’s going to give us skewed results. So it’s going to start to make a lot of assumptions. It’s like, okay, it’s already standing in the address of the business that I would have shown them. So probably not showing that one, because it’s kind of like standing in a restaurant. If you’re looking for other restaurants while you’re standing in a restaurant, Google is going to assume, man, they probably don’t like that restaurant. Let’s show them other options. It’s also going to base it on your search history. So if you’ve been to your website and your Google business page a lot, it might opt to show you less of that result. It’s also going to base it off of where you’re standing at the moment and what time of day it is. So for instance, if it’s seven o’clock at night, I had a client call me seven o’clock at night, and his business closed at six. He’s like, I’m not even showing up in the results. I’m like, okay, because you’re closed. Google will still show your business sometimes, but if there’s 30 other businesses that are still open, it’s going to show their business to me. So there’s a lot of reasons why it’s not going to show you for “home inspector near me.”

So it’s really a ridiculous keyword set, and one guy was convinced, because he got a report from a random person in an email from India telling him all this stuff, showing him all this technical data and how Voice Search and this and that, blah, blah, blah. So I said, okay, cool. And it was already an hour long conversation with them, whatever. So I’m like, if I’m going to be here all day, let’s actually run the experiment. Had him go down and go to his sister’s house or his cousin’s house or something down the road. And I’m like, now on their computer that you’ve never touched, type in the same “home inspector near me,” and he got all flustered. He goes, it’s different results. At least I show up on these. He’s like, what did you do? I’m like, I didn’t do anything. Now go back home. Use your device again, and search. Went back home. Used the device, this guy was driving around. He was really an intense guy, super nice guy, but super intense, and he’s like, now the results are different. I’m like, yes, the results are going to be different for everybody typing in those same keywords. I actually just did it about a week or so ago where I typed in “home inspectors in this area” and with my client, both of us with the same screen showed different results. I mean, I was happy because their result was number four and mine was number two. So they were hanging out right at the top. But they were like, why is that different? I’m like, because I have a different IP address, I have a different search history, I have a different everything.

So “home inspector near me” is literally a moving target, and it’s not a keyword set. If you stuff your home inspection website with the keywords, “home inspector near me,” you are just never going to show up for anything. First of all, we should never keyword stuff. But just for the sake of illustration, Google’s not going to care about those actual words “home inspector near me.” It’s going to trigger a query instead of a keyword search. So just remember the difference between the keyword search and the query, and also remember user intent. The vast majority of people who hire a home inspector will never use the keywords “home inspector near me.” It’s just not really what happens. Be leery of marketing agencies that charge you to show up for those keywords and how you rank. You really can’t deliver on that. You can’t guarantee that the person is going to be near you, and if they’re a mile down the road and there’s 30 inspectors between us and them, we’re probably not going to show up.

So the third reason is also going to be what we should do instead. The third reason is your energy is better spent on real location specific keywords, so that’s where we want you to focus. So a couple of things. First of all, your address should never be in your Google business page. And I see home inspectors say, I’ve done this for years, never had a problem. How are they going to find me? I do have a physical location. Yada, yada, yada, whatever, go right to Google’s Google My Business standards, it’s about three quarters of the way down. There are two spots where it says you cannot use a temporary office. You cannot use shared office space. You have to have signage, you have to have people posted there, and people have to go to—and this is the clincher—people have to go to your location to receive your service. Because technically, we never do a home inspection in our office. Technically we can never have our address displayed on our Google business page. So does that mean that we disappear? No. In fact, my companies don’t have their address displayed. We rank very well. The difference is, build it out with your citation. So online profiles with your name, address and phone number, or NAP. Build out online citations for the area that you’re in. Don’t get shut down by Google. We see it all the time. Follow the Facebook forums or whatever you want to do, Facebook groups. And guys will get upset because they’re like, I’ve been doing business for years. I’ve had 400 reviews, and I have always had my address on there. New Jersey requires me to have my address on there. Yeah, all these things, it doesn’t matter. And even if, like, 20 other inspectors in your area have their address, Google just happened to catch you. It’s the stinkiest congratulations I can give you. I’m sorry, but we’re going to have to remove our address, Mark ourselves as a service based business, a little toggle, turn it off, off we go.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t target specific areas. So for instance, we’re going to give you the easy stuff, and then if you really want, we’re going to give you some technical stuff. So we’re going to actually want to target keywords if we’re doing our own SEO, or if we’re working with somebody with city name, town or town name, and then home inspections or home inspector. And you can do variations. That’s fine. You can do “home inspector in Mobile, Alabama.” You can do “pre-purchase home inspections in such and such a city.” I do recommend to avoid counties. People tend not to search for our services by county. So for instance, my county here near me, that my primary one is Albany, New York County. So it’s a big county, people don’t search Albany County Home Inspections. They’re going to find the town within that county and say, Colony Home Inspections. Ins, Voorheesville Home Inspections. Even the main city, Albany Home Inspections. Very rarely will we ever see anybody search by county. Sometimes out in the Midwest, but again, it’s such a low percentage, it’s not even worth it. City name and then home inspections. City name home inspector. And you can try variations of it. That’s fine, but as long as it has those primary keywords in there. It’ll tell Google where you are and help you show up in what we call a SERP, which is the website pages below the map section and also in the map section. So target those keywords. You can just put it in your meta description, which is the very basics of SEO, put it in your title, make sure, without stuffing, it naturally appears in your content, like when you’re at the top of your page, you know, put in the Premier Home Inspectors in Albany, New York, you know, that way it’s natural. Google sees it says, oh, they’re in Albany. And because Google and AI are naturally going to associate things together, they’re automatically going to know, oh, this is the guy associated with that in maps, and it’s going to start helping how you rank in maps as well, where all your Google reviews and everything are.

Now, if we really want to get technical, this isn’t as technical as you can get, but it does help. So the first tier of technical, this one’s a little bit easier. Take pictures of yourself and put them on your website and then use alternate description. Describe the photos if you use WordPress or others, you can describe the photo like, this is a picture of me on a home inspection in Albany, New York. Be a little bit more descriptive than that, picture of Ian Robertson inspecting a house in Albany New York, climbing a ladder while holding his camera. You know, give Google something to chew on, and then you have what’s called alt text, and then you can put in there Albany home inspections, you know. So that gets a little bit more technical. The meta description, make sure it’s in the meta description. Contact us for the Premier Home Inspections in Albany, New York, that kind of thing. That’s a little bit more technical. But each page on your website, you can target a different city or town. All the content on each page should be unique. You should not duplicate content. If you duplicate content, Google and ChatGPT will both dislike you for that. Content is relatively easy to generate, ask ChatGPT to generate you some good, clean, natural sounding content that gives people value. Remember, it has to give people value. It can’t just be spun content. We all want to do it fast, easy and cheap, but when it’s fast, easy and cheap, it’s usually not going to do us as much good as we’d want it to. Spend some time, put a good amount of time into each page, pick out a good photo, write the content, do an external link, and target one or two towns per page. The bigger the city, one page. If you have, like, three towns of, you know, 3,000 people, okay, you can probably chunk those into one page if you really want to save a little bit of time.

Now, the ultimate, now, this is if you are very technical—schema markups or structured data. This is only for technical people, but if you want to create structured data, and in that structured data you’re going to insert it, I like to do it as a JSON setup in the header of a page. And then you can enter all your data and where you service and you can create new data for each page that will target a different city. So for instance, the structured data on my homepage for Albany will target Albany. It’ll say service area Albany and surrounding areas. It’ll give a little SEO description. It’ll have a latitude and longitude mark to geo target where I am. Every time we’ve ever done that for a client, it’s automatically brought their rankings up because it is highly technical, and I’ll be honest with you, AI loves it. So ask ChatGPT, is structured data important to you and Google? It’ll give you a whole laundry list of why it’s important. They rely more and more on schema markup and structured data. So instead of having to read through a whole site and extrapolate what you do and where you are, the structured data is going to say, here’s a company name, here’s where we’re located, here’s where we service, here’s our service catalog, et cetera, et cetera. And then you target a different area with each page again, homepage, my target Albany, then I might change that structure data for the about page to target Saratoga, whatever we happen to choose out of it. So we got a little technical there. I don’t want to go too deep into it, because this isn’t a technical SEO podcast.

I just want to tell you that the keyword scam I’m going to call it of “home inspector near me” is completely useless. It’s going to drive a query, not keywords. So when those companies from India or fiverr.com call you, telling you that you’re not ranking for “home inspector near me,” give it some thought. Spend some time looking at what we’ve told you here, do a little bit of research online and protect yourself from chasing after the wind like that. But anyways, thank you for listening in and we’ll see you on the next episode of Inspector Toolbelt Talk.

Outro: On behalf of myself, Ian, and the entire ITB team, thank you for listening to this episode of Inspector Toolbelt Talk. We also love hearing your feedback, so please drop us a line at [email protected].

If you’re enjoying the conversation, don’t forget to hit the subscribe button. Our podcast is available on all major podcast platforms. For more information on our services and our brand-new inspection app, please visit our website at Inspectortoolbelt.com.

*The views and opinions expressed in this podcast, and the guests on it, do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Inspector Toolbelt and its associates.

PODCAST SUMMARY/BLOG

The SEO Mirage: Why “Home Inspector Near Me” Keywords Are Hurting Your Business

For years, home inspectors have been chasing what many consider the holy grail of search engine optimization: ranking for “home inspector near me” searches. Marketing agencies call you promising top rankings, colleagues boast about their position when they search this phrase, and you might even be stuffing these words throughout your website in hopes of climbing the search results. But what if I told you this entire approach is fundamentally flawed?

Understanding the difference between keywords and query triggers is essential for any service-based business trying to improve their online visibility. When someone searches “home inspector near me,” they’re not actually using keywords in the traditional sense. Instead, they’re triggering a location-based query that Google handles completely differently than standard keyword searches. This seemingly small distinction makes an enormous difference in how search engines process and display results to potential customers. Rather than looking for pages that contain the phrase “home inspector near me,” Google performs a complex calculation based on the searcher’s exact geographic location, time of day, search history, and dozens of other factors to deliver customized results. This means that two people standing just a mile apart searching for the exact same phrase will likely see entirely different results, making it impossible to “rank” consistently for this search term.

The futility of focusing on these non-keywords becomes even more apparent when you consider actual user behavior. Think about it logically: when someone is looking to hire a home inspector, they’re rarely searching from the property they need inspected. Instead, they’re typically searching from their current home, an office, or a coffee shop while researching options for a property they’re considering purchasing. In these situations, the phrase “near me” makes little sense – instead, users overwhelmingly search for “[City Name] home inspector” or “[City Name] home inspections.” Google Trends confirms this pattern has remained consistent for over a decade, showing that location-specific searches dominate the market. By focusing your SEO efforts on the wrong search patterns, you’re essentially optimizing for queries that potential clients rarely use.

Another critical consideration is Google’s own business listing policies, which many home inspectors unknowingly violate. Google My Business specifically states that businesses cannot use a physical address if customers don’t visit that location to receive services. Since home inspections always occur at the client’s property – not at your office – displaying your home address or even a temporary office space on your Google Business profile directly violates their terms of service. Home inspectors who do this risk having their listings suspended or removed entirely, losing years of accumulated reviews and rankings overnight. The proper approach is to mark yourself as a service-area business and focus on building citations (your business name, phone number, and website) across the web that associate you with your service areas.

The path to genuine search visibility requires strategic thinking about the keywords that matter. Start by creating location-specific content that naturally incorporates city names with terms like “home inspections” or “home inspector.” Each page on your website should target different locations you serve, with unique, valuable content that helps potential clients understand your services. Technical improvements like proper image alt text, meta descriptions, and even advanced schema markup can significantly boost your visibility for relevant searches. These structured approaches not only improve your rankings in traditional search but also position you favorably for emerging AI search tools that increasingly rely on clear, organized data to understand what your business offers and where you provide it.

Remember that search engine optimization isn’t about tricks or shortcuts – it’s about genuinely communicating what you do and where you do it in a way that both search engines and potential clients can easily understand. By abandoning the chase for “near me” searches and focusing instead on real location-specific keywords, you’ll build a more sustainable and effective online presence. The next time a marketing agency calls promising to get you ranking for “home inspector near me,” you’ll know better than to waste your valuable marketing budget on chasing shadows.