Copywriting Tips

What does good copywriting have to do with home inspection?

You might be wondering why we would even suggest that you take time to learn some good copywriting skills when your business may have nothing to do with online copywriting.

Today, most business owners realize that if they’re not online, on the Internet, they are losing potential business.

However, it’s not just a matter of slapping up a virtual sign, as in a website; It’s also about knowing how to market your business online so that people return again and again to check out your online presence, most often via your blog.

Write a Blog That Keeps Them Coming Back

Even if you are an excellent writer, writing for the Internet is a little different than writing for a professional paper.

You may be able to write accurate home inspection reports, but when it comes to writing a blog, if you take the same approach your copy might seem dry and uninviting to readers. Additionally, you aren’t just writing for readers.

You also have to write so that you stand a better chance of landing on the top pages of the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).

So, let’s get started with these 8 tips to help you write a killer blog that keeps them coming back for more.

#1 Understand and Talk Directly to Your Audience

The size of the traffic to your blog is an important metric to keep track of, but even more important is the demographics.

You want to attract those people most interested in your services and speak directly to them and the issues important to them in their lives.

You should have a good idea of your ideal customer’s income level, gender, educational level, and ethnicity.

Then, speak directly to that audience by addressing the issues important to them.

For instance, if you only want to inspect luxury homes, then your blog might discuss maintenance solutions for inground pools, skylights, and fireplaces that impact selling value and home inspections.

#2 Learn Search Engine Optimization Techniques (SEO)

SEO techniques are used to leverage copy on your website so that it is viewed favorably by a search engine’s algorithm.

The big search engine, Google, uses Adwords campaigns to give marketers a chance to advertise their goods using advertising embedded with keywords.

While you may not want to do an Adwords campaign just yet, you can use the same keywords to get noticed by Google, and other search engines, that are already searching for these terms to deliver them to the people searching via their search engines.

The way to do that is via SEO techniques, which we will describe later.

#3 Create Attention-Grabbing Templates for Your Copy

People reading online have short attention spans. They will often read a title and nothing else.

Make sure your title counts and include keywords in it, since these keywords are weighted heavily in Google’s algorithm when they are in a title.

Have several different potential templates available to help speed up writing your copy.

Lists, How-To’s, Question and Answer templates are all very popular and easily segmented into bite-sized chunks of information that a reader can choose to read or not, depending on their preference.

#4 Tweak Headlines and Subheadings

Ideally, you should have a very strong title, and a minimum of two subheadings in a short article of 500 words or less.

The lengthier your article, the more subheadings you should have in it.

List formats are nice because you can put a subheading for every paragraph, and even include keywords in the subheadings, thus breaking up the article into easily digestible pieces.

This makes it easy for someone to skim read the list points and get a good idea of what your article is about.

It also gives you brownie points with search engine algorithms if you put keywords in the subheadings too.

#5 Do Extensive Keyword Research

You need to be able to identify long-tail keywords that can help drive traffic to your content from search engines.

Long-tail keywords are typically four to five word phrases with high demand and low competition that can help you place well in your area of business interest.

You can also create groupings of thematically similar keywords to use in your content.

Make sure not to over-stuff keywords and insert them into your copy as naturally as possible in your blog articles, on your social media feeds, and any online content you produce.

Use the Google Keyword Planner to research potential keywords for your niche.

#6 Exploit Local Keywords

Home inspectors benefit greatly from the use of local SEO. The keywords may include city and state names as well as other geographical information.

For instance, hyper local keywords might include neighborhoods in a city.

Then, the long-tail keyword might be something like “home inspections Midtown neighborhood, Raleigh.”

If your business relies on local clients, make sure to include local keywords in your copy.

#7 Find Topics of High Interest

Your keywords might be of high interest to a search engine, but you also have to enthrall human readers too. That means you need to find topics that are trending and of high interest to your readers.

You can check out what’s trending with Google Trends or to get an idea what people are talking about in your niche or within your geographical area.

#8 Leverage Other People’s Audiences

If you see that someone in a complementary niche has popular copy that has generated a lot of attention, you can create your own copy to supplement either missing information, new angles, or as a blog response to any issue.

For instance, as a home inspector, you might look at popular real estate blogs for article ideas and then guide new realtors for how to get a good home inspector for their clients or fix issues that can derail a sale, before the home inspection.

Link to their article and comment on their blog, and you’ll have them at least taking a look to see if you make a good partnership for shared reads or business opportunities.

It’s not hard to get a good blog going, but generating topic ideas and fine tuning them to both a human audience and search engines can take some research.

Don’t be afraid to take a little time to do that as it will help you create a blog platform that gets your copy in front of the right audience for the best business results.