Patterson Home Inspection – Playing with SEO

In my new job, I’m working on the technical team which looks after the Working in Canada web portal which relays free information concerning immigrating to Canada.

Of particular note in reference to this entry, is the topic of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) which deals with making your website get the most out of using keywords, title tags, etc. in order that search engines (like Google) will rank your website higher. There’s no public knowledge as to how Google ranks your website, but it is known that it’s a combination of using keywords in the website, having titles that accurately portray the meaning of your website, and how many people link to you. There’s a slew of other things to take into account but for now, let’s just leave it at that.

To understand fully how powerful changing a keyword or title could be, I decided to use Uncle Greg’s Home Inspection website as a test case. He has recently opened a home inspection business and would definitely love any marketing that he can receive. By the way, his website is www.pattersonhomeinspections.com and he services the geographic area around Peterborough, Marmora, etc. I’m sure the mere mention on this website will send the masses to him for some aid in home inspection! At the very least, it will give him a few visitors.

Anyhow, I decided to take a look at where his website stood within Google. I typed in the search criteria ‘home inspection ‘where he’s living” and I found his website buried on Page 3. He was sitting at the #22 spot in all the results for our search criteria.

The goal of this project was to get him onto the first page of Google. The first page is worth a lot in exposure as there are surely a lot of people looking for home inspections on the web and if you’re not on the first page of Google, maybe they won’t find you hidden on the third page.

First off, I used Google Insights which is a tool which compares keywords. For example, I compared the terms ‘home inspection’, ‘home inspections’, ‘home inspector’, and ‘house inspection’ to see what people would generally search for. The results of the search are here and they show that the term ‘home inspection’ was the winner by a wide margin.

With this knowledge, we now know that it’s better to use this term throughout Uncle Greg’s website to maximize the amount of people finding his website through the search criteria ‘home inspection’.

After obtaining the login information for his website, I went ahead and did the following changes:
– I changed the Home Page title from ‘www.pattersonhomeinspections.com’ to ‘Patterson Home Inspection – Home Page – Home Inspector serving Peterborough, Madoc, Marmora, Belleville, Bancroft, Tweed Ontario’. I thought this may do the trick as the #1 Google Ranked home inspector for that area had the same thing within his own site. Google likes how you list out the meaning of the website ‘home inspector, home inspection’ as well as any keywords you want (such as the areas you cover).
– Anywhere I could, I removed the ‘s’ in ‘home inspections’
– I changed the company name to Patterson Home and Mold Inspections from Patterson Home and Mould Inspections Inc as per Uncle Greg’s request. It was quite interesting to see how many people searched for ‘mold’ vs. ‘mould’. I personally never knew that mould was the correct spelling?  It may not be…I haven’t checked in the dictionary yet.

On Wednesday, May 13, I believe the site incorporated the changes and within an hour, the site fell down one spot to #23. I had no idea how this happened and was not impressed! But I figured I would let it sit and see what would happen.

In the end, as of Tuesday, May 19, the website is now sitting on the first Google results page if you type in the search criteria ‘home inspector ‘where he’s living”. It is sitting at the #10 spot.

I would definitely say that this experiment was a grand success with the goal of reaching the first page of Google. I have yet to try out different search criteria (such as ‘home inspection ‘some other place”) but that will be the next task. It may be more difficult as there may be more home inspectors advertising that they service the Peterborough area rather than where he’s living.

***Update***  I have somehow become the victim of my own success.  I went to see where Uncle Greg’s page stood as of Thursday May 19 and lo and behold he was not found on the first page of Google any longer!  But the reason for this is that this blog entry had somehow taken over the third spot and pushed him out of the first page!  Argh!  What have I done?  So I went and removed certain keywords in this particular entry to see if it will remove itself from the Google results for that particular search.  I swear this is a plot from a bad b-movie.