Building Your Business Ep. 27: Turn Your Website Into a Lead Generator with Paige Wiese

CCPIA (00:02.044)
And make sure we got all this all set. Looks like we’re good. Hi, Paige. Thank you for coming on today.

Paige Wiese (00:10.318)
Absolutely, thank you so much for having me.

CCPIA (00:12.86)
I did a little bit of intro on this, but you know what? Let’s start with your background. You’ve been helping businesses strengthen their online visibility for well over 16 years. What inspired you to focus on the digital marketing and helping people grow their businesses?

Paige Wiese (00:31.8)
Yeah, what inspired me to help them is, you know, I started off doing websites and people love them, they’re great. They, you know, really were happy with the outcome. And then we kept getting calls of, it’s not converting, it’s not doing anything. So I started diving a little bit deeper of like, what are you doing for marketing then? And that’s when I started realizing the answer was always nothing. They were never doing anything. They just assumed if they built a website, they will come and…

It’s not true. And so once we could really start pinpointing what’s the right strategy though for you? What industry are you in? Why is this different than another industry? Or what are their similarities in that we can use some similar techniques? That’s when we really started to see those relationships with our clients turn into very, very successful long-term relationships because we were finally getting the results they were looking for, not just a pretty website.

CCPIA (01:24.858)
How did you fall into the world of inspectors?

Paige Wiese (01:29.026)
kind of twofold. One, my background was in architecture originally, so I’ve always enjoyed the construction side of things. I think that’s probably one area that drove me to inspectors, maybe more than other agencies as well, is I’ve been out on the job sites having to be the one to like, is this built the way it’s supposed to be and tell the contractors that they’re not doing their job right? So, you know, I already understood a little bit of the lingo and how that all works. And then the second side is just

a long-time relationship with Nick Grimico at InterNACHI. We’ve been, you know, he was probably one of my first clients, if you will, dating back to 2011 probably. So I really was able to absorb a lot from him. One is I was starting my career, but two, just from, you know, working alongside him and how he operates, we were able to really see what is it that he’s telling inspectors to be doing and how can we incorporate that.

CCPIA (02:26.002)
Yeah, Nick is a pretty good judge of talent and likes to put quality people around him to let him shine and let him do what he does best. And so I guess that says a lot about you as well.

Paige Wiese (02:41.373)
thank you. Yeah, he’s very, very good at uplifting and supporting the ones around him and making sure they’ve got the tools and resources for sure.

CCPIA (02:48.552)
Now, in reading up a little bit about you, Paige, and before this conversation, I love how you describe websites as being the invisible employee. And I know we’ve said that in industries quite a bit. They work 24-7. They represent your business. For inspectors listening, who just have that basic static

I used, I’ll use air quotes, which I hate. Free website. What are some of the practical ways that they can transform their site to be more client generating employees?

Paige Wiese (03:31.224)
Yeah, absolutely. think one of the best places to start is just taking a look at having two different forms. You don’t need a request and inspection form.

and your contact form to be the same thing. You’re never going to get the result that you’re looking for and it’s confusing to the end user. So breaking those out and having a contact form be the very basic contact form while having your request and inspection be a little bit more robust. And now you can start gathering some of the details that you wanted. For example, property address, size of property, age, whatever those intro questions are that you need to be able to better quote them. Have those be two separate things because nobody

wants to fill out a contact form.

and give you all of those details if they just wanna know if you service an area, right? So making those points of contact a lot simpler or even allowing online booking for the inspection so that you’re not trying to play telephone tag all day and get the work while in the meantime, someone else has it on their website and they just swooped that project out right out from under you. So, you know, those are like little things that can go a really, really long way and usually even available whether it be on the free website

Or whether it be like a free option on Calendly, you can still really utilize tools and keep those costs lower, but get you off of the phone quicker. Or more often.

CCPIA (04:54.194)
You know, it’s interesting you say that because, know, I think of our audience and I think of the, just the people I’ve met through my career. We have home inspectors, we have commercial inspectors, we have the hybrid. So in those things that you’re talking about, what are the difference, what are the, those biggest differences in even that capture that you’ll think of between the two sectors?

Paige Wiese (05:18.328)
Well yeah, mean exactly, right? Like making sure you’re messaging. So we originally talked about two different types of forms, but even if you’re going in between, you know, commercial and residential, or you’re in residential looking to go to commercial, separate those out on your site more clearly. Have two separate pages. Don’t just try to lump inspections into the service page and hope that it’s going to cover everything, right? And talk about what you want. But now, same thing, you’re able to dive even deeper and ask them, and even maybe some of the

those add-ons in the, on either side really, but you know, on commercial like, but do you also need like a mold inspection? Do you need an air quality inspection? Do you need these other types that you might also be offering, but could also be opportunities to upsell them. But once they start to see that you specialize in those little areas, that’s a lot more what they’re looking for. I know we were looking at a rental property, so this will be slightly more on the home inspection side, but an example that it was in the mountains. And so we knew

that we needed someone who could come in and better inspect the property for like the well and the septic stuff or you know the hazard the hazard mitigation as far as wildfires and whatnot and just random things that started to come up as we were going through of like

I don’t really want someone who’s just inspecting condos and townhomes all day. I want someone who’s going to be able to understand the mountain terrain. And that’s who we ended up choosing. And so that’s, you know, when you can start to put those extra details on there, whether it be commercial or inspection, that’s why you really want to start breaking out those service pages and make it known where you live.

CCPIA (06:59.472)
interesting you say that can can a website be too big

Paige Wiese (07:05.671)
I think you can, no, you can be too complicated.

CCPIA (07:08.774)
I like that.

Paige Wiese (07:11.566)
The bigger it is, the better it’s going to be for SEO. So I mean, the more we have content, the more you’re hitting keywords, the more that you’ve got all that stuff worked in. but if the user doesn’t know how to navigate it because it’s in your words, too big, yes, it will absolutely fill right away for you. And you’re going to be wondering why you put all this time into something that doesn’t convert. I think it, but the other way, I think a website can be too small. I think that it can be so like, I’m just going to throw up a one page really quick.

just gonna have home about inspections, know, qualifications and contact, we’re not building trust. You know, it works, it gets you going for the first little, little, little bit, but any experienced, you know, real estate agent or a commercial broker, whatever, looking to refer you is gonna be like, how long have they been in business? We need to go find someone who’s got more under their belt. So I think it can be the other way that it can absolutely be too small.

CCPIA (08:07.796)
I have seen both and you can, guess when you think about the resources that are available and given the time we’re in, I mean, we’re in the mid 20s of this millennia. It’s not like it’s in the 1990s when websites were just invented and you just wanted a page to land on. Now all of a sudden.

Paige Wiese (08:30.04)
Right.

CCPIA (08:34.992)
Our clients want you to be the expert. I think your example of the mountain property is right on the money where you just don’t want somebody from down there in the front range. You want somebody that knows exactly every minutia that’s important for you and your purchase.

Paige Wiese (08:55.726)
Yeah, I mean and that’s the thing right and I Nick will always say it too, like it’s one of the biggest purchases most people make. They’re wanting to know that they’ve got an expert that they don’t know, they don’t know if the pan is in the correct place for the hot water heater, if it exists or all these different things and so they need to build trust I think more than any other industry at times you know of like

I’m putting a lot out here but I’m also trusting my inspectors gonna catch this because if they’re wrong and I purchase this, I don’t have maybe the income to go and continue to just fix, fix, fix, fix, fix. So they really do have to be using that website to build trust and the cleaner it is as far as navigation and finding what they’re looking for is putting in those trust signals as you go.

CCPIA (09:42.292)
So in thinking of that then, I mean, our listeners, our audience, it can be from all kinds of different sectors. It could be somebody that’s heavy in the commercial, it could be somebody that’s heavy in the residential that might be transitioning from residential to commercial. You know, as it comes to our digital footprint, our digital marketing, what should they focus on first when they make that shift in their thought process?

or in their digital process.

Paige Wiese (10:13.292)
The first shift that I would make is if they type in your business name, can they find you and what do they see on a search or even now in GPT, whatever you’re looking at and

What is it actually saying about your company? So, like, what do the reviews look like? How often do you show up? Are you on Yelp and these other ones as well, or is it just your website? Are you showing up at all if they type in the business name? Is it just your Facebook page that’s coming up? Those are all those different pieces of what shows up when they type in the business name is gonna be the very, very first place that you wanna start because a lot of things we hear, especially in this space is,

referral based. I’m getting the work because of a referral and so people need to look at it slightly different of not so much do I show up if they’re typing in commercial property inspector near me but more I got the referral for this company. The first thing I’m gonna do is go to Google type in their name and if you’re review even if you don’t have any reviews right it doesn’t even mean they have to be bad you just don’t have any. If it’s just a Facebook page and you don’t have an actual website

that’s the fastest way to kill a pretty decent lead and I think that’s a big mistake I hear a lot of inspectors make is, I’m on referrals so I don’t even need a website. Like they’re just gonna call me. No, where are You’re saying, all right, we’re in the era that people are doing research and they are going straight to the internet and if they can’t find you, they will absolutely call the second person they got that referral for.

CCPIA (11:49.236)
That very much aligns with the CCPIA’s mission and how we’re really trying to make sure that that inspector understands that. And in an emerging industry like commercial inspections, mean, residential inspections have been around for half a century or more. But commercial in the CCPIA vernacular

Paige Wiese (12:08.556)
Long term.

CCPIA (12:17.052)
is a relatively new industry and we’re calling dibs on something that we’re really setting it, we’re setting the bar. And so if you’re not out there mentioning that affiliation or like you say, if it’s one thing not to have reviews, but if your reviews are all residentially centric, then somebody’s going to say, well, you’re really good at condos.

Paige Wiese (12:26.38)
Mm-hmm.

Paige Wiese (12:40.163)
That’s true.

CCPIA (12:45.012)
You’re probably not so good at mountain properties. You’re really good at this, but you don’t know that. And so I can see that. I can see that very clearly. And so to that order, for that inspector to be found, even in the organic, where should they focus on?

Paige Wiese (12:45.23)
I’m

Paige Wiese (13:11.182)
To be found, mean, it is going into making sure to, once you do that Google search and see how you show up, you will start to see what phrases, what words, what does that look like, right? So to your point, start to kind of backtrack and go.

CCPIA (13:20.414)
Okay.

Paige Wiese (13:25.518)
Okay, well that is correct. Facebook showed up, but my messaging is all still related to residential. So let me go over to Facebook and make sure it’s residential and commercial. Or the title tags on the search results for my website say that I’m a home inspector. How do I go in and change that to read residential and commercial inspector? And start really looking at how can you control those things that you don’t necessarily have to hire a marketing agency

to come in and do, yeah, you’ll probably get some better results a little bit faster if you were, but those are like kind of the basics of where could you get started if you’re trying to take that leap from home inspector into commercial inspector. And then same thing, if you’re like, hey, I’ve been doing the commercial a little bit for, you know, just as I am, it’s fine, but I’m ready to grow that part more. Start looking at the cues that you’re already putting out there. And then as you’re like, all right, I feel like I’ve got things cleaned up or I don’t know how to clean these things up, but I see what’s going on.

then go contact an agency and say, hey, what does it look like for you to come in and help me optimize this even more so that when people type in not just my company name, but when they start typing in the types of inspections they’re looking for, now I’m showing up to the general population doing more broad searches, not just the referrals coming in.

CCPIA (14:47.89)
I’d love you to correct me if I’m thinking about this wrong because I’m fairly neanderthal in some of my knowledge on this. But I go back to when I first started my career a long time ago and we had the yellow pages. And I’ve always thought of

Paige Wiese (14:57.646)
Okay.

CCPIA (15:17.694)
the organic search being very similar to the yellow pages. And for those listening, that was a book that you get with phone numbers. And there was the front page of white pages where friends and family and the yellow pages were businesses. But the whole idea was is you wanted to flip over and you wanted to be listed under home inspections with H for home and then maybe under I for inspections.

and you had to pay for both. And if you wanted to be bold, you had to pay for that. If you wanted a pop-up ad, you had to pay for that. But so I’m an inspector who’s been in the business now for a decade. And I’ve been really great at residential. Now I want to do commercial and I want to change my listing. This is the question I ask. If I write, which is

Which is more beneficial or it doesn’t matter if I write residential and commercial commercial and residential or just turn it to commercial because my residential business is flying off the shelf.

Paige Wiese (16:31.818)
There’s a trick question in there, I can tell where you’re going with that. But, to first answer, the easy one is, it doesn’t really matter if you do residential and commercial, or if you do commercial and residential. The search engines these days are smart enough to understand…

what you’re trying to do. Yes, in a perfect world, you would do like residential home inspector and commercial property inspector and really spell it all out, because the search engines are looking for that keyword phrase to be in that order. And how often on your site is it in that order? So the more you kind of break it down to like home or like residential and commercial inspector.

you can kind of start to go a little off but it really doesn’t matter. Now the search engines go, we know your intent, we know what you meant and so they’ll go into it right but as far as just scrapping residential because it’s doing so well, that is one of the biggest mistakes you could make and it yeah because the reason is and this is what we see in any marketing, when business is good

CCPIA (17:34.576)
Interesting. Thank you.

Paige Wiese (17:42.859)
A lot of people go, that’s fine, we’re gonna stop our marketing. We’re gonna save that budget and put it someplace else, right? It’s the first thing to go when business is good. And it is the first panic phone call we get when business is bad, is I need leads immediately. So, while residential’s going well and everything is good, if you completely move all of your messaging to commercial, you’re gonna start getting pretty much

all commercial leads. And so if you want to keep the steadiness of residential, you want to keep the steadiness of the marketing too and not let it just come to a halt. And not even like full-blown marketing, but so what you’re saying is even like an SEO trigger, right? And so if they start to see less and less of the home inspection, they’re going to start to lower the page rank and where you’re showing up in those search results. So no, you don’t want to just scrap it and focus only on, but

as far as the order, that’s not as important. So if you want it to be more commercial heavy, maybe you switch it to say commercial and residential inspector because you want to show that emphasis on the commercial side. That’s just a cue to your user, not so much the search engines.

CCPIA (18:59.238)
I like that.

I kind of felt that way, but I wasn’t sure because when I talked to inspectors that are at that edge of the cliff and they don’t know where to go and they want to, maybe they’re older like myself and they want to slow down the residential side and maybe bring in another inspector for that. So you don’t ever throw it away. In fact, you should probably ramp them both up simultaneously to make your business even probably look more robust.

Paige Wiese (19:31.402)
Exactly. Yeah.

CCPIA (19:35.102)
So you mentioned SEO. And so let’s go down that track for a second. Every business hears about it, but we don’t understand it. So what would be your top three or four really good SEO practices that every home inspection or every inspection company, commercial especially, should be thinking about?

Paige Wiese (19:57.411)
think some of the basic ones that are really basic but often overlooked is first make sure you’ve got a site map and not just one that’s listing out all of the pages like living in the site but it’s a coded version. It’s the XML version you might need to…

Talk with someone to help get that set up. I also know there are some plugins depending on you know What how your website is built that will create the site map for you? I say that because it’s not just about the site map but you also want to go to Google Search Console and even being webmaster tools and Submit your site and I think that that’s something a lot of companies aren’t really talking about is like something they’re doing when looking at SEO and ranking and so I don’t know a lot of small businesses

or you know business owners that are just like I set that up on my own yeah I took care of that but that’s it’s really easy it’s super simple to walk through and set up but that’s basically saying hey search engines there’s a website it exists

And here’s my site map that tells you all of the pages to crawl so you’re not waiting for the search engines to randomly stumble on your site and also know how to crawl your site to index those pages. You’re taking a shortcut and going, let me do this for you so when you get there you already know what you’re doing is another one. And then claiming Google My Business or your Google Business profile would be the third one. And then installing Analytics.

isn’t entirely an SEO tool, it’s gonna be helpful for anything else you do related to SEO. So you might as well start with it right away, get it on your site and get ready to go, but those would be the four like main, main things that I would look at.

CCPIA (21:43.9)
Interesting, as I think of the websites that I’ve built, usually one of my biggest struggles I’ve had is educating my professionals, you being one. And how important do you think it is if you’re going to use a marketing company that they thoroughly know your business rather than, yeah, I built websites, give me the content, I’ll put it in there.

Paige Wiese (22:13.524)
Yeah, it’s actually a really interesting debate that we’ve gone through internally for years because we are more industry agnostic. So we’ve worked with all sorts of them across the board. I like it because it puts us in the eyes of the consumer instead of the business owner who is so in it every day.

I’m even as we’re talking using technical jargon, right? And so if I’m writing my entire site around that and then the end user shows up and goes, I don’t know what any of that means. don’t, or that’s not answering the questions I have though.

that’s not going to help, right? So how do we actually come in as a consumer and go, this is all great information, but I still need to know, again, will you service this area? What do you do evening and weekends? Do you, you know, how long is the inspection going to take if I have to take time off work? Or does, you know, who all needs to be at a commercial inspection? Is it just, you know, me or anybody or what does that look like? Those are things as a business owner we forget. So I really like being

industry agnistic because then we get to say let’s look at this from a different lens but home inspections are very and commercial inspections are very very different that I think having someone in that space can be way more helpful because of just the different nature of how they work.

CCPIA (23:40.372)
Now, in our conversations we had and my research, I saw that your company, Three Ring Digital, has a focus on digital asset management. I think we need to probably talk a little bit about that. And really, what does that mean? And what does it mean for the commercial property inspector?

Paige Wiese (24:01.784)
That’s a great question. So digital asset management and the way that we look at it is very much who has ownership.

of the various data and like digital pieces that you have on just to have your business up online and running. We’ve identified over 300 data points for one business to be online. And that’s not running an online business like an e-commerce. That’s literally just having a website and being online. Right? And yeah, 300 plus and then more and more depending on size of company.

CCPIA (24:33.108)
300

Paige Wiese (24:39.872)
And that’s the thing is like as a business who’s

started off doing home inspections and I’ve kind of grown into this and it’s still kind of a two-person team. Maybe I want to bring somebody else in or I’ve got someone handling some light admin work. You want to know who though has ownership of all of these different pieces from your Facebook profile to your website and hosting to domain name. But you also need to focus on are you ADA compliant? Do you have the privacy policy and the GDPR stuff in place that you need? Do you have

trademark to your logo or is that something that could come up down the road? What are all and where are we storing all of these? If something were to happen to you tomorrow, what’s that succession plan look like? If you’re wanting to exit as you mentioned, know, some are getting older and looking to wind down, you can still sell. But what does that look like? And if you don’t know where some of these pieces are, it starts to decrease the value of the company as well. So that’s what digital asset management is and why it’s so important in

CCPIA (25:41.204)
Okay.

Paige Wiese (25:43.105)
you know, any company, whether it’s service or product driven, but especially with inspectors, because now you’ve got all these different third-party tools that you’re also using to complete your inspections, to send the inspections to your customers, to be able to show that your certifications are good and current, all of those things. And if you can’t log into them, now it starts to make it a lot harder to continue operating.

CCPIA (26:08.596)
I most of us inspectors, we’ve worked alone for all of our careers and we don’t think about those because it’s just, it’s in that file camera over there. Everything is auto-fill when I go to this website, because it’s all, you all I gotta do is hit my finger on the little button on the top of my MacBook and now I’m logged in and where is this stuff? So I could see that value plus,

I I was always told in school that when you make a business plan, one of your first elements of your business plan is your succession. It’s not just, I’m gonna work for 22 years, six months, four days, and then I’m gonna lock the door and say, thank you. No, we run for-profit companies and in aligning ourselves with professionals like you and your firm.

can help us steer our boat the right direction so we’re not running aground.

Paige Wiese (27:08.514)
Yeah, well especially as you’re hiring vendors too. Like to your point, you’ve been running independently for so long. Yes, everything is written down on a notepad someplace and a drawer that hopefully they find when they need it, right? But what happens when your computer crashes and now your fingerprint no longer works and you’re rebooting the whole thing and you’ve lost access to all of it? So having those safety measures but then it goes even further beyond that is…

who owns when you start hiring stuff out and where is that data and if you were to end that contract, does that all stay within the CRM that you’re using or is that something you can export? If that company goes under or gets bought out or decides they wanna raise their rates.

How do you maintain ownership of even the customer data? And so, you know, sometimes the website tools, they’re the ones that own your data. And so really asking those questions as you go through as far as, you know, we set up a lot of domains on behalf of clients just because it’s easier, but we make sure it’s very clear. Here’s the login. You’re the registered agent. You’re the one whose credit card is on file. You are the one who has the two factor. But a lot of companies don’t look at that. They just go, the web team set up the website for us.

and they’re good, they’ll be fine. And the next thing you know, they disappear and you don’t know how to access anything on your site anymore.

CCPIA (28:32.604)
And not to say it’s terrible, but there are a lot of inspectors that use their report writing software provider as their, they call it a website. We all know it’s probably a landing page within somebody else’s website. But nonetheless, if that company goes under or if they got bought, maybe they got bought by a, don’t want to say.

Maybe somebody that you don’t want to align with. And now it’s musical chairs. The music stopped. You don’t have a chair. And you’re searching real quick. And you might be out of business for a little while then. Yeah.

Paige Wiese (29:14.648)
Well, and everything that you’ve put into for, you your page rank and, you know, various aspects of marketing that you’ve been investing in year after year. And all of a sudden it just comes to a halt for whatever reason. I think that’s the hardest piece with digital asset management is everyone thinks it’s good until the thing happens. And as soon as the thing happens, it is pure panic mode and it is…

CCPIA (29:33.31)
Yeah.

Paige Wiese (29:38.777)
frustrating. It is impacting just your daily operations because now you’re pulled off of it to go try to sort this out. You may or may not know who to even call if you’ve been doing it independently for so long of what do I do to recover it? We had a client managing the website, doing it fine on their own. hosting provider updated the database on their own. It’s just part of the auto updates.

crashed the whole site, so she just thought I’ll just hit backup or restore from backup, we’ll be fine. Well no, she lost 50 orders in the three hours that were down and now you know her boss is looking at her going.

where is all of the order information? We don’t know what to fulfill. Like, well, I to a back, I know, but because you restored from four hours ago, everything that happened in that moment, gone. And the same thing can happen to inspectors if depending on the tools and software they’re using is if something goes down, where is the backup data that you can easily access instead of relying on?

CCPIA (30:38.704)
I heard a similar story just this spring that an inspector switched software, switched everything, had to go to a new website and lost hundreds of their reviews and their stars.

Paige Wiese (30:53.642)
yeah, there are some review companies that build it all into their third party system and they like that’s where it’s all linked. They’re not driving them to Google. And we’ve seen that before too. A lot of times in the service providing space where they’re like, yep, we’ll get you all these reviews. And then they’re like, Hey, I’m ready to move. And you’re like, I own those things. Like that should be my dad, like stars, my reviews. Why? Because I end a service with you. Did all of these things disappear? But we don’t know to ask these questions when we

into it, we trust that they’re the expert and that they’re gonna set me up for success and then yeah next thing you know and it’s like do you keep paying them just to keep all these reviews? No if it’s not serving you but how do you rebuild that? So even just knowing where are the reviews going, where is the customer data going? We’ve seen companies to your point just shut down and no you don’t get to take that customer list with you. That was our customer list built on our customer database.

CCPIA (31:49.908)
Right, but then in the same vein page, wouldn’t that be a company asset if I was selling my company and I had the ability to sell my 3,000 five-star ratings?

Paige Wiese (31:59.311)
100 %

Paige Wiese (32:06.062)
You’re nailing it on the head because that is exactly where we’re also seeing this overlooked when it comes to sale. Your domain name for how long you’ve been in business does come with value and weight. And so that’s one thing, even just your reputation and where you show up in your page ranks is valuable. It’s what the difference of a company’s coming in purchasing you and starting all over or being able to pick up where you left off. It’s, hey, I’ve been running Google ads successfully for years.

of my data to show you here’s my ad spend, here’s the conversion rate, here’s how well it’s working, you can literally purchase my company today, keep the ads running and things should just be smooth sailing right and so any of those things make a make or break a deal if you’ve got poor reviews online.

they might not want to be acquiring you because they don’t want to have to rebuild that reputation or respond to all of these saying under new management and try to hope that someone takes the risk on them. So there’s all these signals when it comes to the digital assets that companies aren’t looking at that really should be more highly considered in the valuation but can also break or make a deal. We’ve seen people think they own a domain name and then turns out it’s with the co-founder still who hasn’t been with the company.

for five years and we don’t know if can get a hold of them or not because they’re off on some island right and if we can’t sell the domain name with the company we’re gonna change our valuation.

CCPIA (33:35.604)
I think of that famous story from PepsiCo when they lost Sierra Mist because they didn’t renew on time and they had to invent Starry.

Paige Wiese (33:40.343)
Yeah.

Paige Wiese (33:48.782)
yeah.

CCPIA (33:50.292)
And so everybody’s like, we’re CRMS, I like CRMS. What is this story stuff? And it took a lot of effort for them to reestablish and rebrand an entire flavor of beverage because they lost their domain name.

Paige Wiese (34:10.87)
And you know it was like it’s on auto renew, it’ll never happen until the credit card expires and no one’s getting the email that says it’s right, like you can only trust auto renew and this and that so well but if you’re not having eyes on it, it’s funny we actually send emails out to clients to say hey just want to remind you your domain’s up for renewal soon and they’re like I know we’ve got this handled thank you though and I’m like

No, we’re just really doing it as a courtesy. Like we just, I know that you have it handled like on your end and it’s not on us, like our credit card to renew it. But I just wanted to remind you, like you got that coming, right? You’re good to go. There’s no changes that are needed because it’s expensive. Just to recover it can easily be $2,500. That’s just to buy your own domain back. That’s usually $25. But to your point, how much are you losing?

It’s so hard when someone goes, hey we lost the domain, how do we rebuild? And I’m like, it’s a whole new site, it’s a whole new this, it’s all new marketing and everything you invested in for 10 years, we’re doing it all over again but probably double because you want to go faster this go than you did the last one. And so it can be a very, very expensive mistake, not just, oops, we’ve got this, we’ll figure it out.

CCPIA (35:32.564)
Yeah, it’s not as simple as I forgot to renew my online subscription to a movie service. Oh yeah, you’ll get it all back. And in fact, you get to keep everything you saved in your favorites list still. No, no, no. The internet and those domains, that was all set up for a commerce reason. And that’s why.

Paige Wiese (35:43.074)
Great.

Paige Wiese (35:52.589)
Nope.

Paige Wiese (35:59.875)
Yeah

CCPIA (36:01.16)
There’s some very large companies that make a lot of money and there are shareholders that make really good dividends off of.

Paige Wiese (36:08.652)
Yeah, they’re covered to make sure all the notices went out, but they are not there to help you when it doesn’t. mean, hosting is similar. People don’t realize that hosting companies aren’t typically there to support you, to your point. They’re there to make the money. So if you stop paying,

within about 15 days that site’s deleted from the server, if not less. That’s the entire site. If you don’t have any form of backup in place, your whole site’s gone. you know, so that’s, we like to come in and go, I’ve got you for the better part of six months, maybe a year, we’re gonna do everything we can. So if you come back to me go, had a family emergency, I’m sorry I didn’t get this invoice paid in time.

We still have a copy. Most hosting companies within about 15 days will just delete the whole thing from the server and act like it never existed and they don’t take a backup and you’re done. And that’s yeah, roughly anywhere from three to $10,000 mistake depending on how you have your website set up.

CCPIA (37:06.663)
they only have so much room and there’s always somebody wanting to come in. And so if you’re taking up space and you’re not paying for the things, you know, they’re going to kick you out. It’s, I don’t blame them.

Paige Wiese (37:12.754)
Enough pain. Yeah. What’s the same with your CRMs? You know, I mean, like we were saying, all the inspector tools that are out there, like you think that set up on auto renew.

until it’s not or until the credit card got called for fraud and they decided you forgot to update the card on file and you just were going about business and thinking, I’ll handle it next week. Well, next thing you know, yeah, everything’s gone. So that’s what the digital asset management is, is really putting a pulse on when do these things expire? What’s the cards on file? What does this all look like in like a nice clean dashboard so that you can easily see everything in one go without having to log into every

platform that you’re a part of.

CCPIA (37:56.692)
I guess that’s probably one of the greatest aspects of going with somebody like 3Ring Digital that is sitting there monitoring your stuff and making sure that you can do what you do best. I inspect. I’ll get told what to do otherwise. I’m sure, and I’ll be receptive. I promise I’m not going to be that inspector. I know, I know, I know.

Paige Wiese (38:07.798)
Right?

Paige Wiese (38:12.799)
Exactly.

CCPIA (38:25.268)
is I don’t think there’s a single inspector that I’ve ever met in my career that hasn’t had that three o’clock in the morning, running the report and I didn’t hit save or my computer lost charge or, or, and, and, and, and I decided that I was going to manually click off the auto save every 15 minute mode. We’ve all done it. You’ve just set up practices and

and systems to make sure that our digital side is safe. And I love that. So to that order then, I want to talk a little bit about some common mistakes or missed opportunities, because I am confident and positive you’ve got some stories you could share of common mistakes that we can make when trying to market ourselves versus using a professional.

Paige Wiese (39:22.328)
think, yeah, there’s so many, One of them just, you know, starting off though is just hoping that everything will be fine through referrals.

That’s one of the biggest ones that I see, especially in the inspector space is, you know, hey, I’ve got all this lead flow coming in. Everything is great, but it’s not the way you really want to go about business. You want to have that consistency. You want to make sure that leads are coming in naturally on their own so that you can focus on just the execution side of it, right? And get in and get out. That’s the part that others can’t do. That’s why they hire you. Others can handle the marketing.

can handle these other aspects of the company and so being able to say how do I best maximize my time if it’s me or one, two, three people on the team, where is my time best spent? And I’m gonna be completely honest, it’s not on the website of the marketing. Like there’s just no point in this sector to be focusing on that as you as the business owner.

CCPIA (40:24.956)
unless that’s your forte, you’ve got other people doing other things. Yeah, maybe I’m a whiz or the expert at this side, then I’m gonna have somebody else do that side. It’s like anything else. If I’m not good at bookkeeping, I’m gonna get a bookkeeper. If I’m not superior at my digital world, I’m gonna get an expert because I’m gonna be superior doing my inspection side.

Paige Wiese (40:28.406)
Right, yeah.

Paige Wiese (40:48.61)
Yeah.

CCPIA (40:53.204)
And I guess that kind of that kind of goes right to public relations and our reputation. How important is public relations and reputation as it means to the digital world?

Paige Wiese (41:07.63)
So it’s a changing question. Had you asked me even six months ago, two years ago, you know, the reputation is always going to be a long-standing, 100 % important

CCPIA (41:10.76)
Yeah.

Paige Wiese (41:21.484)
right? That is how we make decisions. That’s the buying, whether it’s recommendations on Facebook, whether it’s your Google reviews, whether it’s through just the networks and the communities that you’re running in. Like the reputation is going to be really one of the core lifelines of marketing in this space. As far as public relations though, that one had been a little bit different. People weren’t looking for some of the articles and whatnot, right? They just wanted to see in Google who are the top three

that I can call and go to, get three quotes, see who I like the best and go. But now with people moving into AI…

even more so than ever. And that’s what we’re starting to see is it’s not, there’s still going to be a foundation and SEO, but it’s really coming into the mentions and the social cues from others like the publications, like the, Hey, I was mentioned in the newspaper or like, you know, an online news article and that’s where it’s coming from. I, there’s a list of top three home inspectors in my area and it’s a blog post that sort of mentions

in that capacity is going to start going a lot further. Even the social mentions, you know, I was even looking the other day, I was baffled with the amount that TikTok and Instagram reels are showing up in the video section of search results. Where back in the day, it was just YouTube or Vimeo, mostly YouTube because you’re looking on Google, right? But now it’s just like, no, you can start showing up in the video search results through social channels too.

It’s more so than ever the PR place is really really starting to come back around and something people should be paying attention to.

CCPIA (43:09.852)
that’s a loaded one. I started thinking about social and you see stuff and, I made that tweet 15 years ago when I was in my 20s. Now I’m in my 40s. That’s not me anymore. mean, this stuff lasts, the internet lasts forever, right? So how important is it? And I know it’s tough to do to have

Paige Wiese (43:31.383)
Yeah.

CCPIA (43:40.414)
two personalities in your social world. I’ve got my business personality and I’ve got my friend and family social personality. And can you really separate them?

Paige Wiese (43:54.979)
think in Spectres it can be a tiny bit harder because it’s so consumer and relationship driven, but I absolutely think that you should. To your point, people don’t need to see everything you decided to do. I’ve seen it where there’s times I start to see someone is just constantly away from work, right? And I’m just like…

no wonder why the quality isn’t quite as good and why, you know, this is going on. And so even if you think that everything is still running just fine, if they start to see a certain behavior over and over, it kind of just…

makes them start second-guessing whether it’s true or not. It puts that thought in their head of but are they still paying the same attention? Are they still involved? And so, or just your po… the views, everything that is going on right now that you like this kind of music, I don’t know, like it can be anything that can just be a little off-putting to a consumer. Some people look at it and go not my customer anyway, it’s totally fine, I’m gonna keep doing it, right? And that’s one model for sure.

but I think that in today’s age with how far we’ve come in the social platforms, absolutely create those things as separate. Have your personal be locked down and just to your personal network and if you’ve got some business relationships with friends and family, go for it. Go ahead and let them see that side. You don’t have to like remove them from it, right? But keep all of the business stuff on the business profiles and that’s how I like, you don’t see me too often

bring a ton of my business promotional posts to my private. One, not entirely the audience I’m going after, but two, they don’t need to see all, if they want to see it, send them to the business. Make them follow the business page, get another follower over there. But to cross be, you know, sharing or constantly be talking about, you know, inspection stuff when you’re personal, it’s just not where you should be. That’s not what they’re following you for.

CCPIA (45:54.356)
I I’ve always struggled when you sit in there with your handheld device and which account am I on? And it’s always been so much effort for me that I’ve just avoided myself 100 % from the personal world. Just because otherwise it’s going to be, oh, look, Rob’s either teaching a class, inspecting a building, or he’s got a glass of beer in his hand.

Paige Wiese (46:11.15)
Mm-hmm.

Paige Wiese (46:22.71)
Okay.

CCPIA (46:23.828)
Because I’ve been to a different brewery somewhere, I wanted to show off this wonderful experience I’m having. You know what? You’re right. They’re either going to say, boy, I can’t stand it that there’s 15 posts in the breweries. Apparently, he’s an alcoholic.

Paige Wiese (46:33.678)
Great.

Paige Wiese (46:43.342)
You don’t want to say it, that’s the perception though, right? And that they’re going to believe what they want to believe. And so it is really important to be putting out what you want them to see.

CCPIA (46:56.948)
I like that idea and it hasn’t become easier in the last few years to set up multiple accounts. I know it used to never be that easy, especially like Facebook where they mingled so much together. Is it easier now to make a business account and a private account?

Paige Wiese (47:20.116)
Absolutely, I think easier than it ever has been. I mean, I think the hardest piece that is a hurdle for a lot of people is like, but you still need a personal Facebook page to create the business. But there’s a reason for that. You don’t have to use it. You just have to create it, right? But the reason for it is if something comes up, that’s the owner.

And so we need to have that ownership tied to. There’s also so many scams online with social profiles and can I trust this company? Can I not? So Facebook uses it as they should as a way to help validate who is legit and who isn’t. So there’s that little piece that I know has made a lot of clients like, don’t want to be on Facebook at all. Why do I have to do this? So there’s a reason. But then Instagram is a lot easier. You can create an Instagram business page without doing a whole lot. LinkedIn is

probably the one place that I would start to say, you should have both and yes you’re personal, but if you’re doing more commercial inspections

you should be on LinkedIn and you should be top of mind of every single person in that space from the commercial real estate agents to the financing to the, you know, insurance to the brokers to you should be showing up top of mind all of the time in the commercial side and that should be your personal but you’re not trying to go post about all the breweries you’ve been to on LinkedIn’s personal, right? Like that’s not what that’s for. That’s your business resume, if you will. So I think again, then go.

ahead and move all of the brewery to your Facebook personal and keep LinkedIn super clean for your business profile there.

CCPIA (48:59.462)
and maybe limit your acceptance of friend list to those that you’re friends with and not, look, I’m a mutual friend of 57 people here. So apparently I must know you, I don’t know you, but you’re the second tier down. I see that. so what you’re saying is, in that, and I guess I’ll say PR or…

Paige Wiese (49:05.473)
I’m

CCPIA (49:28.948)
or social aspects of my business, I’d better have something there along with my website, because it’s really that corroborator, correct?

Paige Wiese (49:39.299)
Yes. Yeah. And you’ll see it more and more, even as the Google business profile, when you’re doing a Google search on the right hand side, it is now starting to say where some of those social cues are coming from. like,

Here’s some activity on Facebook or Instagram, and here’s some other things that they’re doing. They’re not just showing whatever you’ve put on the Google business profile. And then same thing, if your company name is showing up in a Google search result, there’s all these other places that it’s pulling from. It could be awards that you’ve won, certifications you’ve had. It could be different areas and different aspects. And all of that though is really going into the cues for the search engines is to like,

Okay, they’re being referred to from these other companies that have a good reputation. They must have a good reputation. Let’s bump them up a tiny bit higher in the search results and the page rank. So it really, there’s a lot more to it on the little cues and triggers, if you will, on the SEO side than just how do I optimize my page, my website one time for all these keywords and hope it’s gonna be great, right? Like, that’s not how SEO works and definitely not today with how quick, it’s not even about algorithms changing anymore.

It’s just how quickly it’s changing that just users even search is changing. And so there’s so many more reasons to be focused on it now.

CCPIA (51:02.044)
Is it about the money too or can you do this intelligently on a budget?

Paige Wiese (51:09.45)
on SEO you can absolutely, you can do both actually Google Ads and SEO intelligently on a budget. That’s something we really pride ourselves in at TreeRing Digital is trying to come in at what is the budget that we actually need to receive the results that you want, especially for inspectors like you said that don’t have maybe a shop of 20, 30 employees. We don’t need to be spending the budget equal to some of these other companies that have a company of that size. Like we don’t need as

leads in the door to make the revenue that we’re trying to hit. So why would we be dumping so much money into marketing if we’re turning people away? So how do we find that sweet spot and plan our budget around, great that’s the number we need to hit then this is the budget we need to spend and do that mindfully instead of my gosh this is just gonna be so expensive if I want to run Google Ads or SEO and how I want to compete.

CCPIA (52:07.528)
I coming in my background, I used to have multiple locations and multiple offices across the country that are managed. And I’d have, I’d have one, one office in one area of the country. He’d come to me, he’d so angry, he’d be talking so out of breath. like this, like he ran in to tell me this thing on the phone. Rob, I’m so angry.

that I’m sitting here and I’ve been in business for 20 years and I’ve got some young company that has only been in business for six months. They haven’t even done a fraction of the inspections I’ve done, but they’re higher ranked than me, why? And I said, they probably either spend more, have a better website with better reach, a better ad word or better whatever it was.

Paige Wiese (52:48.91)
They’re willing to spend more.

CCPIA (53:02.366)
They’re rank higher than you, I’m sorry. The internet doesn’t have any other bias other than what they know. And if you’re unknown, you’re unknown.

Paige Wiese (53:13.602)
Yeah, well one, I would probably challenge them and you know them so I don’t know but I’d challenge first to say they probably haven’t touched their site in multiple years, right, where this new company has. So that already plays a trigger, or plays a role because they have…

CCPIA (53:23.688)
That’s all.

Paige Wiese (53:31.032)
probably a more responsive, we see this all the time in inspectors, it’s a more responsive design because the other ones haven’t even gotten caught up on that yet. And it was interesting, I was listening to a podcast the other day and someone was saying like, if a website just bought the domain and just got started, there’s no way it’s gonna rank, like you shouldn’t even be looking at SEO strategy. And I was like,

That is the worst advice I could possibly, I have never had a time that a client came to me and said, I’m starting a business. Can we also run SEO? If you’re doing things correctly, you can absolutely start to outrank or just rank really, really well in the search engines with just basic tactics, tricks and techniques. Yes, domain name and how long it’s been around does have some authority and I’m not going to lie, we get better results with some of those clients as far as faster, but

To say, hey, if you just bought a domain name and just putting a website up today that you won’t see results for a year to two years is so unrealistic. Like, you absolutely can. So that’s why your example is seeing that of like, well, they just got started. How are they out doing? Because they’re just willing to do different things and they’re probably using newer technologies too and different tricks and whatnot than maybe a different company that’s a little more set in some older school ways are.

different ways to go about it, but there is no perfect recipe for SEO. I think that’s what we enjoy about it so much is every business, there’s just different things that work and being able to figure that out is the really, really fun part. But no, SEO is not a here’s how, there’s no playbook for it. Nobody actually really, really fully knows. We all just know these are things that will have an impact. How many of them can we do to get the result we want?

CCPIA (55:20.766)
So you’re saying that Skycat’s running off.

Paige Wiese (55:23.754)
Exactly.

CCPIA (55:24.788)
Well, as I said in the intro, that you’re a very, very good friend of the inspection industry through your work with Nick, your work with our executive director, Yeh, has helped us at the CCPA build our website. And I just wanted to share with you, because I don’t know if you know this or not, but we just had a member

who’s never done an inspection in their entire lives, ever. No residential, no commercial. They came from another industry. In fact, I believe the industry was wildland firefighting. So not even remotely close. And this member used our website tools, the CCPIA website template.

Paige Wiese (56:10.126)
Nope.

CCPIA (56:20.5)
and worked hand in hand with Maggie who learned everything from you that she could absorb. And he launched his website and in less than a week had his first job booked, paid for and finished.

Paige Wiese (56:35.694)
It speaks volumes for the organization and that is something I know Maggie has put so much time into is really understanding. We want members, but we want members who succeed.

We want the best, we want the right members, right? But in order to do that, how do we best support our members? And how do we make sure that we’re doing everything we can to succeed? And I know, I mean, the amount of resources that CCPIA offers on their website is absolutely insane. I haven’t seen many organizations, and we’ve built a variety of organizational sites, I have not seen many that go to the amount

of tools and resources and templates that CCPIA has. InterNACHI does a fantastic job with it, but that’s why.

the inspectors get the results they get because they have such a, like, because a lot of them don’t, you’re right, a lot of them don’t have a website or marketing background. They do inspections and that’s what they wanna do. And so I really commend the both organizations for how much they’ve reinvested into, how do we not just be a certification company or organization.

but a tool and a resource that really sets them up for success. And it’s, yeah, been incredible, the results that they’ve seen over the years.

CCPIA (58:02.004)
Well, we could have done it without you either. I got a couple more for us. I know your time is precious, but I would be doing a disservice to those listening if I didn’t bring up AI because it’s all over us. I I got to wipe it off constantly. know AI is a topic. What is a very simple and practical way?

Paige Wiese (58:17.321)
Hehehehehe

CCPIA (58:31.058)
that you think AI can help improve an inspector’s marketing today.

Paige Wiese (58:38.638)
You know, I think the best way that I could see AI help in inspectors marketing today would be to better understand your own

understand, like use it as a tool to finesse your own messaging. Use it as a tool to understand what is it that they’re wanting to do when they’re hiring you and how do you better like change your messaging to hit that. And also just like what types of inspections are they looking for, right? And like asking the questions and diving in and using AI more as a tool to better understand your company. There’s never been a better

time to be able to think outside of the box right now, like before you’d be like okay well this is what I know.

about how they want to search or this is what I know about why I’m good or what my customers tell me but really diving deeper into more of the like no but tell me what are the three most important things when someone is like looking for a home inspection the results will come back what are the three you know best deliverables I can be providing in a home inspection the results will come back and then you can start to shift and pivot your model to do that and especially as you’re you diving in and taking

that leap from residential to commercial, use it even more, right? And really start to educate yourself a little bit more by asking the random questions. And the second one is just a fun little trick is…

Paige Wiese (01:00:08.822)
Just start taking some of the calls. Just start taking some of the questions that you get and just keep an ongoing list of all of the questions that you’re getting as you go. What phone calls did you answer today? Keep a list of all of those questions and then figure out how to sprinkle them back into your presentation materials as you’re talking to them. I don’t know, sometimes it’s a folder, sometimes it’s at the very end of an inspection. Here’s the next steps or what to expect when my inspection’s done, whatever it is.

those questions ahead of time, whether it’s your site, because you’re going to see yourself cleared up so much more, but you’re also going to see yourself start closing more deals because you’re already answering questions before they’re having to spend yet another phone call on with you. So the sooner you can take all of that and start utilizing this data with AI, you’re going to start seeing results on your own.

CCPIA (01:01:06.1)
I love that. So I guess Paige, before we wrap up and take any more of your time, what do you think is one action item that somebody could do to help their internet presence, their website, or their marketing that they could do this week to make themselves more visible?

Paige Wiese (01:01:30.99)
I would say Google yourself, would you hire yourself? Like, go, does your website saying that you do commercial inspections or are you still 100 % or are you mostly still focused on residential? And if you’re asking why am I not getting more commercial leads, that’s the reason. If you’re showing up when you do a Google search and you can’t, or like, and the reviews aren’t great, there’s probably a reason your phone isn’t ringing quite as much. If you do a Google search and you don’t show up,

That’s because the referrals aren’t finding you either. So just doing a Google search is one of the best things I can say, or Bing search too, but just search yourself and see what happens and that will really start to shed light on are the cues there for what I’m wanting more work in or did I forget to change messaging someplace?

CCPIA (01:02:22.014)
Paige, this has been great. And I know we’re gonna get questions and for all those listening, I promise this is not our last conversation. We’re going to have more conversations with Paige coming up and she’ll help us. She’s gonna help us, I promise. And for all those, check out some of Paige’s stuff, the digital asset management checklist that we’re gonna provide at the end of this.

Paige Wiese (01:02:30.365)
I know.

CCPIA (01:02:52.052)
along with links to Three Ring Digital. I know that she can help you or at least in these future conversations we’re having, I think I’d like to break down some more with the SEOs and go deeper with that, some deeper conversations with websites. But today, I think we hit it out of the park. think Paige, we talked a little bit about some of the practices and…

I hope we set our members up for success. What do you think?

Paige Wiese (01:03:23.566)
I think we did a great job. think it’s just, you a really good place to start getting some of those questions answered as they’re diving into their online presence and what does some of the things mean, but also a great, great place for, what did she say? What does that mean? Can we learn more about that and start asking the questions? So no, I’m very much looking forward to additional, you know, conversations to really put some good groundwork out there so that they can be thriving.

CCPIA (01:03:50.75)
So to all of our listeners, thank you again for listening to this episode of Building Your Business with the CCPIA. We had Paige Weiss on here, and she was fantastic for holding court and helping us with all of this. Jot down your questions, send them to us, like us, subscribe to us. Check out her page at Three Ring Digital and see what she has to offer. Thank you again, Paige, for taking time out of your day.

Paige Wiese (01:04:20.015)
Thank you so much. I enjoyed it.