One common misconception I hear from home stagers about search engines is that they expect their new website or listing on the Staging Diva Directory of Home Stagers to be on the first or second page of Google within a few days.

Wouldn’t it be great if it were as easy as that? Unfortunately, though, it’s not. Think about it for a minute. When you search for something online how many results come up? 500,000 or a million? Maybe if you’re looking for something very specific you’ll get a mere 250,000!

While every website owner out there wants to be on top, Google can only display 10 listings per page. Why do you think your brand new website “deserves” one of only 20 coveted spots on the first two pages of results?

Google has about an 80% share of the search engine market because it yields the results that people most value and trust. If we didn’t trust it so much, everyone would switch to Yahoo, Bing or one of the other search engines out there. From a business perspective, Google will only make money if the results it provides are relevant so you can be sure a lot of consideration is taken into what appears on the first pages of a search.

Google, like all other search engines, uses a very complicated algorithm to determine the order of results it provides from a search. Only Google knows the formula but we know it includes the following factors:

• How many people are visiting the site
• How old it is (most new sites aren’t ranked for 3 to 6 months)
• How many other relevant sites are linking to it
• The ranking of the sites that link to it (you lose “points” if there are no high-traffic sites linking to your site)
• Whether the content is relevant to the phrase being searched
• How often the content is updated
• How long visitors spend on the site (if they visit for a few seconds, you will lose ranking)
• And many more factors

I built my first website in 1999 and I’ve been learning about how to make my sites rank better since then.

Just as an example, today if I type “find a home stager” into Google, the Staging Diva Directory of Home Stagers comes up at number 4 out of 133,000 results. All home stagers on the Directory benefit from such a great result.

In all likelihood, if you do the same search, you’ll get a different result. That’s because you’re not searching from the same physical location I am. (Google knows where you are by your IP address and changes the results accordingly!) You could also get a different result on a different day. You see, a company can be on the first page today and drop significantly overnight. Often this is because they’ve employed a black hat technique, or they haven’t kept up the efforts needed to maintain their high Google ranking.

So if you develop your own website, chances are Google will not rank you at all for 3 to 6 months. But, when you join the Staging Diva Directory of Home Stagers, you’ll be ranked within a matter of days. That’s because Google visits the Directory every week, indexing the fresh content. This means you get found 3 to 6 months sooner and if you have your own site and it’s linked from the Directory, it will be found sooner and ranked higher.

For more information about how your website can be making you more money, schedule a Website Checkup with me!

Debra Gould, The Staging Diva®
President, Six Elements Inc. Home Staging

Debra Gould knows how to make money as a home stager and she developed the Staging Diva Home Staging Business Training Program to teach others how to earn a living doing something they love.