Let’s imagine that you’ve decided to host a party to launch your home staging business. For days you work countless hours researching the very best location, carefully planning the food and décor. Thousands of thoughtful, elegant invitations have been sent out to the big event and as the date comes closer, you can’t wait to meet all of these new potential clients and you’re excited about how quickly your new business is going to take off.
But imagine if, when the big night arrives, the only people who show up are your parents and a few of your closest friends.
Can you even begin to fathom what a waste of time, energy and money that would have been? Not to mention the dashed expectations of a booming home staging business right out of the gate!
That’s exactly what’s happened if you’ve hired a website designer to build you a beautiful home staging website that nobody visits except for your friends, family and people who already know about you and your business.
It amazes me that in this day and age people still don’t understand the importance of a well-optimized website. You need to have a website not so you have a pretty place on the Internet to send your family members as proof you have a business, but so that people in your area who are in need of a home stager can find you.
It’s not easy getting your website found in the midst of the other millions of home staging websites out there and a website built with only beauty in mind is certainly not going to do anything to help your efforts.
One of the topics I’m most interested in continuing to learn more about is how search engines work and I devote a considerable amount of time into my education in this area. After all, that’s how you found my home staging courses! That’s also how 90% of my home staging clients find me when it’s time to stage their house – I’ve optimized my websites so that the people looking for what I have to offer find me!
I just finished visiting a Staging Diva Graduate’s website. It is truly lovely. The layout is very nice, the colors are great and the photography is stunning. I imagine she paid the designer who built it quite a lot but guess what?
The way the website is built, there is not one single thing within its infrastructure to make a search engine find it. It’s almost totally invisible to Google except for the footer at the bottom of every page of the site that says, “Site built by designersname” with a link taking viewers right back to the designer’s site!
The reason I know her website is invisible to search engines is because I took a few seconds to take a look at the code.
Yes…code. See, search engines don’t read websites the way you and I do. We’ll scan through the text and look at the pretty pictures but search engines can’t see that. All they can do to determine if it’s a site worth going to is dig into the code to see if it’s relevant to the phrase someone is searching for.
Don’t even consider hiring someone to build your home staging website before finding out if they know how to code the site so that it’s visible to Google. Make sure they don’t plan to use frames or flash which will actually make it harder for your site to be found.
Better yet, consider joining the Staging Diva Directory of Home Stagers. We build your web page for you, making sure your listing is found based on what I’ve learned over the years through SEO courses and building my own successful websites. I built my very first one in 1999 and I’ve continued to study the Internet as it has evolved ever since.
When you get a profile listing on the directory, you’ll also be certain anyone searching your city for a home stager finds you and I’ll even throw in a FREE full-color brochure when you join (valued at $300).
Home stagers, do you have a web design horror story you care to share? Or would you like to tell us a story of a client finding you from your listing on the directory? Please share by leaving a comment below!
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.
Debra,
Your post is particularly meaningful to me. Although I don’t have a horror story to tell, or a client yet, I have been doing a LOT of research about websites, optimization, social media and attending some Small Business Development classes that warn new business owners of the very issues you bring up. My hope is to avoid a horror story by being well informed so I know if a website is necessary, and what other options I might have to me to help drive traffic to my staging business. It is confusing to sort it all out and I can see why an uninfomred stager would get into such a position. I am beginning to understand why you have often said you could “write a book” about websites and SEO!!! Thanks for reminding us to be wary and that our staging diva directory page is truly a benefit of being one of your graduates!
I wouldn’t say I exactly have a “horror story,” — ok, maybe close — but I did find out after five months of my website going up that the web designer I used (courtesy of my husband using him for all of his websites, I was “thrown in” cheap!) knew very little about SEO and all the tags, meta tags, etc. were completely wrong and ineffective, so my ranking on Google was around #40, bottom of 4th page. Thanks to a lot of help from a friend who’s a web designer, and someone I met through LinkedIn (the value of social networking!) who designs websites as a sideline business, I’m now around #10, bottom of first page of Google, less than 4 months later. But it’s a shame I didn’t even know my website ranking for the first 5 months, and hadn’t paid attention to anything beyond how it looked and that it was up.
Wow Debra, this is all very imtimidating but I know when I join the staging diva and become a graduate, I to will take advantage of your starging diva directory and follow ur recommendations to a “T”… It is a little overwhelming to think of how to make my web presence know when starting to market myself as a stager…thanks for posting this blog
Wynette
Hey there, how are you? I was actually just spending some time looking via the internet for some information and facts and stumble’d on your daarn cool site. I’m truly amazed because of the material that there is posted on this blog. It tells me how great you understand this topic. I have put a favorite mark on this page, and will be back soon. Once again, thank you
Hi Latoria, glad you found me! If you’re really interested in learning more about home staging, you might enjoy my Free report that features a behind the scenes peek at 10 home stagers and how they got started, their projects, etc. You can learn more about “Can a Regular Person Like Me Become a Home Stager?” here:
https://stagingdiva.com/homestagersuccessstories.html
Hi Debra,
sounds like you are talking of my website…lol _ this is one point I have addressed with my web designer as I am concerned that my code is not showing up in google anywhere, unless like you said , if someone knows me … My guestion to you is should I still be after my web designer for the right code even thou I am on your directory ? …
Lucy, when you have your own stand alone website, you should always be doing everything you can to maximize it’s searchability, readability, attractiveness to your target audience, etc. This “job” is never “done,” there are always refinements needed. That’s why I spend such a big percentage of every week learning about the latest in search engines, marketing, etc. That way I can share my best tips with my students and Staging Diva Dialog members in our monthly calls. During the last two months for example, I dove deeply into ways to leverage Facebook and Twitter for your business.