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Chased by a Bear!

There is a story of two people in the woods, being charged by a hungry bear. One stops to tie his shoes, the other scoffs, “you can’t outrun a bear.”  “I don’t need to outrun the bear, I just need to outrun you.” His companion replied.

So too, with marketing in a local market.

You don’t need to be the best in the nation at marketing, you just need to be better than your local competitors.  That may be easier than you think.

With notable exceptions most home stagers spend very little time thinking about their marketing. Some may even feel it contrary to their nature. But if you are serious about your home staging business, you must give some serious thought to how you are going to attract your next customer and then the one after that.

That’s one reason you have a web page. But many of you make a mistake and think a web page is all about selling a potential customer on your staging skills. The purpose of a web page is to get prospects to call you.

I will discuss that more in a future article, but many of you have a bigger problem and don’t even know it.

Many people looking for a home stager in your town can’t find your web site.

In past articles, I’ve touched on two things you can do to remedy that problem. One is to change your page title tags to include relevant keywords.  Another is to change the Meta Tag description on your web page to also include relevant keywords.  There is one more major step to take in the meta tags area, that will greatly increase the chance that prospects looking online actually find you.

And that is the formal meta tag keywords.

There are over six million web sites that show up when someone searches for the term “Home Staging” in Google. That’s way too many, so most people when confronted with so many responses do a second search.

And in that second search they may try another keyword, like “home stager,” but more likely they will use the same keyword and add a geographical term.

When my son searches for pizza on the web, he adds his zip code. For a less common business like home staging, he might use his telephone area code, or the town name.

I’ve written about this before, but I am amazed at how few people actually take the time to make this simple change to the keywords they have in their meta tags.

If you do, and your competitors don’t, it’s like you putting on a pair of tennis shoes. Hey, they may even be a slightly better home stager than you. But if you are wearing geographically based keywords as your tennis shoes, you will get ranked above them in the computer search engines.  You will get seen, they won’t. Or if they do, they will be listed under you in the rankings.  You will get first chance to stage more houses. And they won’t know why.

Now I know some of you aren’t into competition, but this is business. If you want your phone to ring. If you want to be doing two to four more home stagings a month, you need to pay attention to your marketing.

You need to change the keywords in your web page’s meta tags. You need to include terms like “Home staging in Minneapolis”, “St. Paul Home Stager”, “House Staging in 612.”

In the first article of this series, I told you where and how to look up keywords. You need to find the top keywords people actually use, and then mix and match the appropriate geographical references for your market place.

It’s a chore, but not hard. It will make a real difference, and will allow you to outrun your competition.

Next week, the Market Maker program will be launched. All of these changes and much more will be handled by Market Maker for you. Market Maker is a unique program designed specifically for the Home Staging industry.  It will put your web based marketing on auto pilot and will pay for itself.

Membership will be limited, particularly at first. So if you want to sprint to the front of your market place, make sure you sign up for advance notice of the release date.

To do so go to http://homestagingbusinesstips.com/MarketMaker/ComingSoon.html

Best Wishes,

Earl Netwal
MicroBusinessSpecialist
http://www.HomestagingBusinessTips.com/blog

Technorati Tags: homestaging, Keywords, marketing, Meta Tags

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There are many ways to market ones home staging business. Most of them are enhanced by having a good web site where you can refer interested people to learn more about you and your business.

That way, when you give a talk to a church group or Chamber of Commerce luncheon you can give people a web page to visit.

But you can also get a lot of free traffic from people surfing the web for information on home staging, if your site is properly set up so it can be found.

Unfortunately, most home staging web sites are not easy to find, because they have not been optimized for search engine traffic. About 85% or all web traffic results from searches on search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN and a myriad of others.

If you were to enter the words “home staging” into Google today you would get over 6 million responses. The top 10 names on the page get the vast majority of actual page views, the others 6 million don’t, and that includes your page.

That means that 85% of the people searching for a home stager are unlikely to see your page at all. That’s lost business. Business you could have a shot at…if your web pages were properly optimized to get the search engines attention.

There is an entire industry devoted to Search Engine Optimization or “SEO.”

But there are some simple steps anyone can do, if you are willing to take action and make your web site more attractive to the search engines. If you do, you will get more traffic to your page. And that’s the first step. What you do with that traffic is another issue. But first things first.

In the next week I will be posting a series of articles on SEO. This is a prelude to the release of a major new product. The exact release date and time is being held under wraps for now.

The new product is called Market Maker. Not everyone that wants to will be allowed to join when it releases. I encourage you to sign up for additional information at
http://homestagingbusinesstips.com/MarketMaker/ComingSoon.html

Today, I want to let you know how easy it is to begin to find keywords that apply to your business and website. In later articles I will tell you how to use these keywords, for that’s where the magic of SEO takes place.

There are a lot of expensive paid keyword tools, but the best free tool is Google’s.
Go to https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
In the middle of the page, you will see a blank box with directions to enter a single word or phrase. Type in the word “Home Staging.”

Make sure the box that says synonyms is checked.

Then you will need to enter the letters from the Captcha code that is there. This is to confirm you are a person and not a computer or robot.

Then click get keyword ideas.

When I did this recently I got 127 keywords related to Home Staging and another 73 related terms. Not all of these are appropriate for a home stager looking to find customers. But many are. This is because different people will use different terms to search for you. If your web site is only set up to attract some of these keywords, you won’t stand a chance of showing up in the results the search engines return at all.

There is a lot more to say about all this, and it does matter. If your web site is properly optimized to get traffic from all the relevant keywords and your competitor across town isn’t you will get more business.

If your competitor’s website is properly optimized and yours isn’t you will loose out on business you could be getting.

If you’re not turning away customers today because you are too busy, you may want to consider making the effort to understand keywords and how they apply to your web site.

More on this tomorrow. And don’t forget to sign up for information on Market Maker.

It is designed to put your web marketing on auto pilot and to pay for itself!

Go to http://homestagingbusinesstips.com/MarketMaker/ComingSoon.html

Best wishes,

Earl Netwal
www.HomestagingBusinessTips.com

Technorati Tags: Home Staging, homestaging, Homestagingbusinesstips, Market Maker, SEO

So far, I haven’t found a single home staging web site with good keywords in the meta tags of their web site.

This is a big mistake, as these meta tags are what almost everybody other than Google uses to find web sites to display.  And while Google may have the largest chunk of web search, they certainly don’t have it all. And with the older demographic that is most likely to use the services of home stagers they may even have a lesser share of the pie. That’s cause most older folk are likely to use the search tool that comes with their computer. My wife for example has Yahoo on hers. While she may say she is going to “Google” something, she actually uses Yahoo.  Yahoo uses meta tags. So does MSN, ASK and virtually everybody but Google.

I have created a base list of some ten dozen key words people often use to search for home stagers in their market. I add or subtract a few depending on the scope of service of the individual home stager, and then incorporate geographical elements to come up with a comprehensive set of what I call, “geographical long tail keywords.”  These are the phrases people actually use to search for you.

Every business should have these in the hidden meta tags that the search engine “bots” see, but no one else does. Unfortunately most web site developers are techies, and not marketers, and they often don’t have a clue as to what they should put in there.

For an industry like Home Stagers, where I have already done the Keyword research, I charge $75 for a compiled list of keywords. I have a few simple questions that Home Stagers need to answer, and then I can generally get their completed keyword lists done in 24 hours or less, depending on what’s on my plate that day.

Until the end of January, I am offering a $40 discount as part of my Recession Fighter effort, (Yours and Mine) So if you would like more people to find your web site, drop me an email, and I will give your web page a look see. If it needs the work, and so far they all have, I will let you know and submit my list of Q’s.

But hurry, I will raise the price to $75 effective February 1st.

email me at enetwal@gmail.com with any questions.

Technorati Tags: geographical long tail keywords, homestaging, Keywords, long tail keywords, Meta Tags