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Reaching the Masses

By Jackie Peraza

Home Stager with Perceptions AdverStaging(TM), LLC

October 17, 2007 05:53 AM

I'm a bit of a geek when it comes to Marketing and Market Research and have wanted to take a look at what the general public actually searches under when they look for a home stager. In order to closely align myself with Joe Public I have to step into his paradigm, so to speak. I mean basically the web is the yellow pages of today, right?

Wow. I can't believe my eyes. I decided to run an Overture Keyword Selector Tool Search on some of the words common to our industry, or what we might consider common and was shocked to find that the words I thought would be searched on with regularity by potential clients were not as frequent as imagined. Take a look at these results for key word searches as they relate to home staging. The numbers represent the Count Search Terms and again, I used Overture.

Stage: 34640

Stager: <further broken down as follows>

Real Estate Staging - 2110

Home stager - 944

House staging - 8658

Home Sale Staging - 538

Stager - 392

House stager - 117

Professional Stager - 100

Real Estate Stager - 55

(ASP & Certified Stagers both less than 50)

Redesign: 1799

Interior Redesign: 939

Interior redesign industry specialist: 712

(all remaining: less than 500)

Real Estate Merchandising: 0

This is important information to me. What it tells me is either, I don't know the search terms folks are using to search under, thus I'm not using the appropriate language to come up in their searches or folks just aren't educated enough about staging in general to even run a search on the service - maybe a combination of both. From a purely marketing and market research perspective this means I have some serious investigative work ahead of me.

Anyone have any input?

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Abe Do

Olympia, WA

Staging New Homes, Designed to Sell - If it was me I'd tune into HDTV and watch some of their shows most people are likely searching those names more so than the appropriate names.

Oct 17, 2007 05:58 AM

Ralph Nudi

Success Realtors brokered by eXp Realty - Kenosha, WI

"YOUR success IS our success"

Why do you think HOUSE staging is so much higher than HOME staging?

Oct 17, 2007 06:00 AM

David Valley

Massachusetts Home Inspections - Methuen, MA

Massachusetts Home Inspections

I can say that keywords are important.

If I were looking for a home stager, I'd enter the keywords home stager and the city or state I'm located in.

Geographic keywords definitely help.

Example...Go to Google and enter keywords "massachusetts home inspection" or "massachusetts home inspector and see where I'm positioned.

http://www.masscertifiedhomeinspections.com

Oct 17, 2007 06:01 AM

Richard Perkins

R PERKINS REALTY - Stockton, CA

Don't know if I agree in our area I have tried both ways. Don't know if its worth the money. Keep trying maybe your area is different Good Luck! Keep up the good work!

Oct 17, 2007 06:03 AM

Pamela Bless

RE/MAX Tri County - Hamilton, NJ

Obviously you want to create tags that include the most often searched terms. I like the comment someone left about Designed to Sell, if there is something popular that relates to what you do, you should try and get those words in a post. I'm a realtor and I'm going to use "designed to sell" in my tags. Good luck!

Oct 17, 2007 06:04 AM

Jackie Peraza

Perceptions AdverStaging(TM), LLC - Framingham, MA

Home Stager - Framingham, Massachusetts

Ryan - Most excellent point. I'll listen more to the language they use.

Ralph - Another interesting observation. I noticed this too and what surprised me about it is as a stager, is that I spend quite a bit of time having to talk about the need to 'disassociate' from one's home . But, if folks are searching under house, then there has to be at least some minor disassociating already going on and I'll be sure to change my print marketing and online information to reflect the change in terms.

David - I agree with you, however there is a tremendous difference. You are in a widely recognized and accepted industry, an expected part of the real estate transaction process. Staging is new and burgeoning. We have to identify the language of the buyer or further educate the buyer if they don't know altogether.

Richard - Thank you! Interesting little tidbit there re: ASP and Certified, don't you think? Especially as so much of a big deal is made out of it. Obviously, Joe Public is not making a big deal out of it.

Pamela - Is there a Trademark on that though?

Jackie

Oct 17, 2007 06:20 AM

Jackie,

There are no Trademarks on keywords. You can utilize any keyword you feel will help to get your web site in the correct position.

Oct 17, 2007 09:38 AM

David- Ahhhh, right - got it! I was thinking overall marketing literature, not just tags; but of course it makes sense that phrase could be used in tags! OK, now I'm laughing over here imagining stagers and other professionals that include staging in their services around the world running to change their tags to include "designed to sell".

Thanks for pointing that out.

Oct 17, 2007 10:00 AM

Kathy Riggle

STAGING SMART N SOLD - Houston, TX

Houston Home Staging

Jackie-

Very informative- house staging surprised me. I will pay more attention to tag keywords, too.

Kathy

Oct 17, 2007 10:57 AM

Kathy - tag words are important. Maureen Henry recently wrote a great blog post here about this.

Oct 17, 2007 12:24 PM

Cari Pilon

RE:STYLE Home Staging - Brighton, MI

RE:STYLE Home Staging

You should run the word "stagger" LOL, I can't tell you how many times I see that word on my stats. I keep combing my site to see if I have mispelled stager somewhere.

Oct 19, 2007 01:12 AM

Cari - That's funny! I can see it now...having a bunch of new brochures made up with "stagger" throughout it....Joe Public might know what it meant though!

Thanks for sharing that little tidbit.

Oct 19, 2007 05:15 AM

Reaching the Masses

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