Easy SEO Tips for Home Stagers to Rank Higher on Google

You want your home staging business to get on page one of Google. But, how do you make that happen? Here are some easy tips to rank higher in organic search and get more traffic to your home staging website.

But first, let’s back up a step and discuss what organic search is and what those elusive three words, “Search Engine Optimization,” actually mean.

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is the process of showing Google that your website is what people want to see when they search for specific keywords.

For example, if you offer home staging services in San Antonio, TX, you want anyone living in San Antonio, TX, who types in “home stager near me,” to see your website to show up at the top of the search results.

Great SEO is one of the best ways to generate traffic to your website and market your staging business.

“My staging business isn’t even on the first page of search results. Help! I need to get more traffic to my website.” – Carolyn B.

The cool thing about understanding SEO is that there are actionable ways to rank higher on Google and get to the first page for searches for stagers in your area!

Tip No. 1 - Have the Content Staging Clients Are Looking For

SEO is all about ensuring that people using Google to search are getting the best results at the top of the page. When someone searches for a “home stager near me,” Google wants to provide the searcher with the website of the best home stager in their area.

If people visit your site and leave quickly (called “bounce”), Google will think your staging company must not be who clients want to hire when they search for a stager near them.

Pro Tip: A staging blog is a great way to add fresh, relevant, and engaging content on your website.

Tip No. 2 - Use Targeted Keywords

Think about what your potential clients would actually type into Google to find you. So for instance, you might like the phrase “property styling,” but if that is not what people in your area call home staging, then that is not a keyword you should focus on.

Make sure you focus on phrases that include your location. Trying to get Google to rank you for the phrase “home staging” is going to be extremely difficult. Instead, focus on phrases like “home staging in [enter your city].”

Ideally, you’ll want your page title (called a heading) to incorporate your keyword phrase.

Tip No. 3 - Gain “Backlinks”

Notice what we did in the example at the top of the blog. Our own home staging company is in San Antonio, so we hyperlinked our site to the anchor text “home staging services in San Antonio, TX.”

This is considered a “backlink” for our home staging company, BY Design. Google looks at the link and sees that it is coming from an authoritative site about home staging, stagingstudio.com. So, Google determined that BY Design must be a good website for people who are looking for staging services in San Antonio.

To improve your SEO, you should try to gain backlinks on other authoritative sites.

Pro Tip: A great way to gain a link is to get on our Find a Stager Map. This not only links to your site, but also helps clients find you who are looking for stagers in their area. *Map is exclusively for Staging Studio students.

Tip No. 4 - Link to Authoritative Sites

Similar to the concept of backlinks, Google’s job is to make sure that people searching for a specific phrase get connected to the site with the best information. One of the ways Google determines how good the info on a page is is by looking at the links on the page. Do you link to a couple of relevant, authoritative websites?

Pro Tip: Link your Staging Studio training badge back to our site. We give you details on how to do that inside the course.

Tip No. 5 – Improve Your Page Load Time

If your staging site is slow, visitors will become impatient and bounce. This will kill your chances of Google ranking you very high. A good rule of thumb is to ensure your page loads in under three seconds.

You can check your website’s page load time by visiting these websites:

https://gtmetrix.com/
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

Both will give you a list of what needs to be improved.

Tip No. 6 – Optimize Your Images

Beautiful pictures of your stages are very important to have on your website and help engage visitors. However, images with huge file sizes are one of the biggest reasons for slow page load times. Optimizing your images before uploading them to your site will help to speed up page load time.

Optimizing images means they aren’t too big (this website has a free tool for optimizing your pictures) and they have keywords in the image’s title, description, alt tag, file name, and caption. Google can’t see images, but it can read alt text.

Tip No. 7 - Have an SSL Certificate

SSL stands for secure sockets layer. You’ll know a website has an SSL certificate by two things:

1. The URL says “https” and not “http.”
2. You'll see a padlock icon in the URL bar.

That extra ‘S’ means your connection to the website is secure and encrypted and that any data you enter (even an email address) is safely shared with that website. While the primary purpose of SSL is securing information, there are benefits for SEO as well because SSL is part of Google’s search ranking algorithm.

Tip No. 8 - Uplevel the User Experience

There’s so much that goes into a great user experience on a website, but here’s a quick summary of what you should focus on:

• Make your message clear and simple
• Make it easy to navigate
• Use fonts that are easy to read
• Remember that you are selling design services, so it should look well-designed
• Have a clear call to action - this should be a way to request a staging quote
• If it should be clicked, make it obvious

Further reading: 7 Things Your Home Staging Website Needs to Gain Clients

Increasing SEO is not a simple fix that can be done overnight. It can take a while for Google to start noticing your site, but implementing these tips will help your staging website start to rank higher.

Ultimately, good SEO will lead to higher organic traffic, meaning less money spent on ads, and more clients. Staging Studio's one-hour website audits will assess your SEO and give you a solid plan for attracting more clients to your site.

Special thanks to Robyn White at RDW Design Studio for her contributions to this article.