Everything I have said about anchor text as a major asset for home staging marketing results remains true. However a recent change in Google’s algorithm may have negatively affected some of you in highly competitive markets.
While this is probably relatively few of you, I wanted to share some insights into the recent “Penguin Update,” that has thrown the SEO world into a bit of a tumult this past week.
First let me remind you what I mean by anchor text, then I will tell you what Google seems to want and why, and finally suggest the obvious steps you may need to take in case your home staging marketing efforts were negatively affected.
The key to effective home staging marketing from an online perspective is getting your business to show up on the first page of results when a prospective customer does a search for your services online.
You have four options as I explain on another web site of mine addressed to dentists but worth a quick look if you want to understand all four.
For most home staging marketing that means getting your web site ranked by Google higher than that of your competitors. There are two major aspects to winning this battle. On page factors and off page factors.
The off page factors center around the quantity and quality of backlinks to your website. In my discussions of anchor text I instructed you to use your main keyword, “home staging ________” with the blank filled it to be your home town, or other geographical name you want to do business in.
Thus if you posted an article on Active Rain, did article marketing, or blog posting on other people’s sites you would include the anchor text phrase in your posting and then hyperlink that phrase back to your web site.
This process told Google that your site was about “Home staging Minneapolis” or what ever city you are in. This is still true and still powerful.
However, as more and more people learned of the importance of the technique, people began in the larger internet marketing circles to over do it. So much so that Google has now started to penalize sites that have most if not all of their backlinks specifically linked to the same keyword(s).
And we have all seen a lot of “Click here’s” in our internet experiences.
Turns out that if you have followed my advice too well and created a ton of backlinks to your site that all use the same anchor text, Google will see that as unnatural.
They would expect to see more “Click here’s,” and naked URL’s and at least a reasonable number of “Minneapolis Home Staging” versus “Home Staging Minneapolis,” etc.
So if this past week, you have all of a sudden seen your web site drop from neat the top of Google in your local area to the bottom or worse yet on a second page or worse, you need to take action. You need to restore some more natural balance to your backlinks.
What is the right balance? Lots of speculation on that. But the preponderant thinking is that you want 40-60% of your anchor text to be for your primary keyword phrase. Do another 20% or so on major variations. And then mix up some naked url’s and click here’s and lesser keywords that are clearly related for the balance.
Such efforts should help restore your balance in Google eyes and help you regain your top position faster than you may have otherwise.
In the long run, the best course of action for home staging marketing is to build backlinks anchored to your site by doing blog commenting on other home staging sites, writing articles for article directories and posting on relevant sites like Active Rain.
Home Staging Marketing Consultation
Feel free to contact me, if you would like a professional assessment of your web site and of your competition within your marketplace. I work with a wide variety of locally based businesses throughout the US and Canada.
I enjoy working with home stagers who are serious about building a real business via online home staging marketing. It’s where I first started my local business consulting practice some years ago.