To most home stagers, sticky is a disgusting problem that has to be remediated at once!! In Geek Speak, for SEO (read: getting yourself higher up on the search engine rankings so that you get gigs from people visiting your website) sticky is a good thing… it means it stays at the top, or wherever you put it. Any SEO tactic you can deploy that stays in place is a GREAT thing!! And here’s one that none of us use often enough:
Testimonials.
Testimonials not only ingratiate you with your clients/brokers and vendors but they stay in place. They make you look like a nice, kind person; they show your clients’ competition who they work with (very important in the ultra-secret, don’t-share-your-sources world of high-end real estate); AND they create a backlink to your site from an organic, natural source.
It is generally held that a good testimonial is made up of 3 elements:-
Element 1: Before
The client’s hesitation before the purchase
Element 2: After
The client’s ‘discovery’ after the purchase
Element 3: The Experience
The emotional response
However, I find when you write from the heart, and explain the context, the piece works fine. Shorter is better than longer, simply because more people will then read it.
Each testimonial usually comes with your photo, your name and your web address. (whichever one you submit)
Obviously this is not something you want to abuse; it would dilute the impact of your endorsements. Yet it is one heckuva way to build goodwill, and help yourself in the process.
Plus, it stays in place. I cannot emphasize the benefit of this enough. To have a review, or a testimonial put in such a prominent place on a site, wall, etc. is advertising most of us couldn’t afford. Certainly when running an efficient, lean operation as we teach in our home staging classes at SAR. I wrote a testimonials for the computer guy that helps me and found it weeks later on the wall of his store. I was touched and then realized that my logo, my voice and my details were on the wall of a busy store in a related field, and all it had cost me was being nice for a few minutes to say thank you.. Not too shabby.
In helping others, you help yourself. Forget altruism, get the authoritative, organic backlink. Serves us all!
Places to post Testimonials:-
- Client’s Website
Places to post Reviews
- Google+ (place/Map/whatever it’s called tomorrow)
- Yelp
- Angie’s List
- Yahoo or Bing
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