Houzz is an extraordinarily popular website/app for people to collect ideas for building or remodeling a home.  Users can create folders of designs that they like for home exteriors, kitchens, bathrooms, and other indoor living spaces.

How is Houzz helpful to you as a builder?

A strong presence on Houzz will boost your online authority (i.e. help with search rankings) and get your business more exposure. With over 20 million users in the United States alone, many of whom are right now thinking about building a home, this is not an opportunity to miss. You need to be highly visible when users search for pictures, examples, and ideas for their home projects and for when they search for builders in your local area.

How do you become ‘highly visible’ to Houzz users?

The more proactive on the site you are the more your company will show up in those searches.  

How can you be more visible on Houzz?

There are several different ways to interact with others on Houzz. The first is through creating a portfolio of your completed projects for home building clients to search and gather ideas for their new home. Another way is to network with other subcontractors and suppliers that you work closely with on your home building projects. A third way is to be helpful on question forums when homeowners ask questions as this builds rapport with them and increases your authority. 

How can you create a successful Houzz portfolio?

1. Create a profile for your company. This includes your email, phone number, website, address, and a blurb about your specialization. You will also upload a profile and cover photo for your business. For these photos, you will want to use professional images that represent your business well and communicate to the users the quality of work you complete.
2. Upload a portfolio of completed projects. Show off your work through before and after photos. Be sure to use high resolution professional quality images to really showcase your work. If you don’t have access to professional photos, a home builder photo editing service can make phone pics look like near professional quality. The phrase “a picture is worth a thousand words” is very true in this environment. The more pleasing and eye catching your project photos are the more frequently they will be saved to the Ideabooks of users, which will increase your exposure among other users and promote your visibility on Houzz. Your project names should include a descriptive name along with the location.
3. Use plenty of relevant keywords. When you upload your project photos, list as many relevant keywords as possible. A goal would be to have 5-25 keywords per photo. These keyword tags are not visible to users, but help to make your project photos more visible on Houzz. You want to use general (ex. contemporary kitchen) and specific (ex. subway tile backsplash) keywords. In describing your projects, keep in mind popular trends and materials used. You don’t want to use industry specific terms, but use everyday common language that your customer would use.
4. Don’t skip the extras! Some additional items will be indicated for your completed projects. You will enter a location tag that will allow users searching for professionals in your area to find your completed work. A style of the room or house will be marked in the entry and you will also want to put in a link back to your business website.
5. Offer idea books. You can also create your own Ideabooks where photos can be grouped according to types of products, colors, settings, or specific rooms. It gives users a different way to look at your projects. They could browse a folder of “contemporary kitchens” to look for ones they like rather than looking through all of the completed home projects.
6. Ask your clients to review your business on Houzz. The more positive reviews you have, the more authoritative your profile is in Houzz’ eyes and you gain more exposure. You want to have at least 3 reviews, but 10 or more is best. 
7. Put a Houzz link on your company website.

How can you leverage subcontractor and supplier relationships to maximize exposure?

If you worked with any subcontractors or suppliers who are also on Houzz, you will want to give credit to them in the “Credits” line underneath the project description when you are on the project page. Once you tag another professional on your project and they accept it, you Houzz projects will show up on their Houzz page as well. If a user clicks on a project from their page, it will link them back to your Houzz page where more photos will be seen from that project. This will increase your exposure by allowing users to add your pictures to their Ideabooks, which can in turn, allow their followers to also see them giving you further exposure. 

You can also follow other professionals, competitors, manufacturers, and associations on Houzz. Networking with area designers will help to drive business. Like a social network, followers will be notified when the business has new photos, Ideabooks, or are featured in an article.

How do you interact with homeowners on Houzz?

Houzz users can comment on your photos and ask questions regarding products used, colors, etc.. To help build your rapport with the homeowners and increase your online authority, you should take the time to answer their questions, provide a helpful tip, and thank them for their interest. By providing them with useful information it will go a longer way than a hard sell in this community. Even those who aren’t quite in the buying phase yet could become prospective clients in the future. Your Houzz activity is also monitored in a tab, so users can see how active and engaged a professional is on the site.

What makes a business successful on Houzz?

Those who are most successful on Houzz will be those who have invested time and effort into their profile by adding high quality photos, keywords in their photo descriptions, information about the company, and stay active on the site by uploading new content frequently (weekly/monthly) and engage with users through answering questions or providing tips. 

If you have more marketing questions regarding this or other social media platforms, join our Home Builder Marketing Group on Facebook as we discuss ways to promote your business in the always changing market.  Feel free to contact us at Advent Builder Marketing with your specific business’ needs. We’re happy to provide free, actionable advice. 

Want more help? Colene here at Advent Builder Marketing is a Houzz expert and would be happy to talk with you further about your Houzz needs.

The post Helpful Houzz Hints for Home Builders – How to Boost Your Online Authority and Build Brand Awareness appeared first on Advent Builder Marketing.

But where the heck do you start?

There are lots of tools you can use to drive qualified, profitable leads, but there are three that are absolutely fundamental to all others:

1) A well performing website

90% of home buyers (including 73% of senior home buyers) will search for options or research a home builder online before contacting you (NAR 2017 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers). Regardless of which marketing tools are used, and even for word of mouth potential customers, eventually nearly ALL of your prospective customers are going to funnel through your website BEFORE they decide to take the next step with you. Your website is the lynch pin to all your marketing efforts.

You build high quality homes. Your website needs to convey that with every fiber of its being. It needs to connect visually (great photos, presentation, etc.), intellectually (sound reasoning, your unique selling points, etc.) and emotionally. Yes, emotionally. Studies show most people make decisions, like building a home, based upon emotions and then back them up with reasoning. If you’re site is ignoring this point, you’re missing out on great leads.

Secondly, your site needs to encourage the right prospects to contact you. Notice I said the ‘right’ prospects. A great site will subtly discourage those customers who are not a good fit while encouraging the right prospects to contact you with effective calls to action.

2) Local search optimization and citations

If you’re hard to find, or your competitors are showing up more than you, that’s a problem. Search optimization (SEO) is nothing more than optimizing your website so that you show up when someone searches for “home builders” in your area. There are things that need to be done on your website, as well as things to be done outside your website. One of the most important things are citation listings. There are litterally hundreds of sites out there, sites like foursquare, apple maps, mapquest, superpages, yellowbook, and on and on, that will list your site. The more of those that have consistent information pointing back to your website, the better you’ll rank.

3) Review and reputation management

Reviews matter. Even for a product like building a home, reviews matter. Inc Magazine reported 91% of consumers pay attention to reviews and 84% of them trust online reviews as much as friends’ recommendations. And reviews affect your search rankings. If you have poor reviews, or they’re non-existent, this can be a great area to improve the volume of interested prospects visiting your website. There are automated tools that can make getting and improving reviews easy.

That’s it. If you don’t know where to start when it comes to digital marketing to help drive more sales as the housing market starts to slip, those are the big three to start. No doubt you’ve got questions, and we’re here to answer them. Just click here to schedule a quick chat and we’ll be happy to answer any questions you have and offer some free advice without obligation.

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1) Find out when home building competitors are mentioned on the web

If you have a gmail or google account, you can set an alert to get notified every time someone somewhere on the internet mentions your competition. This is a great way to keep tabs on what is going on in your local home building market, and get insight into how your competition is promoting themselves.

2) See what home builders are doing on social media

Facebook, Pinterest, Houzz and more… if your competition has an account, make sure you follow them. For some incredible insight into Twitter and Instagram posts, use Keyhole. Keyhole analyzes posts giving you detailed metrics of your competitors such as posts, impressions and reach. It can also provide demographics, share of posts, geolocation and more.

3) Find out what keywords your home building competitors are ranking for

Google’s keyword planner is a great tool for ferreting out what the best search terms are that your website needs to be optimized for. However, you can also find out about competitors data as a feature of the tool. If you’re looking for even more competitor information, SEMRush has some great tools for analyzing competitor keywords, ranking and traffic. You’ll quickly learn what your competition is doing to capture leads.

4) Find out where their website visitor traffic is coming from

A backlink analyzer scours the web to find pages that link to whatever site you’re wanting to research. With a tool like the Moz Link Explorer, you can find out where your competition is listed on the web and make sure you’re listed there as well.

5) Find out where other custom home builders are advertising

What Runs Where technically specializes in helping businesses buy paid advertising, but it has some great tools to help watch what your competition is doing as well. It supports dozens of ad networks and allows you to track a list of your competitors. You can even set alerts to find out the moment your home building competitors launch a new ad or publish new content!

6) Don’t forget to play average consumer!

If your home building competition is harvesting contact information as they should, make sure you subscribe to any email subscription they are utilizing on their website. To keep things anonymous, use a non business related email address or create a generic email account with gmail, yahoo or other free email providers to use as a proxy for the subscriptions.

What if find out my home building competitors aren’t doing much in terms of digital marketing?

Well then… sit back and get ready for a pretty easy home run! Most home buyers start their search or do significant research online before getting serious about selecting a home builder. If most of your competition is taking a very passive online strategy, with nothing more than a website serving as an online brochure, you’re in a position to get a serious leg up! By employing some basic pro-active strategies, you’ll get your name out in front of more potential home buying customers for a minimal investment.

Feeling a bit overwhelmed by any of the above? We totally understand. We do this for a living and sometimes it’s taxing for us too! Feel free to give us a call and we’d be happy to help and answer any questions you may have.

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