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If you work in the home remodeling or contracting industry you’ve most likely heard of Houzz. If you have not and don’t have a profile, you should get on that ASAP.
In comparison to something like Yelp, it has been adopted at a much slower pace but in my opinion, Houzz is much more powerful for companies that provide any type of service for the home.
Now, I promised you some actionable tips you can take away from this but it is 1200 words, so if time is an issue for you, here is the TL:DR version of how to get more customers from using our Houzz marketing guide.
Improving the Performance of Your Houzz Profile
1. Fill out every section completely
2. Start getting reviews ASAP and reach out to past customers
3. Create an optimized but compelling first sentence of your business description and aim for 200 words in total for your business description.
4. Don’t be lazy naming your projects and ideabooks, be descriptive and always give an address
5. Use high quality images with descriptive file names and titles
6. Add your main social accounts
7. Follow others and more importantly attract followers
Some of these are pretty obvious, others not so much. Keep in mind, this not only will help improve the performance of your profile in Houzz for relevant searches but also send better signals and relevance to your social profiles and website for search.
The rest of our guide will breakdown everything starting with the overview and all the way down to the nitty gritty task of naming your images.
Enjoy.
Complete Your Houzz Profile
Your Houzz profile should be 100% complete. This goes without saying and it is best practice. Don’t feel like you need to write a novel in each section but having something is important.
How come? Well, why would Houzz want to show its users a neglected profile that wouldn’t provide a good experience?
Optimize Your Business Name/Title
Sadly, Houzz follows suit with most of the other niche directories or as I like to call them, mini search engines, when it comes to their ranking system. Keywords are vital to ranking, whether you are doing SEO for your contracting business on Google or Houzz.
It’s not the all-powerful factor, but those companies with relevant keywords in their business names tend to perform better (all else being equal).
TIP: Try to include a relevant keyword in your business name but don’t overdo it. Nobody likes spam.
Example: If your business name is “Build Pros” but your chosen category for your profile is kitchen and bath designers, then use the name “Build Pros Kitchen & Bath” or “Build Pros Kitchen Design”.
If geography is more important or you have multiple locations, then you can do “Build Pros Los Angeles” etc.
Subtleness is the key and if it sounds like you are trying too hard to force in keywords you probably are.
Write a Better Business Description
As mentioned, when completing the overview section, you want to write a compelling first sentence that is both promotional and optimized.
The reason is because the first sentence is what appears under your name and reviews on a Houzz search results page.
You want this bit of text to be compelling and encourage someone looking for your service to click through to your profile.
Tell me which one makes you more compelled to visit, listing one or two?
TIP: Write a promotional first sentence (110 characters give or take) that’s both compelling and includes relevant keywords.
This part is also used as the meta description when your profile is displayed in search engines like Google.
For the rest of the description, I like to include one instance somewhere of “keyword + City” and also synonyms. So to continue with the remodeling example, I would include something like:
“We’ve been in the business of designing dream baths and doing kitchen remodeling in San Diego for 20 years.”
As expected, select any services you provide and add custom ones that are not listed. The same goes for Areas Served.
Lastly, you want to put your best foot forward so to say with your cover photos. As Houzz states, they show up in the search results page and can help get people to click your listing.
Get Houzz Reviews
In my opinion, reviews are probably the most important factor for obvious reasons. Not just the total number but the overall star rating.
It goes without saying that you should constantly be asking for/gathering reviews. Now, this next part is a tip I generally don’t share but will add so much more power and relevance to your reviews.
Some of your customers won’t know what to say or might even be lost. So just make a few suggestions.
“It would be great if you could leave us a review! Just a few words and you can talk about the job we performed for your home in “City”
It doesn’t happen every time, but subconsciously, your customer is more likely to include relevant keywords and even mentions of the city where.
Add those instances up over time and it makes your profile more relevant to your location.
Optimize Houzz Projects and Ideabooks
The most research I do on Houzz and profiles I visit, the more I believe Projects and Ideabooks play a key role in not only the mount of “credits” your profile will get but also the performance in Houzz searches.
Why?
It comes back to user experience and…….relevance. Sometimes Houzz users just like to browse and they most likely have a particular style in mind.
If all of your Projects are simply “Kitchens” or “Baths” then in the rare possibility that someone does find your profile or image in a search, they’ll ask themselves whether or not you can bring their dream contemporary kitchen to life.
So when you are creating your Houzz Projects, be descriptive when you name them. Include the type of style, colors, what room/part of the house and where the project was completed.
You do not necessarily need to include a location on every single project name but you should 100% include the primary city in the “Address” field.
This sends more signals to Houzz and when combined with some of the other recommendations really says, “We are the best professional in this area for the job at hand.”
Make Sure Your Photos
Check Your Images
Finally, we will go over the basics of proper image optimization.
We already said that working with high quality images was important for the user but there are things you should do before you even upload them.
It can be painstaking at times but whether you have a laptop or desktop computer, every image you upload should have an optimized file name.
Before you add the image to your profile or project, change it from the usual img0001.jpg to something that describes the image better like “Modern-Kitchen-Remodel-Seattle.jpg”
Then when uploading images to Houzz, fill out the necessary fields and add a few relevant keywords.
You’d be amazed at how big of a difference receiving credit from other Houzz users can have on your Houzz profile strength.
If users decide to share your images on social media or even embed them on their personal website or blog, then you’re really ahead of the pack.
Even at 1200 words I still feel like there is a lot more to cover but hopefully you found it useful. As always if you have questions, you can post them in the comments or message me.