hipCENTRAL Blog

Well the tail is growing with lots of weird and wonderful HIP keyword combinations bringing traffic to the site - January saw a 20% rise in unique visitors from December which is great. In terms of the the top performing keywords it will come as no surprise that they are, wait for it, HIP and HIPS.

Keywords:

hips 999 11.8 %
hip 655 7.7 %

In keyphrases:

hips 2230 9.5 %
hip 2092 8.9 %

I was just reading an article in the Guardian about the 900,000 enquiries that Learndirect gets every year from people wanting to switch career. The thing that struck me the most was that Domestic Energy Assessment was the most asked after.  I hope this still isn’t the case as I don’t believe there is currently enough well paid work to sustain the existing energy assessors…

A shake-up of the way local authority searches are carried out will be announced by the government today in an effort to speed up the housebuying process, amid criticism that some councils are dragging their heels and may delay people’s home information packs.

Read the rest of this entry »

I have just read that savvy home buyers
are using the information provided in HIPs to negotiate discounts on properties.  This is great, especially for first time buyers, but the full benefits of HIPS will only be realised when the Home Condition Report (HCR)  is made manadatory as it is the survey that many stretched first time buyers skimp on resulting in the possibility of their buying properties with significant hidden defects without realising it.  Additionally, the information in the HCR will provide further opportunities to negotiate discounts.

The site is currently doing well for “HIP Training” releated searches - remember these are based on the last 500 page loads and are only a snapshot.
Read the rest of this entry »

Estate agents could easily use a favourable EPC to sell one home over another. “This house will be £500 per month cheaper to run per year than the next is a selling point” will persuade some buyers.

The problem is that home owners are let down by estate agents that do nothing more than open the door for a prospective buyer.

I saw this cartoon too and it made me laugh. The not so funny thing is the fact that several different people may print it out.

Well this weeks snapshot shows an increasing number of searches coming from Yahoo and MSN. Termssuch as “HIPS London” and “HIPS Training” are bringing good traffic to the site and the regional search terms are continuing to do well as are generic terms such as HIPS, HIP, Home Information Packs etc.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tesco has pulled its property website but, according to the Times, they are thinking about launching a full estate agency service and there is no doubt that it will be cheap and the chances are they will follow the example of Asda and offer HIPS for free. Watch this space - they obviously want the seven out of eight pounds that are not spent at Tesco!

Yahoo have stopped providing this information now, but these results from May 2007 show the kind of terms that people were searching for with the number of searches - asssume that Google had 10 times as many

Read the rest of this entry »