Afew months ago in the heart of Clerkenwell, we hosted a fantastic interior business boosting event to 20 women. The workshop was centred around how to take your interior business from good to great. We taught the budding designers all about branding, building a website, marketing, client relationships and importantly – SEO. Why? Well it has the potential to lead to increased web traffic & new clients. Now we’re not self proclaimed SEO experts, so we invited guest speaker Freddie Chatt, the founder of https://decorblueprint.com, to join us. If you don’t know what Decor Blue Print is, it’s a fantastic website aimed at helping interior designers grow their business. Freddie’s business related blogs are honestly packed with useful information so we’ll be linking our favourite articles of his below. For now though, we’ve spoken to the master himself to give you lot some of his top SEO tips for interior designers. So listen up and learn people…
Freddie & Athina chatting all things SEO.
So what even is SEO?
SEO stands for – Search Engine Optimisation. Quite simply it’s the activity taken to try and increase the quantity and quality of traffic from organic search results i.e that means mostly from Google.
SEO is one of those marketing tactics that has the illusion of great difficulty, but if you can learn just a tiny part of it and execute that – you’ll be light years ahead of most your competition in no time.
It’s one of the best long-term tactics for driving new prospective interior design clients through your website month after month.
Start firstly with keyword research
At its core, SEO is all about keywords. It’s main purpose is to try and make your website appear on Google with relevant keywords.
There are many tools to help you find relevant keywords that suit you. A great free tool is Ubersuggest. Combining this with your intuition can help you find the best keywords to target for your business.
E.g.
For example, let’s say you are an interior designer in Leeds. If you think about what people may search for when they want your service, something like ‘interior designers in leeds’. By putting this into Ubersuggest, you will see that 590 searches per month.
If you scroll down, you’ll then be able to see some more keyword ideas around your keyword that might also be useful for your website. It’s worth nothing however that some may not be relevant (e.g. people searching ‘interior design Leeds university’ are probably looking for a course at the university rather than for interior design services).
How to rank for those keywords (on page SEO)
Now you have a keyword decided, or maybe even a few that you want to try and rank for – it’s time to get down to business and optimise your site. Optimising your site means you’ll need to make small changes on your web pages (outlined below) that essentially makes Google happy and tells it you’re your SEO friendly! These small changes can be as simple as ensuring the URL of your website contains your chosen keywords.
These are the key areas you need to make sure your keyword is mentioned:
Page Title – This is the main way of telling Google and users what your page is about.
Meta Description – This is the short description that also shows in Google results. This doesn’t influence rankings but can impact the number of people who click through to your website.
Headings (H1, 2,3,4…) – These are the different bold headings you can add to a page. They give structure to your pages, making it easier for users and Google read and understand it.
Body Copy – This is all of the text on the page. Google reads all of this when it crawls your site. It’s important to put your keywords here as much as possible but in a realistic way i.e. don’t just add the keywords everywhere, it needs to make sense.
Alt Tags – You add these to images to help Google to identify what is in the images on your page.
URL’s – It is important to keep your URLs as short as possible whilst including your target keyword.
Internal Links – Add links with your keywords in, to the pages you want to rank for those keywords.
Why you should blog to reach new customers
Research by Hubspot has proven that businesses using blogs get 67% more leads than those who don’t! So if you haven’t already started a blog then you better get to work now!
However, to get the most out of your blog you need to approach it strategically and make sure you are creating content that your potential clients are looking for. This comes back again to the keywords. Let’s take an example of an interior designer who specialises in creating spaces suitable for children. You could create content specifically around children’s rooms, such as “Children’s Bedroom Ideas”, “Children’s Bedroom Colour Schemes” etc.
From Ubersuggest, you can see additional ideas around storage, paint colours, or splitting out the article into boys and girls articles.
Creating relevant content to your offering that is also targeted to a keyword will both help you drive more traffic from Google and help you convert them to clients in future.
Freddie’s Top Tip: For every article you write about a specific room (e.g. Bedroom Colour Scheme Ideas) – you can write a similar article across every other room in the house (kitchen, hallway, living room, etc).
Local SEO for interior designers
If your interior design business caters for a local market – you will need to have set up your own Google My Business page to maximise your chances of getting featured in the business listings that show up for location-specific searches (like ‘interior designers in essex’). Head over to google.com/business and follow the simple steps to get your listing created.
Next, follow these tips to increase the chances of you showing up:
- Fill out your business listing as completely as you can
- Upload your best photos so clients can see your work quickly
- Keep it updated, if you change office, change your address – Google can penalise you if it realises the information is not correct
- Ask clients to leave reviews and respond to them – having reviews will increase the number of clicks you get, and responding to the reviews will show you are active on the business listing.
There you have it, the core components of interior design SEO – actioning even a few of these steps will you climb up those search results and drive more traffic, leads and clients before you know it.
If you want to learn more about Freddie and his amazing website head to https://decorblueprint.com. Some of our favourite articles are:
https://decorblueprint.com/interior-design-pricing/
https://decorblueprint.com/interior-design-hashtags/
https://decorblueprint.com/interior-design-pricing/
https://decorblueprint.com/social-media-for-interior-designers/
