SEO FOR INTERIOR DESIGNERS - 5 COMMON MISTAKES (AND HOW TO FIX THEM)
- Dan White
- Jul 1, 2024
- 10 min read
Updated: Mar 27
Launching or scaling your interior design studio? You know that leads are the lifeblood of your business. Here's how SEO can help those leads to keep flowing.
For over a decade now I've worked with interior designers on their SEO - and seen the results it brings. So, following on from my posts about SEO for luxury brands, SEO for architects and SEO for kitchen designers, I'm turning my attention to SEO for interior designers.
We'll start by covering the fundamentals. What then follows are 5 of the most common mistakes for interior design SEO that I've seen time and again when studios market their brands on Google - and what you can do to solve them. Here's what they are:
SEO FUNDAMENTALS FOR INTERIOR DESIGNERS
Inbetween the clients, the costings and the samples, the last thing you'll likely want to think about is SEO.
You should though. It's a marketing tactic which can provide a consistent and cost-effective way of generating leads all year round. It's not the easiest thing to understand though - SEO is a narrow label for a broad category of different tactics. Some are technical and some are creative but all of them can help a brand to rank higher on Google for the right and relevant keywords.
While you don't have to know every nuance of SEO, understanding the basics is always helpful, giving you a clearer understanding of things and how they work.
If you do want to have a deeper read then I can't recommend highly enough the Beginners Guide to SEO from Moz. It covers all the essentials and is regularly kept up to date.
If you have other areas besides SEO that you want to concentrate on then see how an SEO Consultant like myself can help.
THE DIFFERENT AREAS OF SEO
ON-SITE SEO: Everything on your website - the copy, the images and the links can all be adjusted to help the pages appear more often for relevant searches in Google.
OFF-SITE SEO: Everything off your website - specifically links and mentions from other websites to your website Google looks at as a vote of trust
TECHNICAL SEO: Everything on your website that you can't see. The code, the architecture, how fast it is. All of this affects Google's ability to discover and rank a brands pages.
CONTENT MARKETING: Additional blog posts, guides or resources you add to your site can be discovered by Google, meaning more people can find you via different searches.
LOCAL SEO: Optimising your Google My Business listing is crucial to be found more often for local searches e.g. 'interior designer surrey'.
INTERNATIONAL SEO: If your studio offers services to an international client base, international SEO helps your content to appear in the right versions of Google in that country or territory.
Not sure how your website is performing across these areas?
Then get in touch to ask about an SEO Audit.
THE MOST COMMON MISTAKES WITH INTERIOR DESIGN SEO (AND HOW TO FIX THEM)
I've worked with numerous interior designers over years on their SEO. Both residential and commercial designers, local and international; from those offering colour schemes for those on a budget to whole house transformations for high net worth individuals.
Regardless of the type of interior design on offer, almost every one of them has made at least 1 of these 5 most common SEO mistakes. Each item is often overlooked but sorting them out can make a big difference to your SEO, resulting in more traffic and more leads from your website.
MISTAKE 1: NOT ENOUGH PAGES TO RANK IN GOOGLE
Interior designers fall into a common but awkward trap - they want to rank in Google but also want a lean, minimalist website.
A single page interiors website, while aesthetically beautiful is nowhere near enough for Google to rank. Everything is bundled into a single page which won't show your expertise. It's a generic beautiful business card, but not a lead generating tool.
Let's imagine a hypothetical interior design studio. While they naturally offer interior design, digging a little deeper you find that they:
Actually specialise in commercial interior design
Want to win more work in the restaurant space
Want to offer their services to only London restaurants
Also have extensive experience in Italian restaurants
There is always a relevant result.
Here, Alex Waterworth Interiors uses a case study to rank in the results for 'Italian restaurant interior design london'.
Building a page about restaurant interior design in London, or Italian restaurant design is much more likely to reach the right people in Google and much more likely to covert someone who has can see that your team are experts in a specific field.
Naturally, the studio may want to do more than just Italian restaurant design. You could offer other pages of restaurants styles, but a page a topic is ideal. We can tell through Keyword Research what people are searching for so having multiple pages specialised to different areas is only going to help in the long term.
Here, commercial interior designers Liqui Design utilise clear and separate category pages for each of the sectors they want to optimise their website for.
The best way to summarise this is to ask yourself the following questions and build pages around them:
QUESTIONS TO ASK OF YOUR WEBSITE:
Do you offer residential or commercial interior design services?
The most common keywords are based around - Commercial interior design, residential interior design
Where in the world do you offer those services to?
The most common keywords are based around - Counties, towns, districts and large villages
What types of property do you work on?
Common keywords are grouped around property function if commercial - Restaurant, office, gym etc, or by property type if residential - Country, penthouse, terrace etc
What specific styles or design influences do you offer?
Common keywords include: Victorian, mid-century modern, scandi, bauhaus, passivhaus etc
Are there specific service types you offer?For instance, lighting design, architectural design, kitchen design
MISTAKE 2: IMAGES ADDED ARE TOO BIG
The HD photographs in a portfolio are what sells a studio to the world. While a site includes convincing copy and BIID accreditations it's the images showcasing your style which people are going to fall in love with.
Here, stunning images from StephensonWright showcase the large scale images that are often used on interior design websites.
As a result the trend for gigantic images spanning entire pages are all too common, but adding in them could be harming your SEO if not done properly.
Big images have big file sizes - and big file sizes can slow your website down. Often single images could be as high as 15mb, when ideally we would want an entire pages worth of images to be less than 3mb. The measurement of site speed is complicated (this post on Core Web Vitals goes into the details) so the challenge is to ensure the images are helping rather than hindering a websites performance in Google.
Because of the importance, size and frequency of stunning visuals on an interior designers website this needs more attention than most. Compromise is often what's needed. If you look at optimising your images yourself:
Resize your image first before compressing it to reduce file size first to the dimensions of the screen you expect to see the image on. There's little point uploading the equivalent of an A3 poster if on the website it will only take up the space of a postage stamp.
Experiment with different image compression rates. Compress Jpeg is a useful tool for this. You can see how much smaller you can make the file without losing quality.
Check what device your visitors are viewing your website on. Huge images don't need to be huge if everyone sees them on a smartphone. Likewise, small images won't work on widescreen monitors. You can see what devices the majority of people use via your Analytics.
MISTAKE 3: NOT ENOUGH GOOGLE REVIEWS
A Google Business Profile for an interiors website is crucial to optimise. It gives the first impression of a brand even before someone has visited a website.
Part of this listing is your star rating, which is based on reviews scored from 1 star to 5 stars and interior designers have an all too common problem. Because projects can take months or years, to complete, the number of people who are able to leave reviews in any given year is likely to be in the single figures.
In itself, this is not a problem. After all, a few 5 stars reviews are better than several average recommendations.
The problem arises is that a small number of reviews leaves a brand vulnerable if, and more often when, a bad review comes along. A dreaded 1 star review from an angry client, a case of mistaken identity or someone with too much time on their hands can topple your average rating from a premium 5 stars to something much less attractive.
As this is the first thing people see of a brand online it can seriously affect first impressions of a brand.
Here, TME Interiors and Hannah Redden are well defended against 1 star reviews as a result of their 20+, 5 star reviews they have collected.
My solution where it's possible is to:
Consistently build up reviews in the long term from happy clients. If you haven't done this then contact historic clients to ask
Clients though can be understandably reluctant to reveal themselves. If this happens then look to your suppliers for reviews instead. Architects, photographers, landscape gardeners and antique dealers you work with are much easier to convince
If you do receive a negative review in whatever form, do respond to it. It gives you a platform to explain the situation
MISTAKE 4: TRYING TO OUTRANK THOSE AT THE TOP OF GOOGLE
When we talk about ranking a website on Google what we mean by default is ranking a website in the 1st position on Google. After all, the top spot receives the most attention.
However, when it comes the interior design SEO, often the clients I've started working with find themselves a long way behind the competition so the top spots are dominated by websites far bigger, or more authoritative than their own. When we talk about competition we're also not just talking about other interior designers in your local area. Plenty of other websites have an interest in getting in front of people looking for interior design services.
On so many occasions if you search for 'interior design in [location]' you'll see the top results are occupied by:
Houzz - who have a page of interior designers operating in that location
Magazines who have written a feature on the top interior designers in that location
Trade Directories - Yelp, Yell, Bark etc will often appear offering a list of people available
Here are the search results for 'interior designer reading'. Houzz will often appear in the 1st organic position on Google. While it is possible to eventually outrank these competitors, sometimes the best approach is simply, if you can't beat them, then join them.
So, if you can, get yourself on Houzz and get in touch with the feature writer of the local magazines. Featuring yourself on other relevant websites can be hugely effective, quick solution of getting in front of target clients. You get access to their much larger audiences as well as appearing in the top positions on Google - albeit indirectly.
(It's worth emphasising the relevancy though of such listings. whereas something like Yelp may outrank your website doesn't mean featuring on there is advantageous, so be discerning).
MISTAKE 5: THE BLOG IS A MESS
The biggest challenge for interior designers always seems to be time. When it comes to 'blogging' then the most common result is an occasional post. Sometimes it's news from the studio, sometimes a clipping from a magazine feature. Occasionally it's a quick write up on a design trend which after an initial rush of interest is never looked at again.
While adding content like this to a website is well meaning, it has two consequences for your SEO:
First, when this approach happens over a long period of time, content which is off-topic, not read or has too few words means the overall quality of the site is reduced. If we had 5 good service pages but 100 old unused blog posts then the majority of the site doesn't amount to much and can actually begin to harm the performance of your 5 good pages.
Second, putting time and effort into adding random content takes away the time and effort which could be added into good content:
Content which is organised around keywords can bringing in additional traffic
It can also helps attract links to the website - which adds authority for SEO
The traffic that arrives is there for the long term if the focus is on 'evergreen' information
Here's a current client, Studio Hooton. Over the years we have together been able to fill their Journal with well researched articles, organised around keywords which are aimed at their target market.
The biggest piece of advice I can offer is take a pause and ask yourself:
What is the business direction over the next 12 months?
What topics can we talk about that align with this business direction?
What are our competitors doing?
How many articles can we realistically create each month?
Do we have someone that can do keyword research and advise on SEO strategy?
Do we the time and budget for a copywriter?
When content marketing is done proactively it can result in some serious results, bringing more traffic and more links to a website - which in time brings more leads and clients in the long term - but you may need to realign your strategy first.
SUMMARY
Although these are five of the most common mistakes I see with interior design SEO, there's a lot more to websites than just working on the items mentioned.
If you know that SEO is something which you should be investing in but aren't sure where to begin, then get in touch. I've spent the last decade working in SEO with a range of interior design clients and have seen first hand the new leads it can help deliver. Get in touch to organise an initial no obligation chat.