Working with kitchen designers on their SEO is one of my favourite kind of jobs. This comes from knowing how much business can be generated from a single successful sale via Google.
For over a decade now I've been working with brands for the home on the SEO including interior designers, architects and luxury home furnishing brands. Now, I'm turning my attention to kitchen designers and SEO to show how you can win more work from your website.
What follows is tailored towards independent kitchen designers and fitters in the UK. You can learn about SEO anywhere but what follows are 6 crucial pieces of SEO advice that are specific to the kitchen design industry. This post goes into slightly more detail than you'll find on other websites but I know that working on these parts of your SEO can really help increase the number of leads you receive. Here's the areas we'll be covering:
SEO FOR KITCHEN DESIGNERS
THE FUNDAMENTALS OF THE KITCHEN MARKET ON GOOGLE
Between chasing suppliers and endless revisions from clients I'm sure that marketing, let alone SEO, is one of the last things on your mind. However, a small but consistent amount of time and effort invested into your website can provide a real and meaningful impact. How does a regular flow of new leads from customers looking for a new kitchen sound? This starts with Google.
THE DEMAND FOR KITCHEN DESIGN SERVICES
Using data from Google Keyword Planner we can see the demand for all the searches that fall within the kitchen design market in the UK. Since 2022, the market has remained consistently strong and always peaks in January of each year with around 1.1 million searches/month before gradually slowing down. The red line you see also shows us how many of these searches are carried out by people using smartphones. It shows a huge market that kitchen designers could be tapping into.
THE DIFFERENT PARTS OF SEO
SEO isn't just one thing and can be split into several sub-disciplines. Here's the one's that are most relevant to kitchen designers that we'll be exploring throughout the rest of this post.
ON-SITE SEO: The area where often the most time is spent. On-site SEO covers everything you that you can normally see on a website. This includes the pictures, the copy, the links and the meta data (which you can see in the top tab). All of this can be adjusted to help Google understand what a website is about.
OFF-SITE SEO: In contrast to On-site SEO, this covers all of the features away from your website which Google will also look at when deciding where to rank a page. This mainly involves things such as links and mentions on other websites.
LOCAL SEO: Particularly important for kitchen designers who service clients in their local area, local SEO looks at all the things you can do to help both your website and your Google My Business listing appear more often for the right searches when someone looks for something with a local angle such as 'kitchen designers in york'.
TECHNICAL SEO: This is a deep dive into the code of a website, making sure that various settings load fast and load correctly so both Google and people can find and understand your website.
CONTENT MARKETING: For kitchen designers, content marketing focusses heavily on case studies and blog posts which can be used to bring in extra traffic for other less common things which people might search for. It also underpins the rest of the website to help Google to understand what a website is all about.
LEARNING MORE ABOUT SEO
While SEO can help get your website into the right search results on Google, the whole of SEO is not something that's particularly easy to understand. Most of it is not complicated, just that there's a lot of it combining a range of technical and creative approaches. But like a kitchen, SEO works best when it's built into the original design, rather than as an afterthought.
As a result, it's always useful to learn a little and understand the basic foundations of SEO. One of the key places I always recommend people start is with the Beginners Guide to SEO from a company called Moz. They've created an easy to understand guide which can be read in a couple of hours. Plus, it's updated regularly so the information you'll be learning about isn't redundant as Google evolves.
However, if SEO is something you'd rather not think about then a freelance SEO consultant can always help you out. Drop me a message and we can arrange a zero obligation chat.
THE 6 SEO TIPS FOR KITCHEN DESIGNERS TO WIN MORE WORK
From installing Bulthaup kitchens in architect designed homes to simple refits to those on a budget, time and again these are the biggest areas for improvement on kitchen design websites. If you're able to improve each of these areas then, given time, it should hopefully increase the amount of visibility your website - leading to winning more work in the long term.
TIP 1: CHOOSING THE MOST RELEVANT KEYWORDS
ON-SITE SEO FOR FINDING YOUR NICHE
Any of the other SEO articles online will be telling you about keywords. They are certainly important but when it comes to the kitchen industry there's an additional layer of complexity - there's not many keywords to choose from.
In different industries there's a wide range of different words or phrases that can be used when people are searching to find a specific product or service. But when it comes to kitchens? Well, kitchens are kitchens. It means it's a narrow market where everyone is competing for the same traffic - specifically everyone is optimising their sites for 'kitchen designer in [location]'.
However, there are a few niches which designers can tap into.
If you use a tool such as Google Keyword Planner, you can see a a common pattern across the UK for people searching for other three other sub-categories of kitchens. All of them are narrow, but may provide a point of differentiation...
Kitchens by style - specifically german kitchens, shaker kitchens and scandi kitchens
Kitchens by budget - specifically luxury kitchens and bespoke kitchens
Kitchens by service - specifically kitchen renovation, kitchen extensions and kitchen planning
Assuming your business offers one of these services, optimising for a phrase which isn't 'kitchen designer in [location]' means by default there is less competition as you're able to differentiate yourself. Plus, you increase relevancy. So, it's the right sort of potential customers coming through to your website.
NEXT STEPS
Use tools such as Google Keyword Planner (or any other SEO tool) to see what available keywords are most relevant to you. Once selected this target keyword - which will no doubt be the most important keyword on your website - will need to be applied to the home page (which has the greatest chance of ranking). Learning how you can apply this keyword to the homepage can be found in the Beginner's Guide to SEO by Moz - mentioned earlier.
TIP 2: OPTIMISING IMAGES AND VIDEOS
TECHNICAL SEO FOR FASTER PERFORMANCE
The stunning images and videos which feature across the websites of kitchen designers are naturally the strongest selling point to encourage people to contact you. Trying to get across the visceral feel and sense of a kitchen space is difficult via a screen which is why across every kitchen website you will see big videos and big images to show what a firm can deliver.
One example I particularly like is Blakes London who have a full width carousel of eight different animated images which truly showcase their projects.
While full sized images work really well to convince prospective customers, the videos and images which are added to a website almost always slow it down. When the total size of a webpage shouldn't ideally be any more than 3mb in size, often you will find single images that are 15mb or larger.
How fast a webpage loads is just one of a whole range of things which Google will look at in determining where a page should appear in it's results. The elements that make this up are grouped into something called Core Web Vitals. (Separately, it's also proven that slower websites lead to fewer conversions as shown in these stats collected by Hubspot here).
So the challenge is, how do you get your images and videos to load fast - without compromising on quality?
FOR OPTIMISING IMAGES
With the images on your site, there's two stages to work through - resizing and then compressing. Both of these mean the file you upload is smaller, meaning it will load faster - but the quality of the image will visually be as clear as it was before you started.
Resizing - An image can be easily edited using a variety of online tools such as Image Resizer or Crop Image. Try to resize the image to fit the dimensions of the screen you would expect it to be viewed on. As mentioned earlier, when looking at the demand for kitchens in the UK, a huge percentage of people will be seeing your images on smartphones so often image dimensions can be smaller. Naturally, people will also be browsing on a regular computer screen so 1200px wide images (the width of images in this post) is a decent size without being too big or too small
Compression - Tools such as Compress Jpg or TinyPNG. will do this job for you. Sometimes you need to play around with the compression level in order not to compromise on the quality of the image but it is often surprising at how much smaller you can make a file - as shown here:
Bonus: It's also really valuable when doing this that you also give you image file names logical file names (for example: german-kitchen-worktop-2024.jpg rather than 1234.jpg. Plus, add alt-text to your images. Both of these things provide additional signals to Google about what a page is about.
FOR OPTIMISING VIDEOS
When it comes to optimising videos you will often need to involve a website developer as different video file types and different video players are harder than images to compress successfully. Before you hire someone though:
Check to see whether the video is really needed? Even small videos or animations can carry a large file size so could it instead be swapped for a image or a GIF?
Could the location of the video be changed? If you need a video (perhaps to give a tour of your showroom) then could it be moved to another page if it's appearance is slowing down an important page? You could potentially link to it instead, given the page you're working a quicker load time
NEXT STEPS
If you want to see how quickly your web pages load then use GTmetrix and test them. The results will show you which elements that make up a web page are the biggest/slowest to load and make recommendations for how improve their performance. From there try and adjust the images and the videos on your key pages to see how that affect the load time and performance.
TIP 3: BUILDING CUSTOMER CONFIDENCE
CONTENT AND ON-SITE SEO WITH GOOGLE EEAT
When I work on client's websites a lot of the stuff I do is very specific. Fix this thing. Include this and remove that. Alongside a long list of specifics though there's several elements which make up Google's algorithms which are harder to pin down. One of these is Google EEAT.
In brief, Google EEAT stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. It's a combination of things across a website which should help a customer to feel more confident about buying something from you. In theory, the more you can demonstrate Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness - the better.
Every website needs to keep this in mind. However, certain websites, particularly when large sums of money are involved, need to pay more attention to this than others. And kitchen design websites are no exception. With projects easily running into five figure sums (and beyond) we need to extra careful for how information is presented to ensure websites have the best Google EEAT signals.
When it comes to kitchen design websites there are two essential areas which all websites need to have.
CASE STUDIES AND PROJECTS
Every kitchen website should include them and the more detail that is included the better. Think about your reader at this time. What do they want to know about a project? What do they want to see? How did you approach the job? Creating case studies is always a surprisingly long and complex task but really showcases recent work - as well as clearly demonstrating experience and expertise in what you do to Google.
CUSTOMER TESTIMONIALS
While these can naturally be included in case studies and projects too, a dedicated area of testimonials is often included, often on the home page to act as reinforcement that you know what you're doing. Once again, given the timescales of design and installation jobs - as well as the reluctance of private clients wanting to be public - they can be difficult to acquire but are essential in convincing customers and Google that you are trustworthy.
NEXT STEPS
Create and review the current case studies and projects you have on your website. Benchmark them against these questions from Google about whether or not the content you have created is helpful. Separately, if you haven't done so already collate a list of testimonials that can be added to your website.
TIP 4: OPTIMISING YOUR BUSINESS LISTING ON GOOGLE
LOCAL SEO
Any established kitchen showroom will already have a Google My Business listing up and running. A good looking listing is essential to give visitors the right impression before they have even clicked through to the website.
A Google My Business listing also has the potential to rank in Google independently of a website, particularly when the searches have a local intent such as 'kitchen showroom bristol' or 'kitchen designer in coventry'. There are a wide range of things you can do to edit and optimise your GMB listing to appear more often for relevant searches. There's an excellent guide from Backlinko if you would like to read more.
However, of the most crucial parts of your listing is reviews (5* star ones ideally) which strongly seem to influence how often your listing shows up when people search.
Alongside a large number of reviews helping to defend against the random 1 star complaints which come out of nowhere, multiple 5* reviews really seem to power a listing, helping a business to appear more often in the map pack - which will only show 3 results on any occasion.
Getting new reviews is hard though. The number of installs which may happen in any given year is never going to be all that many. And even then, customers can understandably want to share personal details publicly on the internet. If this is a challenge for your firm, then the alternative is to ask various suppliers or contractors you work alongside for reviews instead. With so many different elements that need to come together for a kitchen (or the kitchen as part of a bigger whole house build), there should be a good number of people who would be ready and willing to offer a legitimate review of your services.
NEXT STEPS
Compare how many reviews the competition has for your target keywords. From there contact the different suppliers and contractors you work alongside on different jobs to see if they are willing to provide a 5* review for your firm. Ideas of people who you may not have thought about include:
Artists, Sculptors and Photographers, Engineers, HVAC Specialists, Interior Designers, Land Agents, Landscape Gardeners, Lighting Designers, Mechanical, Electrical, and Plumbing (MEP) Engineers, Quantity Surveyors, Relocation Consultants, Security Technicians, Structural Engineers, Surveyors, Sustainability Consultants.
TIP 5: BUILDING LINKS FROM SUPPLIERS
OFF-SITE SEO FOR BUILDING AUTHORITY
One of the biggest advantages that kitchen suppliers have over so many other industries is the relationships with their suppliers. Whether it's particular worktops, seating, lighting or electrics you're going to know the brands you're happy to include as part of a job. So, let's make the most of these relationships.
One of the critical areas for influencing where a website ranks in Google is links from other websites back to your website. This is called off-site SEO but you may have also seen it called link building. Google looks at each link as a vote of trust and while not all links are created equally, the more high quality, relevant links you are able to acquire, the more trusted your website is and the more likely you are to rank in a search engines result pages.
Links can be acquired through all sorts of means from all sorts of websites but ensuring that there are links from your suppliers is one of the easiest ways to do this.
The vast majority of brands will carry a stockist page on their website - particularly for brands with an international reputation. These directory pages will include all of your contact details - but specifically will also have a link through to your website.
Take the example from luxury rug supplier Kasthall, above. They have a international 'Where to buy' section on their site linking through to various UK kitchen business. Gaining links such as these are easy - and you may already be featured on sites such as this without you even knowing.
NEXT STEPS
Draw up a list of all the brands you supply and recommend to customers. Create a list, locate their websites and see if they include a list of stockists. If you're not already included a quick email or call will help you to be included. Already included? Then make sure your details - especially your website link - is correct. Repeat the process with as many suppliers as you can find.
TIP 6: WINNING TRAFFIC AND LINKS FROM OTHER WEBSITES
OFF-SITE SEO FOR EXTRA EXPOSURE
As much as you can put the time into getting links back to your kitchen website from suppliers, there's a wider range of other websites we can also look at to expand our off-site SEO efforts.
The reason this is included is that sometimes, the client websites I work with aren't just going to rank. That's not to say they can't ever achieve a ranking, but that the gap between them and the competition is often so great to achieve in the time spans that we're working to. So, if you can't beat them, then join them.
Often when we're looking at a regular search engine results page for 'kitchen designer in [location],' websites such as Houzz will be one of the first results to appear. Trying to get in front of them on Google is hard, and that's often just for the regular organic results. Elsewhere on a traditional search result, you'll see all sorts of features which will sit above the regular list of websites. So, it pays to get yourself added to them.
There is a dual benefit to this:
Firstly, sitting on these other websites gets you in front of additional people, via other competitive search terms which you're not able to rank for right this moment. That means tapping into a new markets potentially unavailable to you right now with your current website
Secondly, depending on the website, you can also find yourself gaining a new link (or additional other positive signals Google looks at) which, much like the advice about building links from suppliers, can only help you in the long term
How much you need to do this and in what way you approach is really dependent on the precise circumstances of the website. However, the sites you could feature on broadly fall into two areas:
Trade Directories:
Lifestyle websites -
Hampshire Life (or the local equivalent), KBB Magazine, ELLE Decoration, Ideal Home, House Beautiful, Grand Designs Magazine.
NEXT STEPS
Pull together a list of websites you could look to reach out to in order to win additional links and publicity. Think about what different angles or stories you could provide them with. Could a new installation be showcased? Or an expert comment about the latest styles and trends for the year ahead? All of this could be interesting enough for them to feature you to their readers. Draw up a shortlist and sign up and/or contact them to see what can be achieved.
SUMMARY
These different areas of SEO are just a handful of a range of optimisations which can be carried out on a kitchen design website. Yet, there's often a whole lot more when it comes to websites depending on the size of your business and its goals.
If SEO is something which you think your business would benefit from to win new customer leads then send me a message. I've been working in SEO for over a decade and can show you first hand how increasing your visibility on Google can help generate new business. Get in touch to see how we could work together.
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