How to Improve Your SEO in 2024: 5 Tips to Help Interior Designers Get Found Online

How do your customers find you? Maybe some of your happy clients recommend you to their friends. Or maybe you know architects or other people in design-adjacent fields who send clients your way. However, in many industries, would-be clients find companies and services through internet searches. If your customers can’t find you online, you’re missing out!

One of the best ways to make sure you can be found online is to use search engine optimization (SEO) on your website. SEO involves strategically placing the right keywords so your blogs (or other kinds of web content) show up when your target audience searches for design services. It’s a critical part of marketing for interior designers, but it can be hard to master. Here are five tips to help demystify the process.

1. Keywords Are Key

Great SEO starts with great keywords. When you choose keywords, you select words and phrases that your target audience is likely to search for. Fortunately, you don’t have to guess. When you use keyword research tools like SEMrush or Google Keyword Planner, you’ll get to see the exact keywords your target audience is searching for. These keywords will be divided into a few categories:

• Low-Competition Keywords: Fewer people are searching for these keywords, and fewer sites are ranking for them, so your site has a better chance of showing up high on the SERP (search engine results page).
• High-Competition Keywords: Lots of people search for these keywords, and lots of sites rank for them — if your site is smaller or newer, it’s a lot harder to rank for these keywords.
• Medium-Competition Keywords: These are somewhere in between low-competition and high-competition keywords.

When you choose the keywords to use on your web pages, it’s also wise to use a balance of long-tail and short-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords are longer phrases (like “designer specializing in mid-century modern”). There isn’t as much competition around them, so they’re easier to rank for. Short-tail keywords (like “interior designer”) have a lot more competition, and it’s harder to rank for them.

2. Stunning Visuals With Smart SEO

As a key part of digital marketing for interior designers, a quality SEO strategy can help get more potential clients to your website. However, if they arrive and find disappointing visuals, they’ll likely go elsewhere. But did you know you can do even more to optimize your images for search engines?

When you carefully plan your file names and alt text (a brief description of each image), you make it easier for search engines to understand your images. When search engines can get a better sense of the images on your site, you have a better chance of ranking higher.

Having descriptive alt text is particularly important for designers — it makes it more likely that your images will rank highly in Google Image Search. And when people look for design ideas, Google Images is one of the first places they look.

Creating the right file names and alt text isn’t hard. The goal is to be descriptive. For example, if you include a photo of a living room you’ve just designed, a file name like “modern-living-room-with-dark-green-couches.jpg” will work. You could use “a modern living room combining neutral walls with dark green velvet couches” for the alt text.

You can, of course, use SEO to draw more clients to your website, where they’ll see the beautiful visuals of your work. However, you should also consider rounding out your interior designer marketing strategy by posting on visually-oriented Instagram and Pinterest.

Pinterest is a particularly great site for interior designers. This site helps members find photos and other visuals of projects and design styles they want to emulate. Pinterest’s demographics also make it ideal for designers to find new clients.

Almost half of Pinterest users are highly educated and have an annual income of more than $100,000 — two factors that make them more likely to seek interior design services. Additionally, about two-thirds of Pinterest users go to Pinterest first to find both services and new ideas.

Both Pinterest and Instagram also use hashtags — valuable tools when it comes to marketing for interior designers. Including the relevant hashtags on your images will make your business easier for potential clients to find.

3. Content That Connects

A great SEO strategy gets potential clients to your website, but it doesn’t end there. Part of online marketing for interior design is creating content that adds value to your visitors’ lives.

If you’ve ever Googled something, clicked a promising result, and then found a poorly written blog that didn’t even meet the intent of your search, you know how frustrating it can be when you find content that doesn’t connect with you. But quality content does more than just make your site visitors happy — it can also help you rank higher on the SERP.

When visitors spend more time on your website, Google determines that it’s a quality site and boosts its rank accordingly.

How do you go about creating content that connects with your audience? Maintaining an active blog is a key part of SEO, but you don’t need to limit yourself to just blogs. Videos, podcasts, infographics, and other pages on a variety of topics can add some interest and make your website more engaging.

Not sure where to start? Here are some topics and general subject areas to consider:

• Showing off newly completed projects or projects in progress
• Discussing current trends in the design industry
• Discussing historical styles of design
• Answering common questions about design
• Interviewing others in the design field or related fields

Even if someone finds your site purely by chance, quality content might make them a repeat visitor — and eventually a customer.

4. Get Local With SEO

As an interior designer, you work within a limited geographic area. So logically, if you want your SEO strategy to bring you more clients, you’ll need to make sure you optimize your site for local searches (and not just for searches for interior design in general). That way, people near you searching for design services will be more likely to find you. Here are some strategies for doing so:

• Create or claim your Google Business Profile (GBP)
• Make sure you’re in local directories like TripAdvisor, Yellow Pages, and Yelp
• Include content specific to your location (like design-related local news)
• Do location-specific keyword research (most keyword research tools make it easy to do so)
• Strategically reach out to local sites to see if they’re willing to link back to your site

You should also make sure your content is optimized for mobile. That’s a good idea anyway, but many people looking for local businesses will search on their phones when they’re already out.

5. Backlinks and Collaborations

Collaborating with other websites or organizations can enrich the content on your site. However, it’s important for another reason — building backlinks. A backlink is when another website links back to yours. That might not sound like a big deal, but backlinks can have a major positive influence on your SEO.

When a reputable site links to yours, search engines see your site as being more credible, so you’ll likely see better SERP rankings. It’s an often-overlooked strategy, but it’s important for digital marketing for interior designers.

There’s nothing wrong with reaching out to ask for backlinks, but you might find more success with a collaborative approach. For example, you might consider asking a local architect or artist to write a guest post for your blog. That way, your audience benefits from seeing a new perspective, the architect or artist might increase their following, and you’ll get a valuable backlink when the guest blogger links to the post from their own website.

SEO: The Cornerstone of Any Great Marketing Plan

The information above can be a lot to take in, especially if you don’t have marketing experience. However, you don’t have to put all of these tips to use all at once. SEO is a marathon — not a sprint. When you’re patient, consistent, and willing to put in the effort, you’ll likely be rewarded.

However, if you’re like many interior designers, it can be hard to do your own marketing while also running your business. That’s where we can help. At Behind the Design, we offer marketing for interior designers and architects. Traditional digital marketing agencies know marketing, but they don’t know interior design. We know both!

We’ll work with you to create a custom marketing plan tailored to both your industry and your individual business. If you want to know more about our interior design marketing (or you’re ready to start), get in touch today!