Our Expert Guide to SEO for Interior Designers

Our Industry-specific SEO Top Tips

1. Conduct Keyword Research

You want to increase your rankings, but what terms do you want to increase your rankings for? After all, there’s no point in having your interior design website showing up as the top result when people search for local coffee shops!

To decide which search terms you want to rank for, conduct keyword research to identify keywords that:

1. Are relevant to your target audience(s) and your business
2. Have a relatively high search volume

Keywords can be split into two categories:

1. Short-tail
2. Long-tail

Short-tail keywords are typically quite broad, like ‘best interior designer’ or ‘residential interior designer’. Meanwhile, long-tail keywords are more specific, such as ‘modernist residential interior designer’ or ‘commercial office sustainable interior designer’.

While long-tail keywords tend to have a lower search volume, they often represent a higher purchasing intent. In other words, users are more likely to convert when they’re using specific, long-tail search terms. 

By using a combination of short and long-tail keywords in your SEO strategy, you can, therefore, ensure you’re ranking for a wide variety of relevant search terms that will enable you to reach your target audience(s). 

Best SEO Keywords for Interior Designers

When conducting keyword research, it’s essential to think about the terms potential clients might use when searching for design services or inspiration. In our experience, here’s a list of some of the best SEO keywords and phrases that interior designers should consider:

• Core Keywords
  
  • Interior design
  • Interior decorator
  • Home decor
  • Room design

• Specializations
  
  • Sustainable interior design
  • Modern interior design
  • Vintage home decor
  • Minimalist room design
    
    
• Local Keywords
  
  • [City/Region] interior designers (e.g. ‘Dubai interior designers’)
  • Best interior designers in [City/Region]
  • Interior design companies in [City/Region]

• Service-Specific Keywords
  
  • Home renovation design
  • Kitchen and bathroom design
  • Commercial interior design
  • Residential interior design
    
    
• Related Terms
  
  • Home furnishings
  • Color palette consultation
  • Space planning
  • Custom furniture design
    
    
• Trending or Niche Keywords
  
  • Biophilic design
  • Eco-friendly home decor
  • Smart home interior design
  • Tiny house interior ideas
    
    
• Blog ideas
  
  • How to choose an interior designer
  • Tips for decorating a small living room
  • Best color schemes for bedrooms
  • Interior design trends [Year]

Remember, the best keywords for your specific business will depend on your unique offerings, specializations, and target audience. 

It’s also crucial to regularly revisit and update your keyword strategy, as trends in interior design and search behavior evolve. Tools like Google’s Keyword Planner, SEMrush, or Ahrefs can be invaluable in identifying high-potential keywords and assessing competition.

2. Consider UX Design

When it comes to optimizing your website for search engines, there’s more to consider than just keywords. One of the most overlooked aspects of SEO is user experience (UX) design. While many might think of UX as solely related to user engagement and conversion rates, it plays a pivotal role in driving traffic to your site and improving your search engine rankings.

Google and other search engines aim to provide their users with the best possible results. This means that they don’t just look for content relevance but also for how user-friendly a website is. Here are three key UX factors that affect technical SEO…

Website Speed

Users have increasingly shorter attention spans, and even just a few seconds delay can lead to the abandonment of a website. Slow-loading pages can result in a poor user experience, driving visitors away and potentially damaging the website’s reputation. For this reason, faster-loading websites are rewarded with better rankings!

Mobile Responsiveness

With many users browsing on mobile devices, a non-responsive site can make viewing design portfolios frustrating. That’s why Google and other search engines prioritize mobile-optimized sites in their rankings, especially since the introduction of mobile-first indexing.

Clear and Intuitive Navigation

Easy navigation ensures visitors can quickly find design categories or specific projects they’re interested in. A well-structured site similar helps search engines crawl and index content efficiently, improving the site’s visibility.

3. Make Sure Your Site is Indexable and Crawlable

Search engines crawl and index web pages so that they can be displayed when users search for relevant content. If your web pages aren’t crawlable, they can be indexed, and if they aren’t indexed, they can’t appear on search results pages. 

So, making sure your web pages are indexable and crawlable is critical if you want to boost your rankings and attract visitors to your site. Google’s Search Console can provide valuable information regarding page indexing, so be sure to…

1. Submit a sitemap
2. Create a robots.txt file to tell search engines which information to crawl
3. Monitor the impact when you publish new content

4. Use Local Search Terms

The number of searches for local content is continually increasing and users tend to search for businesses that are located in a relatively close proximity. In fact, 1 in 3 mobile searches are now related to location. So, if you tend to operate within a specific area, consider incorporating this into your keyword strategy. 

Put simply, ‘best interior designer Abu Dhabi’ can generate traffic from users who are looking for an interior designer near that location, while ‘best interior designer’ could attract website traffic from all over the world.

5. Optimize Images and Visual Assets

An interior designer’s website tends to be media-rich and feature a variety of visual assets, such as images and videos. While this can be a powerful way of engaging users, showcasing your work, and acquiring new clients, it’s important that these visual assets are optimized for enhanced online performance and high SEO rankings. 

Images and videos can be large in terms of the kilobytes and, thus, can take longer for them to load. In turn, this increases the page loading time and could negatively impact your SEO rankings (as well as increase your bounce rate). 

To prevent this from happening, compress visual assets to an online-friendly format and reduce their size accordingly. This will enable you to feature high-quality images and videos on your site, without negatively impacting your site’s functionality or rankings.

Furthermore, be sure to optimize image and video titles, descriptions, and alt texts with the keywords you’re targeting.

6. Publish Content Regularly

If you want users to return to your site, publishing new content on a regular basis and keeping your web design fresh should be a top priority. As well as keeping users engaged, sharing new content will also help to improve your SEO rankings – providing you publish high-quality content and optimize it for enhanced SEO performance. 

To ensure your new content performs well online, choose a target keyword for each post or page and use on-page SEO techniques to secure high rankings. This means using your target keyword in:

• Page Titles: The primary headline displayed on a webpage.
• Meta Titles: HTML elements that specify the title of a web page, primarily used on search engine results pages (SERPs) to display preview snippets for a given page.
• Meta Descriptions: Brief summaries of a webpage’s content, shown below the meta title in search results, aiding in click-through rates.
• Headings: Structured titles and sub-titles within a webpage (ranging from H1 to H6) that help organize content and indicate topic hierarchies.
• Page URLs: The web address of a specific page, ideally structured clearly and descriptively to benefit both users and search engines.
• Image Titles: The text associated with an image that provides additional context and detail about that image.
• Image Descriptions and Alt Texts: Text attributes added to image tags to describe the image, ensuring accessibility and enhancing SEO when images can’t be displayed.

This helps to tell search engines what the page is about. However, keywords should be incorporated into page text strategically and sporadically, as too many keywords can equate to ‘keyword stuffing’, which will negatively affect your SEO rankings.

7. Generate Reputable Backlinks

When external websites link to your site, it also enhances your site’s authority in the eyes of search engines. Known as ‘backlinks’, these links help to boost your SEO rankings for target keywords. 

Having lots of external links pointing to your website is beneficial but the quality of your backlinks is arguably more important than the number of backlinks. A link from a website with a domain authority of 90+ is, therefore, more beneficial than two links from websites with a domain authority of 5-10, for example. 

When securing backlinks, think strategically about the type of sites you want to endorse your brand and aim for links from high-authority sites. By adding your brand to industry directories, taking part in online industry events, and collaborating with other designers, you can enhance your professional reputation and secure valuable backlinks for your website.