SEO for Interior Designers
SEO for interior designers is challenging.
Do you focus on local search or try to compete with international design firms on the most popular search terms?
Do you hire an SEO expert or go the DIY route?
Should you even care about SEO?
To answer these questions, we turned to SEO rockstar Daniela Furtado from Findable Digital Marketing.
Daniela operates a boutique SEO agency with expertise in both the Design & Cannabis industries. Daniela & her team go beyond technical SEO fixes…employing specialized content strategies to help interior designers rank higher in Google Search.
If you’re an interior designer who wants to rank higher on Google & score more clients via SEO, take a look at my chat with Daniela…
Douglas Robb - Interior Designher: What do interior designers need to know about SEO?
Daniela Furtado - Findable Digital Marketing: SEO is the practice of tailoring your website to a search engine’s everchanging algorithm to increase your chances of ranking on the first page. When we talk about SEO, we’re usually referring to Google.
Google has hundreds of ranking factors, some we know about, some we don’t and most we’ve had to figure out through experiments and research.
Personally, I like to group the ranking factors into 5 buckets:
Technical,
Content,
Local,
Backlinks, and
Design or UX.
Some have more weight than others, but they’re all ranking factors and play a part of SEO.
Douglas Robb - Interior Designher: Does social media activity impact an interior designer’s SEO performance?
Daniela Furtado - Findable Digital Marketing: The relationship between social media and SEO is a little bit of a gray area. Social media is not an algorithm ranking factor. However industry research does show that Google looks for social media signals. In other words, if you have significant links and traffic on your website from social media, Google takes the hint and it can give your website a push. But it’s not enough to help your search rankings alone.
Douglas Robb - Interior Designher: When you start working with an interior designer, how does the process work?
Daniela Furtado - Findable Digital Marketing: If a company has never done any SEO, the first 6 months is all about setting a foundation. We work on your technical SEO, setting up local SEO, creating a content strategy and start executing it. Most companies at this stage aren’t ranking for any keywords, so we work hard to get you on the first page – even if it’s on the bottom.
Once a company has a foundation, we can really run. With data to work with, we can figure out which keywords are worth chasing and which ones don’t have much conversions.
Once we have an area of focus, we look for ways to improve their rankings to top 3. We also work aggressively on backlinks.
At our agency, we don’t buy backlinks. Instead, we run PR campaigns. We pitch projects to design magazines, we pitch designers and their expertise to conferences or podcasts and find ways to get firms genuine press and backlinks. The approach takes longer to yield results than buying backlinks, but the results are tremendously better. You get the backlinks along with the credibility and visibility that comes with press – without running the risk of being penalized.
Douglas Robb - Interior Designher: What do you expect from them?
Daniela Furtado - Findable Digital Marketing: Early on, we expect designers to communicate and collaborate. We need access to your website and analytics. We need you to collaborate with us to help understand your target customers and your business to create a strategy that works, and we need your feedback! We also really appreciate it when designers take incentive to ask questions and learn SEO. For some, going digital is a massive change for them and there’s a lot of education. When designers take an interest to learn and understand what we do, it really helps communicate expectations and your services.
Douglas Robb - Interior Designher: What can a successful SEO strategy do for interior designers...help them get more client leads, grow the biz & make more money?
Daniela Furtado - Findable Digital Marketing: Yes! We help our clients drive traffic from visitors that are searching for and highly interested in their kind of services, as well as turn their portfolio into content that gets them press. The press doesn’t always lead to more clients, but it can give an interior design studio more credibility when selling.
Sometimes, people come to us because they’re getting plenty of traffic but it’s not converting into emails and phone calls. We help them understand why and fix the problem – even if it means getting less traffic.
We also ask businesses what their goals are for the next 6-12 months and create a strategy that helps them achieve those goals.
Douglas Robb - Interior Designher: Are there any SEO tools that you recommend?
Daniela Furtado - Findable Digital Marketing: For interior designers, I can’t emphasize enough the importance of having an active Google My Business account. Get as many reviews as you can on a consistent basis, reply to all the reviews. It’s a free tool and it can help your local search rankings tremendously. Other tools I recommend are Google Analytics and Google Search Console to get data about your website performance.
In our agency, we use several professional SEO tools. SEMRush is our go-to tool for keyword research, competitor analysis and monitoring performance. We also use Screaming Frog for technical SEO.
Douglas Robb - Interior Designher: Other than social media platforms, are there any 3rd party websites that can help my SEO?
Daniela Furtado - Findable Digital Marketing: Directory websites, especially highly targeted or local ones, are great for local SEO. In SEO, we call this NAP (name, address, and phone number) citations. They don’t have the same weight or value as they did +10 years ago but every little bit helps.
Douglas Robb - Interior Designher: Should my SEO efforts focus exclusively on my business name, my personal name, or on both?
Daniela Furtado - Findable Digital Marketing: You should definitely rank for your business name and personal name. If people hear about you through word of mouth or through an advertising campaign, you want to be easy to find.
However, what will bring your website more traffic and business is ranking for keywords related to your services – like “interior designer toronto” or “retail designer montreal”.
Douglas Robb - Interior Designher: Are website About Pages important for SEO?
Daniela Furtado - Findable Digital Marketing: Yes, it can help rank for branded keywords. That is, the name of the design firm and the principal designer.
Douglas Robb - Interior Designher: How important is the homepage to SEO?
Daniela Furtado - Findable Digital Marketing: Absolutely important!
Douglas Robb - Interior Designher: How important is a sitemap to SEO?
Daniela Furtado - Findable Digital Marketing: The bigger the website (300 plus pages) and the more complex the website architecture, the more important it is.
Douglas Robb - Interior Designher: What about website images & optimizing them for SEO - text, captions, image size - download speed?
Daniela Furtado - Findable Digital Marketing: Compressing your images can help with page speed, and page speed affects SEO. Properly tagging your images can also help with image SEO.
Douglas Robb - Interior Designher: How important is content marketing to SEO?
Daniela Furtado - Findable Digital Marketing: Many people think I plug in a piece of code on the backend that tells Google the keywords I want the website to rank for. SEO has never been that. If you want to rank for a keyword, you have to create content that uses it … so content marketing is imperative.
I recommend designers create case studies and create content around their portfolio instead of just using photo galleries. Doing so can have so many purposes. If the content is created with search in mind, it can drive traffic. It can be recycled into press releases or social media posts. And of course, it’s a fantastic sales tool.
However, I highly recommend working with a content marketing professional to create those case studies and blog posts. This is the area I see the most people DIY, waste money and fail. They look at what large companies are doing and copy-and-paste their tactics to their small and local business.
Local interior designers have no business creating content about tips, inspirations and ideas for DIYers or people very early on their journey. That kind of content is competitive and the conversions are low. It’s a better use of your resources to create content that your target customers are looking for when they’re deep in their research and very serious about hiring a professional … not just browsing Pinterest for ideas.
Working with an SEO and content marketing professional will help you figure that out so that the money you invest in content created actually has an ROI.
Douglas Robb - Interior Designher: Are backlinks still important to SEO?
Daniela Furtado - Findable Digital Marketing: Yes.
Douglas Robb - Interior Designher: When search algorithms change, do designers need to re-work their entire SEO strategy?
Daniela Furtado - Findable Digital Marketing: If you aren’t cheating the algorithm and practicing “black-hat SEO” (that is, going against Google’s guidelines) you shouldn’t have to.
Douglas Robb - Interior Designher: Is SEO strategy impacted by device type?
Daniela Furtado - Findable Digital Marketing: Definitely by mobile. Since 2019, Google’s algorithm uses “mobile-first indexing”. This means that Google judges your site based on the mobile version before the desktop version. If your website isn’t fast or responsive on mobile, Google is basing your rankings on your poor mobile performance.
Douglas Robb - Interior Designher: Can website speed impact SEO?
Daniela Furtado - Findable Digital Marketing: Yes.
Douglas Robb - Interior Designher: Can the choice of website host impact SEO?
Daniela Furtado - Findable Digital Marketing: Regardless of the hosting and CMS, page speed impacts SEO.
About Daniela & Findable Digital Marketing
Daniela is the managing director of Findable Digital Marketing, a boutique SEO agency.
She’s been making websites and playing with Google’s algorithm since middle school. She’s passionate about technological literacy and helping people use technology to make their lives easier.
Daniela has lived in Portugal, Spain and China but Toronto is always homebase.
Contact Daniela
Email: daniela@findabledigitalmarketing.com
Website: www.findabledigitalmarketing.com
Phone: +1 (289) 872-0653
Instagram: @findabledigitalmarketing
Facebook: @findabledigitalmarketing
Linkedin: @findabledigitalmarketing
Linkedin: @thisisdanielafurtado