June 22, 2020

Without physical networking and events happening, today the best way to market your design business is to ramp up online presence and drive traffic to your website. Social media is essential for interior designers, but not everyone is going to Instagram to look for you. Instead, they are Googling to find the best designer near them – and clicking what comes up first. SEO – search engine optimization – is the way to get to that top spot.

There are thousands of online courses and tutorials online for more in-depth research, but KBB dug in and boiled down the basics geared specifically for designers. Here are our recommended practices to appear at the top of Google’s search results.

1. Be found by crawlers.

This is the process where search engines – in this case, Google – send out a team of robotic “crawlers” to find content. By following a path of links, the crawler is able to find content and add it to their index, which is then presented to searchers online. The order of the search results is listed by ranking – the higher a website is ranked, the more relevant the search engine believes the site is to the searcher and drives traffic.

One way to check to see where your page is currently is to use an advanced search operator. To do this (for a free option), type “site:yourdomain.com” into the Google search bar. The number of results shown at the top is the number of pages indexed – or found by crawlers – on your site.

2. Help crawlers find your important pages.

If you find some of your most important pages – like your portfolio or your contact pages – were missing from the search results, you need to optimize your results further. Here are a few main questions to ask:

• Are you requiring users to log in? If someone visiting your site has to log in or fill out a form to access certain content, those pages are also locking out search engines and crawlers.
• Is all your text hidden in graphics? Images, GIFs, videos and jpegs should not be used to display text you want indexed by a crawler.
• Can the crawler navigate your site? A crawler needs a path of links on your site to guide it across pages. A page that isn’t linked to any other pages – yours or another site’s, like a publication you’ve been featured in or a review page – is invisible to the crawler.

3. Now that your business pages are found, help boost their ranking.

As a business, you automatically get a boost because Google has its own index of local business listings that it uses to create local search results. Be sure to first get a free Google My Business Listing to optimize your ranking. Google then uses your location for searches like “interior designer near me.”

Google will push your local ranking up if your business has more Google reviews, as well as more stars. If your business is listed on a number of sites – like Yelp or Houzz – and that business information is consistent throughout, that will also boost your ranking.

If you have a showroom, include your business name, phone number and address prominently and consistently through your site to optimize these results. If you have multiple locations, consider having a page for each so each location shows up in search results.

4. Use keywords appropriately to drive traffic.

Keywords are the phrases someone uses to search for you – like “interior designer New York City,” or “contemporary designer.” When those words are contained in your content, you are more likely to appear higher in the results. But don’t stuff your website with keywords in places where it is irrelevant so that the content becomes annoying and repetitive – search engines now watch out for the trick and will pull your ranking down if that’s caught.

Look for the best keywords to use for your business with tools like the Google Keyword Planner or the Moz Keyword Planner.

5. Track and measure your results.

It’s important to see how your efforts are paying off and what pages are getting the most interest, as well as what search queries send users to your page. Google Analytics will allow you to see how long people spent on your page, how many pages they clicked on and how far they scrolled down your site. This will better guide you to what content users are drawn to and what you might want to update for the future.

Looking for more SEO tips? Google has a full SEO Starter Guide to dive in deeper. We also found helpful information on Moz.com, which has both free tools and SEO product solutions.