Designer Marketing Tips – The Role of SEO in Online Marketing

As part of our series on the importance of SEO in online marketing for interior designers, there are a few important points that must be made for those of you who continue to resist developing an SEO strategy, for whatever reason.

• Underperforming Website – In its simplest form, an underperforming website is one that attracts little attention from potential clients. If your website struggles to attract fresh traffic, it’s likely that you are failing to attract attention from simple internet searches. There will usually be two reasons for this: your website has little fresh, relevant content, or you have not optimized the pages and posts properly.
• High “Bounce” Rate – The bounce rate at your website the percentage of visitors who navigate away from your site after viewing only one page. A high bounce rate is a strong indicator that your website lacks high-quality content and that you need to offer something more to keep visitors interested.
• Low “Conversion” Rate – In a strict sense, “conversion marketing” involves making a serious effort at increasing conversions, that is, attracting site visitors who are, or will become, paying customers. However, a conversion may also be defined as enticing a visitor to take a specific action; that is, clicking on a Call-to-Action such as: “Click here for more information” or “Click here to schedule a free consultation”.

Each of these problems indicates that you have failed to fully engage your visitors and that you need to improve your online marketing efforts – and your SEO strategy – if you wish to make the investment you’ve made in your website pay off.Who is Google’s Customer? Not You!It’s important, if not critical, to remember that the customer for whom Google is working is NOT you and your business or website. Their customer is the consumer who is searching for you – or your competitor.In other words, Google works for the searcher, not the content provider.After all, when you perform a search are you worried about how hard a website has worked to attract you, or do you just want to know which site(s) will provide the best information to satisfy your search query?Understanding this is the first step to ensuring that the time and resources you're investing to make your design website as attractive as possible to the search engines and potential clients is worth it.While Google and the other search engines have expanded the influence of other factors when determining rankings, SEO and online marketing specialists can maximize their traffic and conversion opportunities through keyword rankings by creating quality content around niche concepts and phrases that their target audience uses or searches for.This allows brands to increase their monthly traffic and receive qualified conversions based on the type of consumer research that guides their content development efforts. (SearchEngineLand.com)Looking for more interior design marketing tips, trends, and ideas? Get in touch with TD Fall today. And, if you need help developing or improving your SEO strategy, we can refer you to our favorite SEO Strategist!

Online Marketing Tips – SEO Basics

We’ve been sharing some valuable information lately about the importance of organic SEO for your design business website. We’ve also shared some insight into the techniques and strategy for effective optimization of your content, whether your website pages or blog posts.In this post, we’d like to share some of the reasons you should be following this valuable advice, by offering some of the most basic SEO information you need to understand why it’s so critical to your success.How to Get Found by Google When you publish information to your website, the copy on your Home Page or a blog post, Google "spiders" (automated software) go into each article and scans the copy for "keywords." These spiders are analyzing everything about that page to determine where to index that page within the billions of pages in the Google search engine.For example, if you go to www.Google.com and search under the keyword phrase “interior design,” you will notice something like 1,750,000,000 pages are indexed in Google for this phrase in the search results (and this number is constantly changing).Google will rank a page or article based on over 200 sets of criteria, which can include: design elements, programming style, ease of navigation, popularity, and many more. Since Google is scanning your content, you can see the value of trying to give Google as much "help" as possible.Search engine optimization (SEO) is all about suggesting to Google where to index your content in their search results (SERPs). This is known as “optimized content.”If you want to be indexed under the keyword phrase “interior design,” then you need to repeat that keyword phrase regularly in your content, thus telling Google that your optimized content is related to the business of interior design.Since Google has the power to place you anywhere it wants in their SERPs, all you can do is optimize pages and posts to suggest to the search engine giant where you should be indexed for their searchers.If you are trying to get indexed on the first page of the search results for the phrase “interior design”, you must realize that you are competing with entire websites, more than 1 billion, in this case, that may have dozens of pages which collectively try and rank (or get indexed highly) for the same phrase. It would be nearly impossible for a single blog post to compete with all of those websites. It will be much easier to create content that ranks well for what’s known as a “long-tailed keyword phrase.”Instead of “interior design” (a broad phrase), a long-tailed version might be “interior design for 3 bedroom home” (3.9 million pages in the return). In other words, the more narrowly targeted the keyword phrase used in your content, the more likely you will rank highly in Google's search results for that phrase.The higher you rank (the best spot is page 1 in the top 5 results), the more people will click on the link to your page or post. The more people that click on your link, the more exposure you get, etc. This will be fun for you once you've optimized a few pages and posts – and have seen the results!For more, click here for a free SEO Guide from NGNG Enterprises.Looking for more interior design tips, trends, and ideas? Get in touch with TD Fall today.

Designer Marketing Tips – Online Marketing: “Oh no, not more SEO!”

Well, yes; when it comes to designer marketing tips about online marketing, we need to get past the fear and talk about SEO (search engine optimization).For help with this subject, which sometimes frightens website owners (and more than a few website designers), we turn to the inbound marketing experts at HubSpot. Not only do these folks know what they’re talking about, they happily share quite a bit of their high-value information for FREE.First…Benefits of organic SEOWhile offering no guarantees of placement in the search results (SERPs), organic SEO is a proven strategy for gaining the attention of the search engines and bringing traffic to your website. It is cost-effective and, once a list of keywords has been developed and the techniques have been learned, is fairly simple to implement. However, it is not an overnight solution. Effective SEO requires patience and a commitment to consistently implement the strategies and techniques outlined below.Compared to pay-per-click advertising, however, organic SEO has two great benefits: 1) it is less expensive and 2) your placing in the SERPs will hold greater value with your target audience (since they tend to heavily discount the paid ads seen in the search results).Keyword Optimization for Your WebsiteYes, keywords still matter and knowing the phrases that are being searched by your target audience is critical to improving your ranking in the search results and building traffic to your website.But, the traditional view of keywords in search has changed. Where just a few years ago there were maybe 10-20 “big keywords” that would be sought after for ranking within a specific topic or niche market, there are now hundreds or thousands of long-tail variations that are regularly searched within a topic and which can change based on location.Simply dominating a few high-value phrases is no longer enough to produce successful results and, while search engines of the future aren’t going to punish your website for underusing keywords or failing to have an expertly crafted keyword-optimized page title, they will continue to punish you for overusing keywords.What does all of this mean? You should execute proper due diligence and perform market research and keyword analysis to discover high-value phrases to use while creating content for your website.Local SEO Strategy Has Real Value for Interior DesignersBecause most interior design work is local, your online marketing should be targeted accordingly. Both your target audience and your SEO strategy must be focused on the needs of your marketplace – not a national audience.Many marketers and website designers believe that “local SEO” has no value. As it turns out, nothing could be further from the truth. Since Google's algorithm treats local search rankings more like traditional search rankings, they now take hundreds of ranking signals into account; going so far as to improve the way Google evaluates distance when determining rankings.In other words, if you’re a local interior design business, optimizing for local search won’t only help you get found – it will help you get found by people who are nearby and more likely to buy from you. And, if you’re a national or global business trying to rank for a local term, you might as well give up. Local SEO is that important now.While there is a great deal more to say about how and why you should focus on SEO for your design business (and we’ll have more later), we understand that it’s easy to become overloaded with information. On the other hand, if your interior design website is underperforming, it may well be that you’ve ignored this area of online marketing for too long already.Looking for more interior design marketing tips, trends, and ideas? Get in touch with TD Fall today. And, if you need help developing or improving your SEO strategy, we can refer you to our favorite SEO Strategist!

Online Marketing Tips - What is Organic SEO?

It’s a new year, let’s learn something! Organic SEO is a strategy of using targeted phrases to direct the search engines toward the content on your website. The techniques for doing this vary, from “on-page” to “off-page” SEO.On-page SEO involves using assorted keyword phrases within the content you publish, such as titles, headers, images, and the page URLs. These phrases should also be placed within the “Metadata”, the information that exists “behind the scenes” of each page and post, but which the search engines use to identify and rank your content.Variations of your targeted phrases will also be used within the text you create, as well; this allows you to take advantage of a search engine feature known as “synonymous search”.Off-page SEO focuses on increasing the authority of your website through the act of getting links from other websites; a completely different strategy.How to get startedAn important step toward beginning an effective SEO strategy is to perform market research and keyword analysis. Finding high-value phrases that identify your website as a source for valuable information within your niche is critical to bringing the search engines, and an audience, to you. Since any number of phrases may be available to help you define your subject and purpose, it’s important to determine which phrases offer the greatest potential for bringing visitors to your website.A note on single-word keywords – Single word KWs are basically useless, as they tend to be vague yet highly competitive, e.g., “coaching” is vague. Do you mean football, basketball, baseball, life, business, health, wellness coach?As you can see, if you are a life coach who targets the single word, you will be competing with every type of coach in the world – not just with those in your niche. The use of 2, 3, and 4-word phrases is a far more effective SEO strategy. Known as “long-tail keywords”, such phrases are much more descriptive and are highly valued by the search engines.There are basically two levels of research and analysis:

• Basic – This keyword research is designed to discover related phrases that are actually being searched, offer the potential for traffic to your website and have manageable competition from other websites.
• Advanced – Advanced keyword analysis is a phrase-by-phrase study, designed to determine which of the phrases discovered present the greatest opportunities for moving up on the search engine results page (SERPs) for each phrase.

Basic research is very much about raw numbers, how many searches, how much traffic you might see, and how much competition there is from other websites.Advanced research and analysis, on the other hand, provides you with valuable information on how easy or difficult it will be to move into the Top Ten in the search results, for each phrase you may choose to target.Benefits of Organic SEOWhile offering no guarantees of placement in the search results, organic SEO is a proven strategy for gaining the attention of the search engines and bringing traffic to your website. It is cost-effective and, once a list of high-value keywords has been developed and the techniques have been learned, is fairly simple to implement. However, it is not an overnight solution. It requires patience and a commitment to consistently implement the strategies and techniques outlined above.Compared to pay-per-click advertising, however, organic SEO has two great benefits: it is less expensive and your placing in the search results will hold greater value with your target audience (since they tend to heavily discount the paid ads seen in the search results).Looking for more new design trends, tips, and ideas? Get in touch with TD Fall today.