Grow Your Interior Design Business – Analyzing Your Market

There are many ways to gather information that can help you start, build or grow your interior design business. While performing market research can be costly, it does not have to be – if you manage to keep your focus fairly narrow, targeting information that will specifically benefit you.Broad-based research, like that described here at Entreprenuer.com, may tell you a great deal about a wide range of potential clients but, it’s costly and may not offer the information you really need.Instead, you should focus on identifying the services that are in demand in the area you want to work. Doing so can help you shape your offerings, without trying to be “all things to all people”.Next, consider whether it would be best to specialize in one or two offerings, or offer a wider menu of design services, and investigate the major players already in that space.It’s important to remember that most interior design businesses are extremely localized. The national trends that are often identified in design publications may mean little in your local marketplace. New and small design firms need to stay close to home for their information, as well as for clients.With that in mind, here are some questions for which you will need answers as you work to grow your interior design business locally:

• What services are the busiest designers in your area offering?
• What services and categories are needed in your area?
• What services can you provide that are unique, superior, or at a more competitive price point?
• What will set you apart from the local competition?
• Are you able to offer something different or better?

Once you have answers to these general questions, you can begin to seek more specific information that will help you determine where you can best apply your talents, expertise, and energies.Specific Marketing QuestionsBefore starting or expanding a business, researching the market can show you which services are most in demand and give you an idea about the competition. Use this guide to research your area and see if there’s an unmet need you can fulfill to attract clients. (Houzz.com)

• What home renovation or design challenges do customers have in your area?
• How can you help homeowners solve those challenges?
• What services do you currently offer?
• Pull up the Houzz Directory, select your category, enter the location, and select your service radius. How many pros are listed as serving this area?
• Check out the profiles of some top professionals and look at their “Services Provided” section. What services are you commonly seeing?
• What services are you not frequently seeing?
• In what other categories could you perform work?
• How many competitors of your potential other categories are in your service area?
• Look at the average project cost from other pros. Is there a need for a pro who can take on small, medium, or large projects?
• Is there a need for a pro with a different pricing structure? (For example, are the majority of pros charging hourly or a flat fee?)

While these are admittedly basic steps, and a great deal more can be done to research and analyze your market, for emerging designers and those with a limited client base, these marketing tips should be highly valuable in helping you to grow your interior design business.Looking for more new design trends, marketing tips, and ideas? Get in touch with TD Fall today.

Choose the Perfect Rug for Your Design Clients

In a previous post, Interior Design Tips – Helping Clients Focus on High-value Improvements, we offered advice on how to help your design clients choose the perfect rug for any room in their home. Here is the advice we offered:“As we all know, it can take “forever” to find the perfect rug and, when you do, it usually isn't cheap. It’s always helpful to remember that your client may not have the knowledge to make a good decision and that you are the expert here. Take the time to explain that the cost of a rug will vary depending on the age, weaving technique, fiber content, and dye method. Also, hand-loomed rugs wear well and have added character and charm while minor repairs do not affect the value of the rug as long as they have been done well.”(Is it OK to quote ourselves? 😉)Of course, when choosing a rug, the overriding factor will be the figuring out what is best for a specific installation. The rug you choose for a toddler’s room will be very different than the rug you choose for a formal dining or living room.With a bit of help from our friends at Wayfair.com, we offer some guidance on how to choose the perfect rug:Wool rugs – Wool rugs offer the best combination of durability and softness. The fibers are incredibly resilient and stand up well to high traffic, especially soft, tufted or hooked styles. They naturally repel stains and water but will absorb moisture and can fade in sunlight. With a mid-range cost to a serious investment, they are most cost-effective when used in living rooms, dining rooms, and bedrooms.Silk & Viscose rugs – Silk is unrivaled for softness, making it the ultimate choice for a luxurious rug. Viscose provides the softness and sheen of Silk at a substantially lower price point. Because silk and viscose are sensitive to wear and moisture, it is best used in low-traffic areas. Silk and Viscose may also be woven with another material to create a blended rug that's more durable or has a varied texture. The incredible softness and luster of silk and viscose rugs make them ideal for bedrooms, especially the master suite.Cotton rugs – Cotton is commonly used to make flat or woven style rugs and are durable and easy to clean. While not designed as “heirloom” pieces, cotton rugs are affordable, stand up well to high traffic, soft without feeling too plush, and are often machine washable. Best use for cotton rugs would be in family rooms and children’s rooms, bath mats, and hallway runners.Natural fiber rugs – Jute, sisal, and other renewable fiber rugs are remarkably versatile in use and style. While the fibers are very strong and durable, they do stain easily, making them most appropriate for use in dry areas and living rooms. They may also feel somewhat coarse but can be beautifully textured with a woven or braided construction. The cost of natural fiber rugs can run from affordable to mid-range and they are definitely the go-to base when layering rugs.Synthetic Rugs – Synthetics are extremely durable and affordable, often being used to make indoor/outdoor rugs. Flatweaves are great in high traffic areas but can have an artificial feel. They can easily be treated to repel stains and water and will stand up well to moisture and sun exposure. Best use would be in entryways, hallways, mudrooms, and patios.In future posts designed to help you choose the perfect rug for your design clients, we will share our insights into choosing the best size rug for a room, and whether you should design the space around the rug or use it to accent the choices you’ve made.Looking for more new design trends, tips, and ideas? Get in touch with TD Fall today.

Interior Design Tips – Helping Clients Focus on High-Value Improvements

A recent series of articles at Houzz.com offers some interesting insights into where homeowners might be willing to spend a bit more on remodeling and decorating their homes. Although the site is definitely geared toward helping end-users make better choices, the expert advice they share can also be a great source of interior design tips and trends for anyone in the industry.For example, in an article titled 7 Home Purchases Worth the Splurge, designer Erika Wood offers her advice on where homeowners should be willing to invest a bit more money if they hope to avoid “buyer’s remorse” by compromising on quality versus value (or price).While many homeowners will focus on things that add value to their home, hoping to increase the resale price, Ms. Wood is focused on making the home comfortable for the current occupants of the home. Although both are important to an interior designer, it may be true that focusing on comfort will make your design project more acceptable to your clients. With this in mind, she offers seven “guilt-free” purchases for the savvy homeowner – making these areas of emphasis for the equally sharp interior designer, as well.

• Quality Window Coverings – To the uninitiated, it can seem like their options are endless when it comes to window coverings. Yet, as any designer knows, window placement, frame construction, and other external factors help narrow your client’s choices. Your expert advice will be critical for the client who is confused about which option is best for their home. There's generally no way around custom window treatments when there are unusually tall windows or odd placements. A conservative choice will tend to be a good investment in their home when it's time to sell. (Image from HouseBeautiful.com)
• Upholstered Furniture – While many homeowners will think, “It’s just a sofa”, you know that purchasing a quality sofa or other piece of upholstered furniture that stands up to the demands of your client’s lifestyle is always a good idea. Remind them that quality construction and cotton blends that have a high percentage of polyester provide optimal stain resistance and long-term wear.
• Granite Countertops – Yes, granite remains the first choice in countertops: “When a homeowner contacted Houzz for advice on kitchen upgrades, fellow contributor Rebekah Zaveloff responded with helpful advice. In regard to replacing the homeowner's old laminate countertops with classic honed granite counters, Zaveloff advised, ‘Black and white never goes out of style. If you want a classic black and white kitchen, go ahead and change out those countertops’."
• Room-sized Rugs – As we all know, it can take “forever” to find the perfect rug and, when you do, it usually isn't cheap. It’s always helpful to remember that your client may not have the knowledge to make a good decision and that you are the expert here. Take the time to explain that the cost of a rug will vary depending on the age, weaving technique, fiber content, and dye method. Also, hand-loomed rugs wear well and have added character and charm while minor repairs do not affect the value of the rug as long as they have been done well. (Image from MyRugStore.co.uk)
• Original Artwork – “A one-of-a-kind piece by its nature has special value. In addition to adding beauty and interest to the home, fine art gains extrinsic value as time passes.”
• Comfortable Mattresses – Quality sleep is essential for health and well-being – for the entire family. While the client is the true expert here, knowing what is comfortable to them, your guidance may make all the difference in whether they buy a quality product. If you have a relationship with a local sleep shop, all the better, as you can help them find a reputable dealer who will put their needs ahead of anything else.
• Linens and Towels – As Ms. Woods explains, “[You should] consider anything that touches your bare skin an investment in comfort.” Your client’s bed linens and towels should have a high thread count because they are softer, more durable, and will last longer than cheaper choices.

Even though it may seem that the last two items on the list may not be in your wheelhouse as a designer, offering guidance on making your client’s home as comfortable as possible is definitely has value as an area of focus.Looking for more new design trends, tips, and ideas? Get in touch with TD Fall today.

Designer Marketing Tips – Instagram Marketing Strategies That You Need to Know

For anyone who’s been living in a cabin in the woods for the past half-decade or so, a cabin without Wi-Fi that is, a social networking site known as Instagram has made a huge impression. It’s an online mobile photo-sharing, video-sharing, and social networking service that enables its users to share pictures and videos on a wide variety of social networking platforms; including all the biggies like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Flickr.Why you need to know about Instagram StrategiesIt’s been just over seven years since Instagram was launched into the world, yet it currently holds over 800 million active users, and was acquired by Facebook for 1 billion dollars in 2012, when the service was just a couple of years old!Today, Instagram has become an essential marketing tool, allowing designers to diversify their social networking strategy as a way to connect with their audience, enabling them to share their content and connect with customers and prospects. Instagram posts are being engaged with on levels unparalleled to others, yet many designers do not use the platform effectively and focus too much on themselves, rather than providing value to their audiences.Instagram is unique among the growing world of social networks because, while other sites allow you to post images and videos, Instagram requires a picture or video in every post – and the picture or video you share will be the main focus of your post.How Instagram can boost your brandBecause Instagram is so visual, many believe that it only works well for companies that sell attractive physical products, such as jewelry or clothing, for example. But, this is not true. By its very nature, Instagram is a platform that allows you to emotionally connect with your audience to build long-term relationships. It’s also a way to extend your brand values, allowing you to highlight the things that are important to you, such as the vibrant work culture your organization has, charities, and community events that your company takes part in.As a brand, and as a business, you need to connect with your audience in the same way that a close friend would. How can you do this? By telling stories, and the ways that your products or services impact the lives of the people using them. Nothing does this better than compelling imagery, which makes Instagram a great tool for connecting with your target audience in a new and vibrant way.Of course, for an interior designer, such an image-centered platform is vital to your online marketing success.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!

Designer Marketing Tips – Facebook Advertising - 3 Types of FB Ads

It should go without saying that all advertising requires a goal; and yet, for many designers, advertising objectives are unclear and hazy, at best. Even “back in the day,” the days of print advertising, the vague goal of “sell more stuff” was usually ineffective. Today’s savvy internet marketer develops advertising strategies designed to reach specific goals, such as: build brand awareness, drive traffic to a website, boost interest in social media site, or convert visits into sales.Whatever your Facebook marketing goals may be, you have choices to make about how you approach your audience using Facebook ads.Set specific goals for your Facebook advertisingUltimately, the goal of your Facebook ad campaign should be to compel your audience to take action – on your behalf and to their benefit. The type of action you wish them to take, however, will determine the types of FB ads you should use.With help from our friends at AdEspresso.com, where you can also get more details on the types of Facebook ads, we offer these three types of FB ads:

• Generate traffic to your website – with more “click-throughs” from Facebook. Probably the most common purpose of Facebook Advertising is an effort to drive traffic to your website. Your goal may be to increase your site’s overall reach, increase brand awareness, or to send users to a dedicated landing page and have them buy your product, sign up for a newsletter, or participate in some other kind of lead generation. There are three Facebook ad types best suited to achieving this goal: Domain Ads, Page Post Link Ads, and Multi-Product Ads.
• Build your audience – through increased “Likes” and improved audience engagement. All Facebook ad types are great for Facebook Marketing. You can use them to increase the number of Likes on your page and to increase the “Reach” of the content you post to your Facebook Page. Since the usual post on your page will only reach an average of 2-6% of your fan base organically, promoting your posts is a great way to be sure that all your fans see your message. There are four Facebook ad types best suited to achieving this goal: Page Likes, Page Post Photo, Page Post Video, Page Post Text.
• Create interest in an event or on-sight visit – using increased “Shares” of unique opportunities. Driving visitors to a physical event, or to your brick-and-mortar location, can be challenging while measuring the results of your FB promotion can be something of a mixed bag. However, when used correctly and targeted well, these promotions can be extremely effective. There are two Facebook ad types best suited to achieving this goal: Special Event Promotions, and Special Offer Promotions.

For those who are new to using Facebook advertising, it makes a great deal of sense to test these different advertising formats to see which of them work best for you. For those with more experience, even if you’ve enjoyed some success using FB ads, broadening the appeal of your Facebook marketing strategy may lead to even more success.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!

Designer Marketing Tips – The Role of Content in Online Marketing

In a previous post, we mentioned 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. This begs the question of what exactly Google is looking for to satisfy the needs of their customer and, even further, the role of content in online marketing.To quote the folks at Google:“Understanding the meaning of your search is crucial to returning good answers. So, to find pages with relevant information, our first step is to analyze what the words in your search query mean. We build language models to try to decipher what strings of words we should look up in the index.”Yeah, that’s as clear as mud, right?To make it as simple as possible, let’s think of it like this: Google’s goal is to offer a choice of websites that offer the highest quality information possible in answer to a search query.To accomplish this, they use what they’ve decided to label “synonymous search”. In other words, if you type a search for “How to change a light bulb”, the algorithm will also search for websites that tell you how to replace or exchange a light bulb.Google will also look for the most timely version of the information available, with a clear and succinct explanation for swapping a burned-out bulb.Quality Content is Critical to Your SEO StrategyContent marketing is a marketing strategy that revolves around the creation, publication, and distribution of content to a target audience in order to bring new traffic (and therefore new customers) to your business.Quality content writing is the most important part of your SEO. With quality, SEO-friendly formatting is very important because the Google algorithm looks for important words (keywords) at particular places on your web page or blog post.In other words, you can no longer simply stick the phrase “change a light bulb” in your content over and over again in the hope that Google will rank your site higher than your competitor’s. You must offer a better reason for them to rank your site higher, such as a better explanation of how to change that light bulb.Plus, as light bulbs and lighting fixtures evolve, you must continue to offer high-quality content that reflects and includes those changes. You can also offer a step up in the quality of your content, by adding “how to safely change a light bulb”.While search algorithms are constantly changing, there will always be basic SEO strategies that work for you and your website because finding quality content is, and always will be, the goal of search. This means that the role of content in online marketing will always be important to your ongoing success.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!

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.

Interior Design Business Practices: What works for you?

One of the keys to building a successful interior design business is self-assessment; understanding your strengths – and your weaknesses. While you may be able to sit back and evaluate your skills and talents calmly, rationally, and logically, you would be about one in a million if you are. After all, in survey after survey, the average person considers themselves to be “above average” which, by the very definition of “average”, is statistically impossible.So, what’s the solution?Ask Your ClientsIt’s human nature to enjoy positive feedback. We all enjoy praise and tend to avoid criticism. Yet, ironically, we’re also taught that we can “learn more from our failures than our successes”. As with most things though, the truth lies somewhere in between.If you're able to evaluate the jobs you’ve done critically, comparing the how and why of a job well done to a job that you struggled to complete, more power to you. Speaking generally though, the best source of information about how well or poorly you performed on a given design project will be your client.When used properly, your business website and email list can be great sources of information and feedback. In fact, a website today is remarkably flexible, presenting you with multiple opportunities to share information with your audience while also enabling you to acquire information from them.If you're blogging regularly (and if not, why not?), you should have a Comment Section available for feedback on each post. And, you should be asking your audience to comment at the end of each post. Plus, when you do receive comments or questions, you simply must respond.

• Poll your online audience – It’s incredibly easy to set up a quick poll on your website. There are innumerable plugins and widgets available to do this, many of which are free. You should be polling your audience at least twice a year (or more) to find out what matters most to them and whether they believe you can provide it.
• Poll your client list – An email newsletter is a great way to keep in touch with past and prospective clients. Using an email service like MailChimp or AWeber makes this much easier than you might think. Beyond that, a quick poll by email to your list, with different questions for clients and prospects, can also reap great rewards.

Your goal in polling your audience and/or client list is to discover where, and if, they believe they would be willing to invest in design work. You also want to discover their impressions of you and your work; whether they believe you would be worth that investment and, if not, what you can do to change their minds.Avoid Confirmation BiasHere’s the problem with positive feedback: In psychology and cognitive science, there is a tendency of decision makers to actively seek out and assign more weight to evidence that confirms their hypothesis and ignore or under weigh evidence that could disconfirm their hypothesis. (ScienceDaily.com)Known as “confirmation bias”, you can also think of it as “believing your own press”.In essence, this means, anything that confirms your opinion of your talents and skills, of yourself, is far easier to believe than things which contradict what you believe to be true.Again, it feels good to have our beliefs reinforced, whether by others or by research. Yet, and we can all be guilty of this, choosing information that confirms only your beliefs is dangerous in the extreme if you plan to make a heavy investment of your time, energy, and money in an idea – or in a direction for your design business.When you're stuck in a confirmation bias mode of thinking, you’re not really looking for the reasons that your idea may not be a good one, which leads you to think those reasons simply don’t exist. This can lead to real problems for you in the testing process for your idea. Instead, you MUST try to prove your idea is right but, you MUST also try to prove your idea is wrong.If you’re not honest and diligent enough to do both, despite your faith in yourself, you’re likely to wind up with a warehouse overflowing with pink suede wallpaper. (Yeah, that particular “market trend” was a bust for some reason!)Looking for more interior design business 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!