Interior Design Bloggers’ Ultimate Guide to Getting Found on Google

The Interior Design Bloggers’ ultimate guide to getting found on Google is for interior designers who want to attract new clients to their website. This interior design bloggers’ guide sets out how to start an interior design blog. And we cover:

1. The tools you can (and should!) use
2. How to generate lots of topic ideas
3. Finding, comparing, and selecting great keywords
4. Working out who your blogging completion is. And how it affects what you write about
5. Creating your blog outline with search engine optimisation (SEO) in mind

Before You Start Down the Design Bloggers’ Path

Let’s start with the obvious. You need a website. Yes, you can pen journal posts for other platforms. In fact, I’ve talked about this in the past. But to have your own interior design blog, you need a website. And if you’re not sure how to go about getting one, take a look at Why You Need a Website for Interior Design Success.

More than just a website, you need a website that’s been search engine optimised. Because if internet browsers can’t easily find your website, blogging will be a waste of your time.

If your head is already spinning, don’t worry. Instead, schedule a free 30-minute chat to help clear the fog. There won’t’ be any sales pressure, I promise.

Design Bloggers’ Toolkit

The first tool you need when you start an interior design blog is Google Chrome. Google is the leading search engine by a long way. And Chrome is Google’s browser of choice, so use it. Some tools I recommend here are Chrome specific and don’t work in other browsers. That said, if you get it right for Google, you get it right for Bing, Microsoft Edge, Safari, etc. But no, I’m not affiliated to Google!

Second, Google Ads Keyword Planner. Sign up for Google Ads and do 2 things:

• Pause your campaign so you’re not charged for ads (and you can bypass putting in your credit card details to make doubly sure!)
• Change your account from the default Smart Mode to Expert Mode to access the Keyword Planner

Next, A SEO tool. If you have one, ask your web developer for advice. If you’ve built your site yourself, use YoastSEO for WordPress (free if you pay for premium hosting), Wix SEO Wiz for Wix (it doesn’t get great reviews, but it’s improving). Squarespace doesn’t have a recommended SEO tool. Instead they provide various learning resources.

Finally, while you’re in ‘IT mode’, link your website to Google Analytics and Google Search Console. The difference between the 2 tools might appear subtle, but they give vastly different insights. Google Analytics tells you about visitors to your website. Google Search Console tells you about searches your website appears in. We won’t discuss them any further here, but they’re very useful once you start publishing interior design blogs.

There’s a lot to take in. To help you set up your blogging tools, I’m creating an online tutorial. Follow the How to Blog for Interior Design Business Success LinkedIn page so you don’t miss out.

Choose Your Design Blog Topics

You might not realise it, but you’ve got a lot of scope. To demonstrate, from just 2 themes you can produce a myriad of topics to write about:

• Explaining interior design. For example, describing the concept, what interior designers do, why people should hire interior designers, how interior designers work, the interior design process, interior design fees, and so on.
• Using residential interior design to illustrate the second theme, combinations of rooms and property types.

Using just the second theme, I thought of 35 topics in less than 1 minute. 7 rooms (living room, dining room, bedroom, kitchen, bathroom, study, and entrance hall) and 5 property types (country home, town house, period property, modern property, and apartment). By being more specific (for example, guest bedroom, downstairs loo, Victorian, luxury) you can quickly increase the number of topics to nearly 100!

There are other themes too. Prevailing styles such as Japandi or minimalism. Or choosing pieces for different properties or rooms. Put another way, interior designers aren’t short of things to write about!

Once you’ve got a rough list, choose 3 or 4 topics. For the purposes of this blog we’ll use 2:

• Describing interior design
• Country House Living Room

How Design Bloggers Find Great Keywords

For people to find your blog on Google, it’s a good idea to concentrate it on 1 keyword. For the 2 topics we’ve chosen, the keywords could be ‘What Interior Designers Do’ and ‘Country House Living Room’.

And to find great keywords, you use Googles’ Keyword Planner. Sign in and click on ‘Discover new keywords’. Enter ‘What Interior Designers Do’ in ‘Enter products or services closely related to your business’ text box in the next window. Then click ‘Get results’.

You’ll get results for ‘What Interior Designers Do’ and then lots of keyword ideas. Some will be similar to your topic like, ‘What Is Interior Design’. Other suggestions will be irrelevant. For instance, ‘What Degree Do You Need to Be an Interior Designer’. From the list you need to choose a keyword that both represents your topic and will give you your best return for your blogging investment. But how do you decide between the keywords relevant to your topic?

There are 2 important columns to look at: ‘Avg. monthly searches’ (the number of times people enter the keyword into Google) and ‘Competition’ (how sought after the term is relative to other keywords). Obviously, you want the best combination of monthly searches and competition.

How Did our Keywords Fair?

When I looked, people search for ‘What Interior Designers Do’ between 10 and 100 times a month. And competition is low. Although still low competition, ‘What Is Interior Design’ has a greater number of searchers per month, between 100 and 1,000. So, ‘What Is Interior Design’ looks to be a better choice.

I repeated the discover keywords exercise for ‘Country House Living Room’. There’s high competition for this keyword, yet the search volume is 10x lower. Which makes it a poor choice compared to ‘What Is Interior Design’. But a quick glance at Google’s suggestions led to, ‘Farmhouse Living Room’. Still a high competition keyword, but with between 1,000 and 10,000 searches per month.

So, which is better for design bloggers? A low competition keyword with low volume? Or a high competition keyword with higher volume? The answer, in part depends on, on how up the rankings your blog needs to be for people to find it. As a rule of thumb:

• If people search on a keyword 100 times per month, almost all the traffic goes to blogs returned in positions 1 and 2.
• For 1,000 searches per month, every blog below position 4 is living off scraps.
• 10,000 searches per month: the top half of Google results are getting traffic.

So for your blog to attract traffic, it needs to rank at least higher than position 4 for the keyword ‘What Is Interior Design’. And in the top half of page 1 for the keyword ‘Country House Living Room’. That inevitably means knocking other people’s blogs down the Google rankings. To find out who you’re competing with, you need to go undercover.

Go Undercover to Work Out Your Design Blogging Competition

OK, going undercover is a bit of an exaggeration. We need to use Google’s Incognito Mode. Click on the 3 vertical dots below the cross in the top right corner of Google Chrome. And select the 3^rd menu item down. Google’s Incognito mode gives an unbiased view of the results for any entered keyword. Whereas your previous browsing behaviour biases the results returned in your normal Google window. As Google will try to include in its search results relevant websites you often visit. For instance, your own website…

When I searched for ‘What Is Interior Design’ in Incognito mode, Google returned a blog published by SBID in position 4. This means if people search for ‘What Is Interior Design’, your blog needs to knock SBID’s blog down the rankings. If there are only 100 searches a month, your blog needs to leapfrog SBID’s blog by 2 spots. A tough gig. Not impossible, but tough.

When I first searched for ‘Farmhouse Living Room’, Google returned several US design bloggers sites. This is less likely to happen when using normal mode, not Incognito mode, as Google considers your location when returning results. So to mimic the likely results, I searched on ‘Farmhouse Living Room UK’.  Houzz, Ideal Home, and Oak Furniture Land held the top 3 spots. 4^th was the review website, Real Homes, and 5^th a family run furniture business. Although a higher competition keyword search, you have less need to hum the theme tune to a popular movie franchise produced by and starring Tom Cruise.

But I’m not saying you will immediately outrank Ideal Homes, SBID, or even a family run furniture business with just one blog. No matter how good it is (and if you follow this Interior Design Bloggers’ Ultimate Guide to Getting Found on Google, it will be good). But over time, with a mixture of robust business strategies, of which your blogging is only one, it’s possible.

Which Keyword Should You Choose for Your Blog?

Which keyword search should you target, ‘What Is Interior Design’ or ‘Farmhouse Living Room’? For all the super-brain maths involved in SEO ranking, a good dollop of common-sense goes a long way. Moreover, your choice of keyword has more to do with your business circumstances in the real world, than design bloggers’ activities in the digital one.

So, if you’re a local interior designer in a small town, ‘What Is Interior Design’ works well as a keyword. Because it helps Google see your website as an authority in the local area. As a result, Google will push your website up the rankings when people search for ‘Interior Designer Near Me’. However, this approach becomes less effective the bigger the town or city you serve. Because competition increases. And even the big names answer the ‘What Is Interior Design’ question.  

But when your real-world competition is high, you need to get noticed. Stand out. And the time-honoured way to do this is to specialise. Or to use the marketing lingo, target a niche. For instance, interior design for country pads. In this case, the keyword ‘Farmhouse Living Room’, is likely to work better for you. Of course, you need to ensure that farmhouse interior design reflects your brand and services. If your design style is contemporary, keywords such as ‘Modern Living Room Design’ will better reflect your studio.

Create Your Blog Outline with Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) in Mind

Now you’re getting into the nitty-gritty of writing blogs with the intention of being found on Google. And creating a blog outline, before you start writing, will really help your chances of the internet search engines viewing it favourably. To help you, there’s an example blog outline for you to download here.

Attention Grabbing Blog Title

An attention grabbing title that contains your keyword. Examples include (with keywords in bold): ‘What is Interior Design and How to Use it to Impress’, ’10 Farmhouse Living Room Ideas Your Friends Will Love’. Or the cheeky, ‘Bedroom Design Ideas, Your Guide to Enticing Her to Stay Over’. I grant you, the last one is risqué, but I bet your attention is grabbed!

Design bloggers can grab people’s attention by appealing to their underlying, base motivations. The above examples trigger 3 of the 7 Deadly Sins: pride, envy, lust. And for more ideas to connect with potential clients on an emotional level head here.

Answering people’s questions (‘What is..’, ‘How to…’) and lists (’10 Farmhouse Living Room…’) both catch the eye. As does presenting your blog as a resource reference (‘Guide’, ‘Ideas’).

In SEO geek-speak, your blog title is called ‘H1’ (1^st header). To continue in geek-speak, should your H1 match your SEO or Meta Title? The picture below shows how Google displays the SEO title:

Although there’s no hard-and-fast rule, in my opinion your blog title should match your SEO title. Because if someone clicks on a search result called ‘Bedroom Ideas, Your Guide to Making Her Stay’, they expect a blog with that title. Not a blog called ‘Bedroom Ideas, Working with the Latest Interior Design Trends’. And that inconsistency can prevent you building trust with your reader. Which means they’ll never become a client.

Design Bloggers Can Add a Meta Description

One of the biggest barriers to design bloggers’ understanding of SEO is jargon. Epitomised by the phrase ‘Meta Description’. Also known as excerpt, it provides the description of your blog in the internet search results. If you don’t write a description for the search results, Google et al will use the 1^st 155-160 characters from your blog’s body text.

As you have an extra 155ish characters to encourage people to click on your blog and improve your Google ranking, it’s best to use them. But it’ll only boost your SEO standing if you include your keyword. Use as much of the available character count as you can. If you go over your character count, internet search engines won’t show the excess characters. Which may leave people struggling to understand your blog’s description.

Break Up Your Text and Use Subheadings to Help Google Help You

300 is the recommended minimum number of words for a blog. In my view, that’s too few words. Instead, aim for 800-1200 words. As this is equivalent to 3-5 minutes reading time. But a single block of text of 1,000 words is likely to be off-putting. So, break it up using sub-headings. Not least, because they’re fab for SEO.

Use subheadings (SEO geek-speak alert! ‘H2’) frequently to limit blocks of text to 150-300 words. If your block of text strays over 300 words, split it across two H2 subheadings. Or create subheading subheadings (‘H3’). Once you have your H2 and H3 subheadings, how should design bloggers best use them, so your blog gets found on Google? Certainly don’t repeat your keyword in every subheading like this:

• Farmhouse Living Room Idea 1: Sofa
• Farmhouse Living Room Idea 2: Wallpaper
• And so on, until
• Farmhouse Living Room Idea 10: Ceiling Lights

This won’t win you favour with the internet search engines because it’s considered naughty. Instead aim to include your keyword in 2 out of 3 subheadings. And certainly in no more than 75%. But you can use phrases that are similar. For example, ‘Feature Walls Look Great in a Country Home’, ‘Make the Most of Your Country Pad’s Fireplace’.

Design Bloggers Should Use Their Keyword Frequently, But Don’t Overdo It

In SEO-speak, keyword density. It’s calculated from your blog wordcount (including subheadings and title but not result (meta) description), how often you reference your keyword (again including in subheadings and title and excluding result description), and the number of actual words in your keyword. (Which makes it a key phrase, but so be it!). Rather than give you a formula, here’s a handy table for design bloggers to use:

If you don’t include your keyword enough, internet search engines will struggle to work out what your blog is about. Worse, by including your keyword too often, you’ll be committing a crime called keyword stuffing. A crime that Google and other engines will punish you for by not showing your blogs in search results.

That said, design bloggers often struggle to include their keywords enough. One way to up your keyword count is to include it in the blog title and repeat it in the introductory text. For instance:

You can use the same tip for subheadings. And not just to help your SEO. It helps with readability too:

Design bloggers don’t need to sprinkle keywords evenly around their blogs. In fact, it makes it easier for people to find your blog on Google if your keyword is more frequent at the beginning.

Although it’s good to reference it again at the end, your keyword doesn’t need to feature much in the middle of your blog.

Images, A Must-Have for Design Bloggers

Pictures in blogs are great. For design bloggers, they’re a necessity. Not just because of the visual nature of our industry. Also, they can help your blog move up the internet search engine rankings. Not just because images improve engagement. But as a result of a feature called ‘alt text’.

Alt text, short for ‘alternative text’, was originally intended to make internet images more accessible. By providing a description of the picture, that’s read out loud by an internet browser, allows those with visual impairment to also enjoy images. Including your keyword in alt text tells Google that your image is relevant to your blog. And Google likes relevant images!

Although keywords in alt text don’t contribute to your blog’s keyword density, don’t overuse them. Similar to subheadings, include your keywords in the alt text of about 2 from 3 images. And no more than 75%. From the perspective of SEO, you only need to enter the keyword as alt text. However, let’s honour the original reason behind alt text. Namely, accessibility. So please, only include your keyword in alt text that truly describes the image for those who can’t see it.

Internal and External Links

Include links in your blog. Both internal links, to your own blogs or webpages. And external links, to others’ blogs and websites. Both improve your blog’s credibility with internet search engines, if used correctly.

Internal links tell Google that you’ve a wealth of information to share. But Google’s bots check that the linked blog is relevant. That means think carefully to make sure the two blogs relate to each other. So ‘farmhouse living room’ and ‘country kitchen’, yes. ‘What is interior design’ and ‘minimalism’, less so. But if done well, people will spend more time on your website. And Google notices that and will rank your blog higher because of it.

External links tell Google that you’re an expert on the subject because you know what relevant information others share. But only link to authoritative websites. To use a parallel, to check out long COVID symptoms go to NHS.uk, not quackdrs.net! Equally for interior design links, BIID.org.uk – good, homesandgardens.com – good, bodge-it-and-scarper-decorators.biz – bad!

Design bloggers can worry about using external links. Because it may take the reader away from your website. This is true, but manageable. Most web building packages have a setting that causes external links to open in a separate tab. Make use of this feature, because your blog will remain active whilst your reader is scanning another’s page. More importantly, using external links cleverly can make way for another fruitful SEO strategy, backlinking. That’s to say, encouraging others to reference your blog in theirs. But that’s topic for a future blog.

Blog Web Address

I realise a design bloggers’ guide to get found on Google is a dry subject. Unfortunately, this last bit makes the Sahara look like a swamp. But it’s crucial, so grin and bear it.

If left to your web builder (WordPress, Squarespace, etc.) the web address for your blog could end up being quite random. Especially if you’ve copied a previous blog to use as a template. But creating a blog address (sometimes called a ‘slug’) that reflects your keyword is a really easy and effective way to help Google rank it. By example:

In the above web address, the wording ‘what-is-interior-design’ is from our example, ‘What is interior design’ keyword. But with hyphens replacing spaces. And it’s important to use hyphens, not underscores (under_scores). Because internet search engines interpret hyphens as spaces and ignore underscores. So, ‘what_is_interior_design’ is ‘whatisinteriordesign’ to a search engine. AKA a gobble-de-gook.

Interior Design Bloggers’ Ultimate Guide to Getting Found on Google

And that’s it. Now you know how to research and create a blog outline that internet search engines will rank highly. So you can begin to write your insightful, inspiring, engaging, witty blog. And if you want tips on that too, look no further than here.

Let’s Get Your Blogs Working for You!