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Foreign hello everyone, and welcome back to the Kate show. It's episode 289 and today I am sharing SEO fixes that any interior designer can use. Guys, search engine optimization for the design community and related industries has remained a mystery for years to thousands of people. It has felt unapproachable due to how expensive it seems to be, and the trust factor has remained fairly low due to a chronic lack of results. And it's time to fix that. So today on the show, I'm sharing SEO fixes that any designer, stager, organizer, window treatment pro can go implement right now. Some of these fixes are faster and easier, while others require some research and intentional effort. But as we know in business, the things that we put that intentional research and effort into often have the big, biggest impact. So without further ado, let me ask you this. How many of you have had some sort of stress or anxiety over your SEO? You wonder, am I ranking above my competitors? How do I get on the first page of Google? I get asked that all the time. How do I get on the first page? And the part that people don't follow up with is how do I get on the first page of Google for this specific keyword? There's no such thing as just randomly appearing on the first page of Google without having a particular keyword associated with it. And that's often where the disconnect lies. In SEO, you have to have every important page of your website, every money page optimized for a certain keyword or keyword phrase, but only one. And the websites that have tons of keywords crammed into one page won't necessarily rank well. In fact, they could just rank poorly for that very reason. So I'm going to go through a long list of SEO fixes and a list of SEO failures, and then I'll briefly share how you can know if you have good SEO, what to do if you don't, how much SEO for the design industry should cost you just so you have more information. Information so you can make better decisions for your business. All right, so let's get into it. Like I said, the money pages or the important pages of your website really need to be the main focus. The money pages are home about and each services page. Now, each of these pages should have at least 300 words. But you're going to see in a few minutes why 300 words is not a drop in the budget bucket. You need much more than that. Now, I can already hear some of you going, oh my goodness. But I don't want A whole book on every page of my website? Well, no, of course you don't. That wouldn't be very user friendly. And user friendliness is a big part of SEO as well. However, you can easily have five or six hundred words on a page of your website because that's going to be how long it takes for you to explain what you offer, share how it works, share FAQs. And you can break all that text up through good website design and layout. So graphics, images, dropdowns, headlines, all the things. But let's get back to the nitty gritty. So each money page should have at least 300 words. You should have an SEO title that has 50 to 60 words in it, or characters rather. And then your SEO Description should contain 150 to 160 characters as well. So not words, characters. And each page, whether it's a money page, an important page or not, like the non money pages would be like their contact page. Those still need to meet certain SEO requirements. Each and every page of your website should have only one page H1 heading, and that H1 should be about three to seven words long. So sometimes I make exceptions for this, like on the contact page. I don't really want to say contact us now because sometimes that doesn't read well. So I just say contact. To me it's not a huge deal because it's not a money page. But this is also where some artistic flair and some discretion and critical thinking have to come into play. Because SEO is both an art and a science. And that's the tough thing. Now not only should every page only have one H1 heading, you can have multiple H2 and H3 headings throughout the page. And in fact, if you don't have multiple H2 and H3 headings, you're going to have readability issues because you're going to have too many text, too many images, not enough text broken up throughout. And having those H2 and H3 headings will make your page skimmable, which is user friendly, which Google loves to see. Also, every important page of your website should focus on only one keyword or keyword phrase. Now the question you should be asking is which keyword should I focus on for my homepage or for my full service interior design page or for my home organizing services page? Well, that's where keyword research comes into play. I am not going to break down keyword research in this episode because that's not an SEO fix that just anybody can do. Mainly because a lot of you just don't have the time and it requires tools and it requires, it requires a lot of things, but that's what research is. You know, it's not necessarily easy. Now, keyword research should not take weeks. In fact, it can take as little as one afternoon if you know what you're doing. But it's something that absolutely has to be done first before you start making changes to the SEO of your website. Now, here's the thing, and here's why it's so important to go into it. Knowing which keywords you need to rank for the H1 heading, the SEO title and the SEO description of every money page you know home about and services should include that same keyword or keyword phrase, exact same thing. That same keyword phrase should also appear in the first 100 words of body text, as well as about two, maybe three more times later in the text. And that's why it's good to have far more than 300 words on a page. Or these keywords will feel feel too close together, too repetitive and crammed in there. Now, you can also use alternative keywords or alternative keyword phrases in the body text, but only where it feels natural and flows well. Your body text should remain readable, not packed with keywords, to the point where it becomes obvious and obnoxious, because doing that is called keyword packing and it will hurt your SEO. You also, on top of all these technical things, need to make sure your text is actually talking to a specific person, your ideal client, for the highest impact. Because at the end of the day, you're not just trying to rank well on Google, you're ultimately trying to create connection with the right clients. And you've got to do that while navigating these SEO boundaries. In addition to all of this, every image of your site, whether it's in a portfolio, a blog post, or any other page of your site, each image should be compressed, each down to 500 kilobytes or less, as closely and as often as possible. In addition to that, every image file should be named according to the service you offer and the location you offer it in. Now, image files really don't benefit from including your business name in them, and doing that can actually make the file name too long. So don't worry about doing that. You should have a little description of the photo, there's a few words, the service that you offer, just one, and then the location. Just one location. Now, if you have a squarespace website, you can actually change your squarespace image import settings to pull data from the image file names that you upload, which is helpful if you're going to do all this work to the image file names. Anyway to do this, and I don't expect you to remember this, but maybe you can write it down later. Log into your Squarespace website. Click on Settings in the left panel, then click on Developer Tools and then click on Metadata Importing and select Enable. Okay, I don't expect any of you to remember that. Just know that it is possible for your Squarespace website to pull in information from those file names and that's going to be very helpful to you. Also, another thing that you should do is add a Frequently Asked Questions section to every services page that you have. Google will pull this information to answer users questions in search results, especially since they're now using AI summaries to create search results for services that are similar. You can totally group them on one services page because the Frequently Asked Questions section will apply to pretty much all of them. But for services that are more robust or standalone, such as your primary service offering versus your add on services, create separate services pages. You will have so much more clarity and so will your potential clients if you don't cram everything on one page. Now you should have a complete services page. You should have the actual service, who it's for, what it includes, what the benefits are of that service and of the features. Benefits are like the emotional reward of it. Features are here are the things I'm going to do for you. And then you should also have a How it works section so that people understand what to expect. And then you should also have a Frequently Asked Question section because you need to be anticipating their questions even before they can ask. They will love you for this and so will Google. You also need to end that page with a call to action. Now I haven't really discussed here. Here's how the layout of your site should look if you want really good usability and good user experience. But just as a quick little side note, you need to have a call to action at the end of every page of your website, with some exceptions being portfolio pages and the contact page, mainly because the contact page is one giant call to action by itself anyway, anyway. Also, if you have blog posts that are relevant to a service you offer, link those blog posts in those services pages. This not only makes you look like an authority figure to a human being who's looking at the page, but Google will also see that, okay, this URL, this domain has a good amount of internal authority because they've got internal links going on relevant Content. It's easy to read, it's easy to navigate. Five stars, you know, whatever. But if you don't have relevant blog posts, maybe consider writing a few. I know, much easier said than done, but just keep it in the back of your mind. And this is why it matters what you blog about. This is why writing fluff content doesn't help your business. If you were talking about how to style a coffee table, how to pick a color palette, and get you're trying to sell a service on color consultation, it's not going to jive well. Instead, you could say, here's how we transformed this client's home by reimagining her color palette. That'd be a great blog post. And it would make sense to link that to a color consultation service that you offer or just a general design consultation service you offer, because it shows people what's possible and it shows people what you've already done and it tells a story. So that's pretty much awesome right there. Okay, so there are a lot of SEO dues. You know, you want to make sure that above all, your website is easy to use and it communicates directly with a specific type of person. It doesn't just talk about you all the time. That's a very easy trap to fall into. If the first thing on your website is just, we are a design firm that. Blah, blah, blah. That's not right. The first thing you should do is address your ideal client, make sure they feel seen and heard, explain what their pain points are, and then you can go into all the other things while at the same time making sure you're using the keyword phrases that you've researched or that someone has researched for you in the right places so that you can actually rank or show up in search results for the things that your ideal client would be searching so. So that you can actually get that client on your roster. Whew. Right? It's an art and a science. Okay, but let's kind of turn the page here and look at SEO failures. And it's okay if you've been using some of these because, well, now you know. Now you can fix it. The first one is avoid minimal websites and avoid website cover pages that require the user to click enter before seeing the actual website. These things might feel elegant, but these websites don't perform well and they often have terrible SEO because of the thin content issues. As a reminder, thin content is not enough text. No calls to action in the right places. Constantly just telling people to book a call, not giving them enough Information, not anticipating their questions, not addressing their pain points. That's a thin content. And it's one of the most common issues that I see on websites for the design and related industries. All right, so your site should be elegant and optimized for search engines. And that takes time and effort. Sometimes it takes investment. It is what it is. It's part of being in business. Now here's another thing that you need to be aware of. Google does not allow for paid backlinks in bulk. And Google can tell if backlinks were purchased. So focus on having websites that are relevant to your industry linked to your site because they gave you an award or because you wrote an article for them. So an example of this might be you got an award through asid. They're going to probably talk about it on their website and in that blog post on their site, they'll link back to you. That is a high quality backlink. Perfect. Now you're not going to get hundreds or thousands of those, but you know, a few dozen here and there from relevant sources will help increase things like your domain authority. But now on the topic of domain authority, it does impact your SEO, but it's not the king of everything, so don't hyper focus on it. And for those of you who are like, what the heck is domain authority? It is a score of 0 to 100 that estimates your website's potential to rank well in search engine results. It it's not a direct Google ranking factor. So Google's not just going to say, oh, this site has a domain authority score of 50, so I'm going to rank it higher than the one that has a score of 45. But it is a useful tool for measuring the strength and credibility of your domain. So just bear that in mind. And one of the big ways you can increase your domain authority is by having those high quality backlinks. Now, if your competitor has a thousand backlinks, but they're from irrelevant places, irrelevant websites, and you have a hundred backlinks, a lot less, but they're pretty relevant, you'll likely rank higher because that's just how it works. Now here's another thing to be aware of. Aside from the backlinks, another thing that comes up a lot is when people talk to me about SEO would be the keyword monitoring. Because everyone has it in their head now they need to pay someone to monitor their keywords. Guys do not pay an agency or a consultant to monitor your keywords. You can do it yourself by setting up a paid SEO tool that will cost you far less per month. You could use SEM, Rush, Accuranker, keyword. Com, or if you have a squarespace website, you could use SEO space. I love SEO space. It is. It's got all the things you need in one spot and it's affordable and I just really, really love it. Also guys, you don't need to pay for ongoing SEO services if that service does not have a defined goal and a defined and set end date. Because it does not take forever to optimize a website, nor does a website require constant adjustments. Once your on site SEO has been established, the only thing you can do to further enhance it is publish a blog post at least once a month. Because each blog post can be optimized for a certain keyword following the same pattern as all the important pages that already exist on your website. And you can also get quality backlinks where possible, but don't stress about that. And then lastly, just make sure that any additions or new uploads you do on your site are done with SEO best practices in mind because it is possible for your SEO score to go down if, let's say you have your website optimized for SEO or built from scratch with SEO in mind. It looks great, performs well. Six months later you have your assistant upload new photos, but that assistant doesn't know that she's supposed to compress and rename them. Or you build out a new services page and that services page wasn't optimized for the keywords and it has thin content that will drag down the average SEO score of your site. So you just want to make sure that any additions you make to your site going forward after the initial SEO work is done is still following best practices so that you're not sliding backwards. Okay, so now this brings us to the big question that so many people ask and so many people Google. How much should good SEO for the design community cost? Well, this depends. Favorite answer. Right? This depends on the current state of your website. In my professional experience, we typically see the investment starting around 2000, all the way up to 6000. Now these are one time costs broken over several months until that work is complete. There is a set scope of work with a set end date. This is not a reoccurring fee or a subscription fee. And it's important to understand that because there will be plenty of opportunities for you to sign up for an SEO service that really has no end date and no clear deliverable other than like keyword tracking, which is not helpful and it's not A deliverable. The next question that you should be asking is how do you know if your SEO is so bad that you might as well just start over, like with a new website? Well, simply put, if the cost to fix your SEO exceeds that of a new website, common sense would say get a new website and make sure this one has the SEO built directly into. Is so concerning to me when people hire a website done and then they go somewhere else for the SEO, because not only is that very expensive, but in order to properly optimize a site for search engines, a lot of design changes have to be made to the site itself. So they're kind of paying for the same service twice. And that's, that's frustrating. But another question you should be asking is a little bit more positive. How do you know if you have a good SEO already? Well, there are a few things you can do. You could use an SEO audit tool, a measurement tool, some sort of analysis tool, but with discretion. For example, if you use Google's Page Speed insights tool, your WordPress, Wix, Weebly, ShowIt, or Squarespace site will pretty much always score low for things like loading speed. And that's because this tool was meant to measure completely custom coded websites, not content management system sites. And there's nothing wrong with having a content management system based site like what I listed above. You just need to be aware that there is that nuance in these various measurement tools. The other thing that you can do is use a keyword ranking tool and this will determine how people are finding your site and what keywords you are showing up for. It can also show you sometimes what your competitors are ranking for. And you can also see, has my keyword ranking changed since those SEO improvements were made? Now you might have to wait 90 days or so for those improvements to have a measurable impact on your rankings. But at some point you should see a difference. You should also check your Google Analytics and your Google search console every month or at least every quarter and look at what pages are getting the most traffic. Where is the traffic coming from? Did that traffic increase or decrease after the SEO based changes were made? And lastly, you should be tracking how your leads are finding you, because that's what we're all after, right? The best SEO in the world doesn't matter if you're not getting new leads from it. Now, please note, I'm not saying new clients. SEO is not meant to directly bring you clients. It's meant to bring people to your site. Your website is meant to get that person to either book a discovery call or fill out your contact form or at the very least sign up for your lead magnet and then it's the job of your sales funnel to convert that lead into a client. So this is not about finding clients, it's about finding leads. So track how your leads are finding you. Just because someone completed your website contact form doesn't mean they actually found you on Google. But it also doesn't mean they didn't. You can't assume ask them in the contact form on the phone wherever how they found you and then use discretion. They might have found you on Google after also hearing about you from a friend and then seeing you in the search results jog their memory. And they were like, oh yeah, that's the person I should contact. Often a high end client, which is really what you all are focused on serving. A high end client will need to hear about you from multiple angles before they take action. And that's why ongoing marketing aside from just SEO, is so crucial. Okay, now that you have a short and fast or kind of short kind of fast list of do's and don'ts, you're going to be able to make better decisions on how your website should be designed. Not only should your website be easy to use and look great and attract your ideal client and be on brand, but it should also follow the SEO best practices that I shared today. Whether you do it yourself or hire it done, you'll be better equipped to understand what you're paying for and what the ROI should be based on those efforts. All right, so if you have an interior design, staging, window treatment or organizing website that needs an SEO makeover or you're just curious where your website currently ranks you, you should start with an SEO audit. Go to katethesocialite.com SEO for interior designers to get started. We have our whole process outlined there and you really just start with an audit and then you get to decide if, when or how you want to proceed any further. All right guys, thank you so much for watching and listening. Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast on YouTube on Spotify. Please give us a rating and a review on Spotify and Apple podcasts. And until next time, keep your marketing simple, your message clear and I will talk to you soon.