Interior Design SEO Case Study - Ranking #1 & 30 Leads/Month

Our client, Alder & Tweed, is a luxury interior design firm based in the US, with several offices across 3 different states.
When they approached us, they wanted to improve their online reputation and reach potential new customers that had never heard of their brand name, which required going beyond traditional marketing efforts.

We managed to rank our client’s website #1 for the keywords “interior designer”, “interior design agency”, in several locations where they operate, such as:

• Park City, UT
• Big Sky, MT
• Bozeman, MT
• Amenia, NY

Thanks to our SEO strategy, our client got 17-18 leads per month on average , as well as 2,770+ cold traffic in just 1 year. Now, their organic search results drive 30 leads/month!

During the past 2 years, we’ve helped them generate an extra $3M in revenue through SEO alone.

Want to know how we achieved these results? Keep reading to learn about the exact strategy we used and see how we can help your interior design firm too.

Interior Design SEO Case Study Summary

The Challenge

Our interior design client had their website set up, but they weren’t getting nearly enough leads as expected. Although their website was getting some traffic, it wasn’t converting into clients.

They reached out to us so we could build and execute their SEO strategy that would:

• Rank their site in the top 3 positions for their main target keywords in key locations where they operate.
• Increase their organic traffic by 20 times.
• Increase their lead conversion ratio by 20%.

Our Solution

To meet our client’s expectations and deliver long-standing results, we came up with the following interior design SEO strategy:

• Step #1. Audit their website and perform technical optimization
• Step #2. Create a keyword research plan
• Step #3. Publish location landing pages with SEO copy
• Step #4. Optimize their Google My Business listings
• Step #5. Launch Google Ads to start driving leads before SEO efforts kick in
• Step #6. Build NAP citations in local directories
• Step #7. Build links to the homepage and location landing pages

We executed our full SEO strategy step-by-step in 9 months, and in just one year, here are the results we saw:

The Results In the 1st Year

After working on our client’s SEO for one year, we could already see some impressive results:

• Over 2,770 cold traffic per month driven to the website, over 20x the initial goal.
• 210+ cold leads delivered via SEO (∼17-18 leads per month).
• #1 rankings for “interior designer” and “interior design agency” in 3+ different locations, including Park City, Bozeman, Big Sky, and more.
• Improved rankings site-wide for other key pages, including the homepage and blog posts.
• Lead Conversion ratio increased by 25%, over the benchmark set at the beginning of the project.

Keep in mind that well executed SEO strategies have a snowball effect, so at the time you’re reading this, our client is still experiencing growth. That’s the real power of SEO.

Want to learn how we executed each step of the strategy for our client to achieve these results? Read on! Or, contact us so we can start working on your own SEO strategy right away.

Interior Design SEO Case Study - 7 Steps to Ranking #1 for “Interior Designer”

Step #1. Technical SEO Audit & Site Speed Optimization

Your website is the foundation of any SEO strategy. The first step is to do a technical SEO audit and optimize the speed of your website.
In the first month of working with our client, we optimized their website for technical SEO best practices by:

• Making sure all web pages can be crawled and indexed
• Setting up analytics and tracking
• Verifying that the robots.txt file doesn’t have a ‘noindex’ tag on landing pages
• Ensuring there are no pages that result in a 404 error
• Optimizing the URL structure and including keywords in the URL slug
• Redirecting duplicate content and inaccessible pages
• Making sure a sitemap is generated and submitted on GSC on a regular basis
• Disavowing toxic backlinks
• Fixing broken incoming and outgoing links

Besides the technical SEO optimization, we worked directly with their developer in order to make the website load as fast as possible by:

• Minifying JS scripts to optimize website load time
• Losslessly compressing images on their website to load them faster
• Resizing images to save space
• Implementing lazy loading to further optimize page load time
• Setting-up a CDN for faster static asset loading
• Working with the client’s developer to make the website mobile-friendly.

The site now loads instantly, and achieves an almost perfect score on Google PageSpeed Insights:

For more optimization tips, check out our SEO examples article.

Step #2. Keyword Research

After the website was polished, we started working on the keyword research plan.

We picked target keywords for every location our client operates in by feeding seed keywords into Google Keyword Planner, analyzing related searches to our seed keywords, and researching what the competitors are ranking for.
Some of the target keywords we decided to target were:

• park city interior design
• interior design firm park city
• salt lake city interior design
• interior design salt lake city
• big sky interior design
• interior design firm big sky
• yellowstone club interior design, etc.

We then ran the same list of seed keywords through Ahrefs and Semrush, and manually hand-picked the keywords that made the most sense for our client.

Then, we extracted PPC data from Google Keyword Planner to give us an idea of how competitive the keywords are.

Finally, we created a list of landing pages based on the keywords we selected and prioritized them based on their search volume and their competitiveness.

Step #3. Publishing Location-Based Landing Pages

To rank in the top 3 positions on SERPs in locations that our client operates in, we created a dedicated landing page for each location.

Each of these pages is optimized for a different target keyword, such as “park city interior design”, “interior design big sky mt”, and so on.

To make the process of creating these pages much faster, we created a general template page format that all these pages would follow, and then customized the copy for each page.

This way, we managed to deliver 8 unique landing pages during our 3rd month of working on the project.

Of course, we also made sure that each of these landing pages is SEO-optimized by:

• Mentioning the target keyword w/ 0.5%+ keyword density.
• Ensuring that all images have alt text w/ the right relevant keyword.
• Mentioned different variations of the target keyword where possible (“interior designer,” “interior design firm,” etc.).
• Included the target keyword in H1 and H2 headers.
• Wrote a dedicated FAQ for each page.
• Included a Google Maps snippet that links to the relevant office for that location.

Want to learn more about GMB and local SEO optimization? Check out our 11 Step Local SEO Checklist!

Step #4. Optimizing GMB Listings

Google My Business (GMB) optimization is a key part of local SEO campaigns.
By optimizing your website according to SEO best practices, you only get to rank on the standard Google search results:

If you want to rank on Google Maps, though, you’ll have to optimize your Google My Business (GMB) profile too:

So, in the 3rd month, we worked on optimizing our client’s GMB listings for each location by:

• Ensuring the NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number) details were correct and consistent with other NAP mentions (for ex. on their website)
• Updating the working hours
• Including a URL to the website
• Adding (significantly) more portfolio pictures
• Giving the client’s marketing specialist tips and guidelines on how to drive more reviews for the GMB profile.

Step #5. Launching Google Ads for Immediate Results

The main downside of any local SEO initiative is that it can take up to 6 to 8 months to start seeing results (or even longer in competitive locations like NYC, for example.)

In order to start driving leads & revenue for the client from month #1, we started running Google Ads that show up on top of organic results:

If you haven’t tried Google Ads before, here’s the catch:

Instead of waiting for months to rank organically, you instead pay Google to display your URL as a “Sponsored Ad” on top of the organic results instantly.

This, however, won’t be as cheap as SEO - you’ll need to pay for each click your website gets, and the prices can range from anything between 1 to 100 USD, depending on your location.

Places like NYC, London, etc. are going to be significantly more expensive than, say, Salt Lake City, Utah.

Google Ads are also not as effective as organic SEO for getting a constant flow of targeted leads. But they are good to start off with when launching an SEO campaign. On the other hand, when you rank organically, people are more likely to click on your pages than if you are running ads.

However, the benefit of running Google Ads is that you can start getting new leads within a few days of running the ads, as opposed to SEO, which can take months.

Step #6. Building Local NAP Citations

A citation is any mention of your company on the internet that includes the following information:

• Business name
• Address
• Phone number
• Website address (optional)

Building such citations in local directories is important for local businesses because they give search engines a stronger signal for ranking your business locally.

Additionally, listing your business in niche directories, such as interior design firm directories in this case, reaffirms your area of operations to search engines.
Some popular citations directories we listed our client in were:

• Yahoo Maps
• Yellow Pages
• Local.com
• Elocal.com
• Yelp.com

…and over 100+ others, including niche directories. We started building local citations in the 3rd month, after optimizing their GMB listings.

For citations to improve the local SEO bottomline, you need a mixed approach of both well-known general business directories, and niche business directories (in this case interior design ones).

Step #7. Link-Building

Other than citations, link-building is another essential part of interior design SEO.

Link-building is the process of acquiring backlinks to your website, which basically means getting links from any other websites to yours. Just like citations, backlinks have a very significant impact on how your website ranks.

In order to build links to the interior design client’s website, we did the following:

• Every month, we created a list of 100+ online bloggers who cover interior design topics.
• We used Snov.io to send mass personalized emails to the bloggers, asking them for either a guest post or a link insertion.
• We built relationships with dozens of bloggers over the course of the year, which netted us a total of 40+ backlinks.
• The links that we built were pointed at the location landing pages that we explained in Step #3.

Using outreach software like Snov makes the relationship-building process much easier. For other useful SEO tools, check out this list of 23+ best SEO ranking software.

What’s Next in Our Interior Design SEO Strategy?

After we built all the key location landing pages and started citation & link building, the website started driving both traffic and leads within 6 months.

The client managed to easily cover our agency fee as well as drive very significant profits on a monthly basis.

SEO work, however, isn’t something you just do once and call it a day - it’s a continuous process. From then on, we are:

• Keeping track of the website’s SEO health on a monthly basis and making improvements on the go.
• Improving on-page content when needed for certain pages.
• Building links on a regular basis to pages that might be underperforming.
• Picking up new target locations where the client wants to expand in.
• Building citations for new target locations.

And a lot more.

Work With an Interior Design SEO Agency

Unless you’re a seasoned SEO professional, the process we just covered can seem a bit intimidating.

Want to skip past the headache of having to learn all that yourself? Work with an SEO agency with a track record of success working with interior design agencies!

Schedule a free consultation call and let’s see what we can do to rank you #1 in your location.

Or, if you aren’t convinced, head over to our case studies page and learn more about the type of results we’ve driven for other clients.

Interior Design SEO FAQ

#1. How long does interior design SEO take?

Seeing results from interior design SEO efforts can take anything from 6 months to 2 years, depending on how competitive your location is.

#2. How much does interior design SEO cost?

Interior design SEO can cost anything between $1,500 to $5,000 per month, depending on factors like:

• Are you doing it in-house, or working with an agency?
• Are you targeting 1 location or multiple?
• Are you in a competitive location? E.g. NYC, London, etc.
• Do you have existing relations with interior design bloggers? This can make link-building much easier.

#3. Should I work with an interior design SEO agency or do it myself?

Working with an interior design agency can be much cheaper than carrying out the process alone. Agencies like Apollo Digital have the entire interior design SEO process streamlined:

• We can create new landing pages fast and easily.
• We know exactly what needs to be done to optimize your website for on-page SEO.
• We have a very large database of interior design bloggers who work with us in link-building campaigns.

While SEO agencies are certainly not cheap, doing the SEO work in-house is going to be significantly more time-consuming and expensive.

#4. What other industries is SEO an effective marketing channel?

SEO can significantly benefit companies in other industries, too. We’ve used SEO to drive amazing results for companies in SaaS, e-commerce, legal, and other niches.