Interior Designers – Boosting Your Position In Google Search Results

Think about it. When YOU are looking for something on the internet what do you do?

You probably use Google (if you are in the UK as Bing or Yahoo are seldom used) and you probably normally click on results that appear on the left hand side and you probably do not click on one of the adverts on the right hand side. You probably also usually only click on things from the first page and perhaps only occasionally from the second or third page if there is something really hard to find. Well most people are like you in how they search!. That’s the good news.

So you want to get your company website listed as high as possible on the left hand side part of the main results, right?

Well here is the bad news; so does everybody else.

Even worse news, it’s not easy.

But the good news is that it is not rocket science. You CAN get better results with a little bit of effort and time.

You can pay people to do this for you. Be careful though many of them are not reputable organisations who can deliver.

So what do you need to do?

1. Have great relevent content on your web site. If there is lots and lots of good and up-to-date info about your services as an interior designer then google will rank you highly. Having bland media-speak sentences that could apply to any of your competitors WILL NOT WORK. The relavent content will include repeated uses of the keywords that people will be using to find interior designers eg “Interior Designer“, your ‘location’, your style “contemporary/traditional”, your projects “villa, hotel, private residence” and so on.

2. Have a properly constructed web site. All the techy bits need to be right. For example, each page needs to have the ‘correct’ title and the right ‘meta’ keywords in the page (meta bits cannot be seen by users but are seen and used by Google). There are several other technical bits that need to be working properly too.

3. Get your site listed in lots of places. Some of these you will  have to pay for but choose wisely – most of the paid for site listings are a waste of money. However, thehousedirectory.com, bida.org and touchlocal.com are good places to start.

I won’t want to go into too much detail in this article about what to do in points 1. and 2. from above. I’ll let you know if you contact me directly from your work email address as I do not want to share this information with MY competitors! They will eventually figure it out but I want them to take as long as possible!

For point 3. ,  you will probably hear about reciprocal links. This is where some company says “if you put me on your site I will put you on mine”. This used to work but now Google will PENALISE you for doing this. So, don’t do it. Don’t worry about it if you’ve done it once or twice but do not use this as a strategy, it will not work.

What you need is links TO your site FROM good, reputable sites. So if you get links from the bbc or timesonline then that will boost the reputation of your site (from Google’s point of view) a lot. But of course that is hard to do.

Q. How do you know what a good site to be linked from is?

A. Download the ‘google toolbar’ into your web browser, it tells you the PAGERANK of the site you are currently on. Pagerank is a mark out of 10, for example the bbc.co.uk is 9/10. your web site is probably 2 0r 3 out of 10. Which is not as bad as it sounds! The most a smallish company is likely to score is 5/10. If you get listed on a site whose pagerank is higher than your then that boosts your page rank.

Pagerank information is only updated every few months so you will  have to wait to see if you are being successful.

As a tip: most of the reputable fabric houses have a stockists page.  That would be a good place to be listed, of course you actually have to be a stockist!

Briefly how pagerank works: when a user types “Interior Designer London” into Google then the Google search engine will find all occurances of those terms over the whole internet. It will order them based on what it thinks most appropriate. Sites with a higher pagerank get a higher position, pages with a high occurance of the searched for words get a higher position, and so on through several other factors.

Hope that helped.

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