This article is going to compare two areas that are not immediately related, interior design and search engine optimisation (SEO). Interior design is all about making the best use of space in buildings, whilst SEO is all about making best use of space on websites. The homeowner benefits from a well designed interior in the same way they benefit from a well optimised website, it makes their life more enjoyable and easy. They can find what they need effortlessly, the place looks beautiful and day to day life is a joy. By looking at some aspects of SEO, we can identify a unique approach to interior design that can be used to optimise homes as well as websites. There are some interesting tips throughout, enjoy.
Pages / Rooms
Intent / Layout
To be the first result on Google for a search, the content of a page needs to be relevant to the intent of the searchers search. This is why searching for “why is December 25th a special day?” will come up with a search results page full of links to web pages related to Christmas, it is because the ranking system understands you are searching for Christmas, even though you didn’t mention it.
Applying that to interior design, you need to start the process by highlighting the intent of a room, which will be based on the homeowner. Two kitchens should be designed without much similarity if the two chefs intend to use them differently. One may make use of every known spice, appliance and cooking tool in the world, whilst the other exclusively oven cooks ready meals. When the intended use of each room is understood, we can proportion space, time and financial resources in order of those most prioritised by the homeowner. Our master chef will expect a meticulously crafted, expansive kitchen whilst his counterpart will gladly minimise the kitchen space to create more space for his other passions, like a record collection or pet lion.
Keywords / Furniture
The searches we make on google are also known as “keywords”, which when written on a webpage will bring that page to the top of the search results. Google penalises sites for “stuffing” them though, or the top result of any search would be a page full of those words repeated millions of times, like a Daft Punk song.
Applying that to interior design, we have to consider the furniture as keywords. Figure out what furniture needs to be in each room and remove any that has no reason being there. This is basic stuff, but it gets interesting when we look at “long tail keywords”…
Long Tail Keywords / Style
Long tail keywords are searches more than 3 words long, like “metallic gold star shaped lampshades”, and the use of these allows us to find really specific things online.
Applying the long tail idea, we can choose one prefix (goes before the main word) or a set of prefixes to our furniture keywords, which will describe the style of our interior design. For example, if we decide that all the furniture in the house will be “minimalist modern” and then we can literally search for “minimalist modern dining tables” online and see a selection of stylised choices that will suit our chosen design style. We can also use this for extremely specific design choices, such as “bespoke minimalist small round new black British wooden dining tables near me”. By deciding the adjectives that will describe the furniture, and incorporating them into the “keywords”, we can create a style guide that homeowners can utilise for future purchasing decisions. Want some new dining chairs? Just look for “bespoke minimalist small round new black British wooden dining chairs near me”, easy.
Dynamic Content / Decoration
Dynamic content is anything that isn’t text on a website: images, videos, apps, forms, tables, graphs and so on. If two pages have similar content that is relevant to the search intent and contains the right keywords, but one has a load of videos, that page will rank above the other in the search results. Some dynamic content can be so powerful that it beats meticulously keyworded pages to be the top result, for example an instructional video when searching for how to teach your dog to do a backflip.
Applying this to interior design is where decorating comes in, adding extra to the necessary to turn a house into a home. These may be personal touches, such as a collection of antique china plates handed down over generations, or modern gadgets that we often forget are decorative, such as televisions and sound systems. These need to remain relevant to the intent of each room, and can be chosen based on the keyword criteria, but this is where interior design goes beyond the realm of efficiency and beauty and becomes truly individual.
Each person has an individual sense of beauty that should be strongly considered during this stage of interior design. An interior designer deciding these finishing touches makes it a piece of art they have created, rather than a physical representation of the homeowners personality. The unique traits, likes and dislikes of each person are neatly bundled together by the common cause of a search query that leads them to a page on which they watch a video or scan an infographic, however each home should be completely unique. One size may fit all who search when it comes to bespoke minimalist small round new black British wooden dining tables near me, but people are infinitely more complex. So think about what you or your client really likes and drip it over that home like honey on a pancake.
Snippets / Focal Points
Snippets are what you see when you search for something, like little store fronts that line the streets of Google. The most important keywords and information gets put here, as a brief snapshot of the much larger whole.
In interior design, this would be the focal or most important point of each room. Like the bed in a bedroom or the table in a dining room. You need to pick one or two things that are the most important and build the room around them. This may be difficult in a studio flat, where multiple rooms are combined into one space, however the concept of intention then comes into play. Depending on the occupant, a studio flat may be more centred on a bed or a living space. The idea here is that at a glance you can tell what that space is for, like with a snippet for a webpage.
Navigation
Externally / Connectivity
In SEO, backlinks are a great way for a good webpage to climb the rankings. When a highly credible site links to another, it adds credibility to that site, while a “toxic” link from a bad site will harm the sites credibility. Also, customers will be directed to that site from the other if they are interested in what’s on offer. This link to the top digital marketing agency that wrote this article is an example of a good backlink.
When it comes to interior design, this is like how a house connects to the outside world, besides the front door (and other external doors). It’s a huge mistake to leave these connections as an afterthought. Plumbing, electric and signal based connections, postal and waste collection facilities need to be considered with care at the beginning of a design project. If you slap a load of cables and boxes on top of a carefully crafted design, it’s going to make the whole project look badly thought out.
Internally / Between Rooms
A well optimised web page will have clear links to relevant pages on the same site. This allows the user to make the most of the site quickly and easily, without having to travel elsewhere.
Interior design can take advantage of this by placing rooms and their contents in a similar order of relevance. It makes sense to place the water based amenities in the same room, so bathrooms and toilets have become synonymous over time. Similarly, kitchen diners have become common because having the food preparation and consumption in the same room is logical. However by rethinking classical approaches to design using SEO principles and a good san diego seo consultant, we might pair an entrance hall with a washroom, to remove chances of getting a clean house dirty. We may also want to combine a kitchen with a vegetable garden, creating food where we prepare it. Other combinations may be a home gym and bathroom (keeping sweat at bay), or a garage with a larder (straight from the car to the shelf), can you think of any more non-traditional combinations that make sense?
Between rooms as well, there are more options that we initially think, just as a website can be navigated with buttons, hyperlinked text, images, menus and so on. If you want to have a unique home, going from room to room is something that can be cheaply turned from boring to entertaining. Maybe all that’s standing between you and happiness is a secret tunnel, fireman’s pole, slide, curtain, trapdoor, monkey bars, lift, escalator, rotating bookcase, crawlspace, climbing wall or just a ladder.