I am constantly reading and reviewing interior design blogs for clients and potential clients. Many ask me:
- What are the essentials of blogging?
- What topics should I write about?
- How often should I post?
- How should I integrate keywords into a blog?
- What tags should be included?
Blogging Advice for Interior Designers
AUDIENCE & TOPICS
The most important part of interior design blogging is to be clear on your audience. For example, when I first started blogging on this site I was primarily writing for the search engines. My goal was to create valuable content that got online visibility. That is now a secondary issue as I already have a steady stream of traffic and a plenty of clients. Now, my goal is to be useful and informative. Now I am writing for you, the reader, who likely is holding the question that this blog is addressing.
If your website is not getting much traffic, you will want to focus on identifying topics that people search for yet are not overly competitive. If you are getting traffic, you’ll want to speak to your existing readers. You’ll want to inform, educate, and/or entertain. Share your insider perspective which helps them and establishes your expertise.
A great example of this is in the Atlanta interior design firm Nandina Home & Design. If you explore their design blog you will see that their team takes turns in sharing. Rather than being one voice they choose the diversity of voices approach, and it works out really well. Of their past thirteen blog posts they have five different authors. And, each author is a designer in their firm that shares what is of interest to them.
Whereas John Ishmael’s most recent work is on Interpreting Modern Design, which is educational in nature and exhibits his thorough understanding of modern design principles, Sue Shannon’s most recent article on designing beautiful office spaces is informative and makes a case for investing in interior design for commercial spaces. This variety speaks to their audience and helps them cast a wider net in the search engines.
Nandina’s blogging approach lets Google know that they are an active business worthy of sending search engine traffic to. And, it lets their site’s visitors know that they are a dynamic team of professionals with a multitude of specializations, interests, and capacities.
FREQUENCY
Their posting frequency of 1-4 times per month is fine. I would prefer to see a consistent 2x per month than this fluctuating amount, yet it is consistent and that is wonderful. Here are my suggested minimums for blogging:
- If you want to be a “power blogger” and have maximum reach: 2-3 times per day.
- If you want to be strong in the search engines and be useful to your readership: 2-4 times per month.
- If you want to maintain a presence so that visitors know that your business is active: once a month.
I have just changed it to,The most important part of interior design blogging is to be clear on your audience.
With that change above and this explanation of it here, I now have my three uses of my keyword phrase. Technically we call keyword phrases “long-tail keywords.”
To heighten it’s use I can add it in another header. The header above is using what we call H1 (or header 1) which is my biggest font size for this site and is an indicator to Google of the importance of those words. I will use these keywords again yet now in an H2:
Interior Design Blogging Advice
This time I added the word advice because I don’t want the page too look too carefully contrived for SEO. I don’t want my H1 to match my H2 exactly. And, it never hurts to have another keyword to open possibilities.
Then I turn to the “title tags” of the page. These are the words that show on top of your browser window and the ones that the search engines show searchers. I used the following title tag: Interior Design Blogging | Blogging advice for interior designers
Notice my core long-tail keyword is at the beginning of the title and then I put a pipe | followed by the phrase using the word “advice” that I slid in as a secondary keyword.
If you use tags on your blog you would then want to make tags that reflect your keyword strategy for the page- not the keyword strategy for the site. So, in this case I would recommend something like:
Tags: interior design blogging, blogging advice, interior design blogs, interior design marketing, blogging advice for interior designers.
Recognizing that the longtail keyword “blogging advice for interior designers” needs a little more support I just went to the top of this article and added it as a heading using my H2 sized font.
Now this article is more optimized than I imagined when I began, and I still was completely loyal to my primary purpose of explaining the art of blogging for interior designers.
My last step will be to write a nice description for this page so that when someone comes across it in the search engines they are enticed to click through and read my writing. The description tag has nothing to do with SEO so don’t try to stuff keywords into it. It is all about the searcher’s experience so speak directly to them.
Here is a description that is worthy of this page: “Interior design marketing specialist explains the basics of writing a design blog including topic selection, frequency, and how to drive traffic to your blog.”
I always write the description after writing the article.
Finally, it is best to end a blog with some call for action. In this case, I’ll simply share with you that my interior design marketing business is now at ClientExpander.com, and I recommend you visit that site if you are looking for professional support in marketing. As much as homeowners benefit from your professional design support, interior designers benefit from our professional marketing support. Check us out, here.
