Table of Contents
There are a lot of expenses that come up when starting a business. It’s easy to start cutting things out due to cost or to stay within budget. One thing that you should definitely budget for is a website for your interior design business. Here’s why.
People aren’t reading what you want them to read.
A lot of people tell us that the reason they don’t have a website is that they already have profiles on social media or have a listing on Google Maps and they think that’s enough. When someone is looking to work with your business, they will definitely do a simple Google search for you in order to learn more about you. You want to be able to control that narrative. If someone lands your website, you can talk about your strengths, show your past works, and explain how you can help them.
If you don’t have a website, the only thing future clients can read is what others have posted about your business. You might be thinking “That’s fine, my past clients absolutely LOVED my work.” What you have to remember is that there are two types of people that leave reviews online, those that are extremely happy with your work, and those that are slightly unhappy. We’ve seen negative reviews for something as small as a company not picking up the phone on the first call.
Have a Place to Call Your Own.
A few years ago, lots of people would sell custom-made items on marketplaces like Etsy. It was nice because Etsy had an established brand, and selling was easy there. Recently, more and more sellers have started to make their own websites because they’ve realized that at the end of the day, they were at the mercy of Etsy. If selling fees went up, there was nothing they could do. If Etsy decided they did something wrong, their products would be removed.
Just like that, if your social media account is banned for no reason (which happens more frequently than you might realize), or if social media platforms decide that they want to start charging for business accounts, there’s nothing you can do and you would lose your entire following overnight. That’s why it’s important to have a central location like a website for your interior design business where you can link back to from all your social media accounts.
One practice that works well for interior designers, is to have a portfolio of your work on your website where you share information about each project. When you finish a new project, post pictures on social media and say “Click here if you want to learn more about this project and see more pictures“, and add a link back to your portfolio page.
Let SEO Work for You.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a way to optimize your website so that it appears for specific searches on search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. If a client asks you a question about interior design, you can type out an email explaining it to them, but a better idea would be to write a quick blog post and share the URL with them instead. If one person has a question about something, chances are that others will too. When people go to Google and search for an answer to that question, they’ll land on your blog post and that’ll spread awareness of your brand. You won’t believe how amazingly SEO works when you put in some work on your website. The best part is that you get regular traffic to your website without having to pay for ads.
What Not to Do with Your Website.
A website for your interior design business isn’t a build it and they will come type of thing. Although we highly suggest that every business have a website as a bare minimum, most of the time that alone is not enough. If you build a house in the middle of the forest, it doesn’t matter if it’s the most beautiful house in the world, no one knows about it and no one will visit. At first, you’ll have to go out and share your website in order to get traffic. Join Facebook groups related to your business and when you see good questions, answer them with blog posts and share the link to the blog post. Make sure you aren’t just spamming links over and over, that’s a quick way to get kicked out of groups.
Try to post high-quality content. We’ve seen websites that post blog content that’s less than 100 words. It’s very hard to articulate something in less than 100 words. If you don’t have enough content for a blog post, either wait until you do or create a short video and post it to YouTube instead.
Tell People What They Want to Know.
When working on the content for your website, make sure you put yourself in the shoes of the people who would search for your business. Ask yourself what they could possibly type into Google to find you, and then use those phrases on your website. Examples might be “Interior designer in Los Angeles”, or “Luxury interior designers”.
If a lot of people keep calling you to ask about prices, it might be a good idea to place a very rough estimate for things on your website. Having prices on your website will make it easy to weed out people who are working within a budget that’s way under your service price.
Having a frequently asked questions section is a great way to provide answers to questions that you get often. This could be information about the services you provide, or what’s included in a service.
A Website Isn’t as Expensive as You Think It Is.
If you were looking for a website designer a few years ago, you might have seen prices such as $10,000 for a website. Nowadays with the release of easy-to-use website builders like Squarespace, Shopify, and WordPress you can have someone create a website for your interior design business for as little as $500. We highly suggest spending a little bit more on a website and making sure your designer has a solid portfolio, around $2,000 or so is what we recommend for most clients.
Do you have questions about any of the systems we mentioned above? If you do, feel free to comment down below and we’ll help as best as we can. You can also contact us and we can help you in whatever way we can.
