We were so excited when our friends at Lucy Interior Design launched their new blog last month. Award-winning luxury interior designer Lucy Penfield and her team are brilliant creators, and reading how they use wanderlust, curiosity, art, fab finds, books and plants—and of course color, color and more color!—to tell beautiful design stories is so inspiring and enlightening. And while we are excited by the opportunity to read these stories (and to squeal over the accompanying fabulous photos, natch), what we’re particularly thrilled about is that the Lucy team understands the value of blogging in the year 2020.
We get it – blogging has gotten a bad rap. In the era of Instagram, the favorite digital darling of the design world, it may not seem like it, but it’s still necessary for interior designers to have a comprehensive website. And part of having a comprehensive website is having one that features a blog. While it’s obvious that your site needs to feature your portfolio, bio and contact information, what benefit does a blog bring?
For starters, blogging helps boost the SEO (search engine optimization) quality of your site by positioning it as a great answer to your potential clients’ search queries. Strong SEO helps increase both the quality and quantity of visitors to your site. And we’re hard-pressed to think of a time when developing and maintaining a robust pipeline of new clients isn’t the most important part of the job.
SEO isn’t about just the search engines themselves: It’s about understanding what people are searching for and being able to provide great solutions to those searches. It’s about the precise words people are using and the type of content they are looking for and want to consume—think, image-heavy posts, listicles, videos, all of the above. Blogs that use a variety of SEO tactics will give you more opportunities to rank higher in search engine results, drive more people to your site, and ultimately connect you with more clients.
It all starts with focusing on your audience—who you are attracting and who you want to bring in. If the main goal of your site is to bring in potential clients, your site and blog should be built for them, featuring content that will intrigue and inspire. Think of it as a storefront. Just like a sign in front of a brick and mortar building, your SEO-rich blog helps people find you and know who you are and what you offer. In addition to being a way to attract people to your firm or shop, a blog also provides opportunities to add links to press articles, social media accounts, and other pages on your website—all of which contribute to strong SEO.
And to best reach your audience your blog (and entire site, honestly) needs to be mobile-friendly. More people use a search engine from their mobile phones than from a computer, and that number of mobile users grows every year. Google favors mobile-friendly sites so much so that when you search using your phone, it displays mobile-friendly results first.
(Good news: Through our partnership with HubSpot, all content we create on their platform is automatically mobile-friendly and responsive to mobile devices.)
While making sure you have a solid set up for your blog is clearly important, continually creating and publishing content is the true foundation of blog success. Evergreen content, content that is relevant and valuable for a long period of time with minimal changes or updates after it is first published, is the gold standard of blog content. Evergreen content will help your blog rank better over time (not just in the near future), give you more visibility (like social shares and links), and more proof of your authority and industry expertise. This may all sound like a ton of work, but think about the amount of effort you put into an Instagram post: they have what, a 72 hours lifespan before they get lost in the feed?
And when you think “evergreen” don’t confuse that with “generic.” The last thing you want to do is post the same information a potential client can get anywhere else. You have a unique perspective, share it. Comprehensive, well-written and genuinely helpful content not only passes the sniff test with readers (who can smell inauthenticity a mile away) but will lead to increased time on site, which will help your SEO rankings. Additionally, updating and repurposing some of your most successful blog posts will extend its lifespan so you can achieve the best results over a longer period of time. And while we are pro-updating existing content, don’t be afraid to remove a post if it no longer fits with your brand or services.
Let’s go back to our friend Lucy: she’s an ASID award winner, and has recently been featured in newspaper articles and some of the most established print publications around (cough cough Better Homes And Gardens). She’s just launched a throw pillow collection, and her Insta audience is thriving. But even with all of that going on, she knew now was the time to start her blog. By being true to her brand and focusing on her client audience, with her blog she’s created a sophisticated space for her inimitable style to shine. We can’t wait to see what she does next!
Contact ultraviolet and allow us to help you launch or update your interior design blog. Our design industry specialists uniquely understand your needs and can help you through every step of the process, from template to content creation.
Don’t wait another year to tell your story and share your projects.
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