We often hear from lifestyle and interiors brands that they’re not sure how to go about improving the SEO (search engine optimisation) of their websites. SEO is often towards the top of their “to do” lists, but they just don’t know where to start, or what to do to optimise their sites further.
Below, we have collected our top SEO tips for brands and small businesses – things which are easy to do, but which will make a big impact now and in the future.
Our Best SEO Tips for Lifestyle and Interiors Brands
Create Useful, Helpful Content for your Customers
Whether through the pages of your website, your blog or on social media, making sure that your content is useful and helpful is one of the best things you can do for SEO. Visitors are more likely to share or link to content, such as blog posts or articles, that they find helpful to them, and that will give your website a boost.
Write about topics relevant to your brand and products. For example, if you sell homeware, you could write about how to style a space, or how to pick home accessories that work well together.
Write Content for Real People
With the above tip in mind, if you’re keen on improving your SEO, you might be tempted to write content that is full of keywords. The problem comes when you think too much about the keywords and not enough about the people who will be reading your web pages or blog posts. Just because you sell Art Deco furniture, it doesn’t mean that your potential customers won’t be turned off to see ‘Art Deco furniture’ in almost every sentence on your website.
Ensure that your posts are full of great information on topics related to your brand and business (with just 3 or 4 keywords) and you’ll find that not only will your website appear higher in search listings, but your web visitors will be more interested in your site and products, because your content is more useful.
Use Google Analytics
Installing Google Analytics should be one of the first things you do to improve your SEO. This free tool will help you monitor your web traffic and find room for improvement by helping you find out where your web visitors are coming from and what they’re doing when they reach your site.
Update and Upgrade Old Blog Posts
Your blog may be relatively new or it might be a few years old. Either way, it’s a brilliant idea to go back to old posts and re-write or add to them to ensure they stay fresh and updated. This is not only a great way to encourage more website clicks and tell Google that your website is alive and kicking, but you can also promote these blog posts again on your social media pages to encourage your followers to visit your website!
Make Sure Your website is Optimised for Mobile
Mobile traffic accounts for over 60% of web traffic, which means that to stay on top of the listings, your website has to be mobile friendly. If potential customers reach your website but are put off by a slow or unattractive mobile site and leave quickly, you’ll start to slip down the rankings. Ensure your site is optimised for mobile web and can be easily navigated so that visitors can quickly find your products or easily read your lifestyle content.
Ensure Each Product has a Unique Description
Duplicate content is a big problem for a website, so you never want to have large chunks of text that are exactly the same as another site on the web. But you don’t want to have two pages the same on your own website either. Therefore, ensure each product has a great, unique description. This goes for colour options and variations of the same product too. So if you have fashion items, toys or accessories that come in more than one size or colour, ensure each individual product page has its own great description.
Add your Business Name into Page Titles
Page titles appear in search listings whenever a page from your site pops up in the results. It’s a great idea to add your brand name into these titles, either at the beginning or the end, to help increase brand awareness whenever a potential web visitor or customer searches for your lifestyle, gift or interiors products.
Change Image Names
All product photos and blog post images on your website should have a simple relevant description – don’t leave these as generic names such as “Image 259”. Be sure to change both the image name and “Alt text” to a short description of the photo, such as “Red glass vase with white chevron pattern”. This will improve SEO for your interiors or lifestyle site while also helping your images appear in Google image search results.
Don’t Over Optimise
Don’t be tempted to place keywords wherever you can, to use keywords that aren’t directly related to your business or to use strange unnatural phrases because you think you might be able to appear high in search results for them. Not only does this create a confusing experience for your human website users, but you might also be penalised by Google, so you might find that you’re not ranking a high as you’d hoped.
User-Friendly Navigation
Ensure navigation on your website is user-friendly and that your products and pages are grouped into relevant useful categories. This will help search engines crawl your website more easily and understand what your content is about – your site or online shop will appear organised and Google will be able to understand the topics your site covers, such as toys, fashion or kitchenware.
By taking a bit of time to work through the SEO tips above, you can ensure your website is more optimised and you’re getting the maximum number of clicks that you can. Is there anything you’ve tried recently that you’ve found has made a big difference to the SEO of your site?
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