How do you drive the right kind of traffic to your interior design website? How do people who want the services you provide find you? How do strategies differ for local and national traffic? Everyone knows they need a plan to drive traffic, but it can be overwhelming—which is why it’s often put on the back burner. In this episode of Wingnut Social, Nicole Heymer of Glory & Brand will help you nail down where to start and how to drive the right traffic to your interior design website. Don’t miss it!
What You’ll Hear On This Episode of Wingnut Social
- [1:31] Wingnut Academy & Wingnut Webinar Announcements
- [3:15] Mini News Sesh: Instagram shakes up Stories
- [7:06] Driving traffic to your interior design website
- [15:05] Focus on your messaging to demonstrate your niche
- [20:52] The importance of content marketing to drive traffic
- [27:43] The impact of including video on your website
- [33:47] Use social media marketing to serve a larger audience
- [36:24] Why you have to focus your efforts carefully
- [37:35] How to use email marketing to drive traffic
- [40:04] Networking to drive traffic to your website
- [45:03] The What Up Wingnut Round!
- [47:30] How to connect with Nicole Heymer
- [49:40] Blooper Reel!
Connect with Nicole Heymer
Resources & People Mentioned
Driving traffic to your interior design website: Where to start
Your website won’t drive traffic to itself. To figure out where to start, you need to ask yourself some questions:
What is your area of service? Is it local? Is it national? If it’s local, you have to tell the humans and search engines where you service (city, suburb, county?). Ask yourself what you would search for. If you’re trying to reach a national audience, your only hope is to niche.
Start by focusing on local search to establish a presence. It gives you credibility. If you want to build a national brand, focus on social media and building an email list. That's how you get in front of a large audience. An email list gives you control over your audience and the ability to directly market to them.
Secondly, where are you now? Where do you want to go? Who’s coming to the website and where are they coming from? Go to Google Analytics and look at “acquisition.” You can see where people are coming from (social, organic, etc.) You can use a tool like Ubersuggest, SEMrush, Ahrefs, etc. to gauge traffic, research keywords, and even spy on competitors. It’s fun to see how your keywords are growing and moving up in rankings. If you aren’t showing up in organic search, you can see it as an opportunity.
The importance of content marketing to drive traffic to your website
Content marketing is creating content that will educate, entertain, or demonstrate expertise. You can push it on social media but SEO and content marketing are intrinsically linked. You can optimize a homepage—and you should—but the real power in SEO comes from creating content.
If you want people to find you for a search term, you need one page dedicated to that search term. Search results are answers to a question. If you provide a robust answer to the question—that matches the search intent—you’ll start showing up in Google searches.
You can take two approaches with content:
- Locally focused SEO and content
- Ranking for high volume traffic-driving keywords
When Google sees that you’re getting traffic, it raises your domain authority, making you more likely to show up in local searches.
Location and service pages can be a major tool for local bases. Optimizing your google business page because it is low-hanging fruit for local search. Your actual location will help you show up in map searches. If you want to show up for other towns, you can create location pages that you optimize for interior design in such-and-such towns. You want to link to these pages on your website, but the goal is to rank in search. It’s a classic SEO technique that still works.
When it comes to local SEO, the reason Nicole prioritizes this over other methods of traffic is because of intent. Someone is searching for local interior designers, they’re serious. But local SEO can’t be everything. You need to leverage social media, email, and other strategies to have a well-rounded source of traffic. The messaging on your website will help you stand out.
Why should you use video strategically throughout your website to increase traffic? How can you use social media marketing to serve a larger audience? Listen to learn more!
Email marketing: The underused driver of website traffic
Email marketing allows you to drive traffic to your website at a specific time of day. It’s also highly cost-effective—whether you’re paying for a copywriter or doing it yourself. The con is that you have to work to build an email list. The people who are serious about email marketing build numerous opt-ins to get people on their list—quizzes, live speaking engagements, interactive lead magnets, etc.
A perceived con is that everyone hates getting emails. However, there are at least 1–2 emails that people always want to read. They’re educational, entertaining, informational, etc. You can be as accretive as you want.
Why do you need to focus your efforts carefully? How do you use email marketing to drive traffic? How can purposeful strategic networking drive traffic to your website and design firm? Listen to the whole episode for Nicole’s genius advice.
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