How to Make Your Interior Design Business Website Irresistible to New Clients
A website is supposed to bring you new clients. Does yours?
Every interior design, home staging, organizing, and window treatment website has a huge task to accomplish, and it can't do it alone. In fact, there is a huge myth circulating in the entrepreneurial world that merely having a trendy and appealing website will attract and convert the right clients.
In order for your website to bring you new clients, it has to contain several key features, you have to do some ongoing work, and you and your website both need to avoid some wasteful - and dare I even say - nonsensical practices.
Curious whether your website is making even just one mistake that is preventing your business from growing? I take time in this blog post to answer that question.
How to Make Your Website Irresistible to New Clients
First, let's tackle the essential website features for home pros: A sales-driven home page, SEO embedded into the copywriting, a lead magnet with email opt-in, and an easy way to contact you and / or book a discovery call with you.
I spend a large part of my work week looking at home industry websites across all the major website platforms (Wix, Weebly, WordPress, and Squarespace, primarily) and am able to spot the websites that simply don't work well in just a few seconds. This isn't a superpower, but rather, it is the result of reinventing my own websites and those of my clients until I found the design formula that converts well and tells a good story.
Sure, the average website might look pretty, but I'm 0% surprised when the owner of that website tells me they have never received a lead through their contact page. This isn't due to an issue with the contact page itself. The issue is often with the home page, services page, and about page.
Top Mistakes to Avoid in Home Industry Website Design
Mistake #1: A minimal home page with a singular image and little-to-no text.
Not only is this bad for your brand, as it tells your potential clients next to nothing, it is also really harmful to your SEO. If you skip the copywriting on your home page, you are essentially telling Google zilch about your business, your services, and the people you want to serve. Google crawls and indexes every page of your site, and it only uses the information you provide. This is why your home page MUST contain a headline that describes your ideal client and should also contain a smaller headline that lists your geographic service areas.
The Solution
Your home page should contain nearly a dozen specific elements in order to function as a sales page. This isn't about looking like a magazine or getting overly artistic or clever.
Mistake #2: Talking about the business and not about the client.
Business owners who haven't identified their ideal client tend to talk about themselves or their businesses more than anything else on their websites. It makes for a one-sided conversation that results in any potential clients feeling left out and unheard. That is damaging to your brand, and it won't entice leads to contact you.
The Solution
Figure out who your ideal client is. I know, this is a tall order and feels really difficult. You might think that getting specific about whom you serve will alienate other potential clients from you, but the opposite is actually true. Being specific and creating a niche for yourself allows you to become known for something versus falling in line with the countless other business owners in your industry who have opted to serve anyone with a wallet. (Does that sound harsh? A failed business will sting more than these blunt words.)
You might think marketing is burdensome. You might be trying random things and feel aimless. You might be questioning whether anything on the face of the earth will grow your business, because nothing seems to work. This is the fate of a business owner who chooses not to niche down and focus on a specific ideal client. For a step-by-step guide to finding your ideal client, read my blog post: How to Take the First Step in Marketing Your Business.
Mistake #3: No sales funnel to support the website.
Most people who visit your website will not contact you. Perhaps it is because they can't afford you (which is fine) or perhaps they aren't ready to hire you yet (also fine) or perhaps because they didn't experience an intuitive path to working with you (not okay!).
A website by itself is a forest. A sales funnel is a pathway through that forest that brings the right new clients directly to your door. This path might have various ways to connect but the general layout doesn't change. If you build a website, you can't expect people to figure out whether they should work with you. It is your responsibility to carve out that path.
The Solution
The first step of your sales funnel is to initiate a relationship. This can be done through social media, offline networking, and blogging. These are the relational elements of your business.
Ads are not part of your sales funnel. They might encourage the right leads to join your sales funnel (if the ads are constructed properly) but, and I repeat, advertising online or offline is not part of your sales funnel. Do not rely on an ad to bring you new business. You will still need a sales funnel to support the ad.
The second step of your sales funnel is a free offer on your website. This is not a free consult or service, as that will only attract bargain-hunters. Your free offer must match the type of client you want to attract.
This free offer is called a lead magnet because it attracts, or magnetizes, the right leads to your business. It lives on your website, which is the first place people will go after meeting you on social media or in person. If you blog regularly, Google will be sending people directly to your site to read your content. Your website must be up to par, and it must include a lead magnet. Otherwise, your next potential client will leave your site without giving you any way to follow up with them.
When someone signs up for your lead magnet, they should automatically receive it via email. That email should contain a welcome message from you and go directly into the third step of your sales funnel. Let me repeat this for the people in the back: You don't have to manually send your welcome email to your leads. This can easily be automated.
As a home professional serving middle to high-end homeowners, you could offer a PDF, ebook, or video that explains what it's like to work with you. Avoid offering DIY how-to's (e.g. How to Style a Coffee Table or How to Organize Your Closet or How to Stage Your Home) unless you want to attract clients who prefer to DIY their projects.
The third step of your sales funnel is the ongoing communication. Once a potential client has entered their email address to receive your free offer (lead magnet), they need to continue hearing from you once per month via email. Not once per quarter. Not once per week. People will either forget about you or become annoyed by your persistence. Hearing from you once per month is the sweet spot. Plus, it is also quite manageable for you to handle or outsource.
This monthly email should pertain to a service you offer without being salesly. That's right - a profitable sales funnel isn't gross or salesy. It just serves people really well.
Newsletter Topic Examples
An interior designer who wants more kitchen renovation projects would send a newsletter about how to prepare for a remodel or share advice on different aspects of such a project.
A professional organizer who wants more whole-house organizing projects would focus on a different room or organizational style each month, explaining how his / her process works and sharing tips along the way.
A home stager who wants more vacant staging projects would pinpoint different staging tactics each month for listings based on their size, location, and potential buyers in a way that makes sense to realtors.
A window treatment professional who wants to sell more hard treatments would explain the variances between treatments or the different placements and uses of each.
The fourth step of your sales funnel is new client onboarding. When you consistently send a monthly email newsletter, you will encourage a response. When a lead responds to ask a question or book a call, your job is to conduct a great discovery call and send them your client onboarding information. This might consist of a guide that tells them what to expect next, a questionnaire, a contract review, or all of the above.
Mistake #4: Website imagery that doesn't reflect your best work.
Your website photos matter, but not in the ways you might think. If you are just starting out and have no photos of your work yet, or if you have been in business a long time and are not proud of your photos, you have options. Because the nature of the home industry is visual and tangible, your website must include good images.
The Solution
In an ideal situation, you will use professionally photographed images of your own work and of yourself / your team throughout your website.
In a great situation, you will have one or two professionally photographed projects for your portfolio page and home page, a couple of good headshots of yourself, and then will use carefully curated stock images for the other pages of your website.
In a good situation, you will have non-professional photos of your projects for your portfolio page and well-curated stock photos for all other pages of your website. These photos might include spaces in your own home, which is perfectly fine. You will need to edit your non-professional photos for proper lighting. You can use the free Tezza app for this. You will also likely have one professional or non-professional photo of yourself for your about page.
In a difficult situation, you will have no photos of your work or of yourself. If this describes your situation, ask a friend to take a photo of you, then edit it for lighting on the Tezza app. Style, organize, or stage a space in your own home and take a few photos. Edit them for lighting.
See? Even the difficult situation can become a good one. 😉 And if you have a large portfolio, consider culling it and removing projects that don't reflect your best work or have become outdated.
Mistake #5: No SEO keywords in your file names.
While the copywriting on your website, if done correctly, will naturally contain the right SEO keywords, every photo on your site also needs to contain keywords. Whether it's a photo of your work or just a stock photo, each image file should be renamed. It is best to do this before uploading the photo to your site.
How to resize and rename your images for SEO:
If your images are professional-grade, they might have huge file sizes. Use this free image compressor to make your photo file sizes smaller without losing quality. This will help your site load faster, which directly impacts your SEO. Your photos should be no larger than 2000 pixels in either direction.
Rename each photo by including keywords around your key services and geographic location (e.g. photos of your kitchen project could be named kitchen interior design for families in Atlanta Georgia).
Add a number at the end of each file name to keep using the same general file name over and over for each photo of that space.
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