Keyword Research for Home Designers

In search engine optimization (SEO), keywords are very important. You need them for your meta title, description, and in the content. That makes keyword research one of the most important things you can do.

Note that a keyword may actually be keywordS or a keyphrase. It’s easier to just call them all keywords, regardless of how many words are in it, so that’s what we’ll do for the rest of this blog post.

So, how do you pick out what keywords are best for you?

Most of the time, you can get a lot of your keyword ideas just with common sense.

If you’re a building designer, a good place to start is with the keyword “Building Designer.”

Of course, if you’re doing work locally, you’ll want to add in what’s called a “location modifier”, which is a part of your keyword that is a specific location.

For example, “building designer in Miami, Florida.”

If you don’t know what we’re talking about, let us teach you SEO! We have a free email course you sign up for here:

You’ll need to know the right keywords for every page on your site. Once you’re done with that, you can use your keyword research to figure out what your blog posts should be.

There are tons of keyword research tools out there, so we’re only going to show you the ones that we use.

First, let’s talk about UberSuggest.

UberSuggest is just a basic keyword suggestion tool, but it’s one of the better free ones we’ve found.

Basically, just type in your main keyword, and it will spit out a group of top suggestions, and then a bunch of other suggestions which will be organized alphabetically.

Here, we typed in home designer and the top suggestions were:

• home designer
• home designer software
• home designer suite
• home designer pro
• home designer online
• home designer architectural
• home designer suite 2016
• home designer interiors
• home designer 2017
• home designer salary

In the image you can see there is also monthly volume, cpc, and competition for each of the keywords.

1. Monthly volume is approximately how many searches the keyword gets.
2. CPC is cost per click, which is and estimated how much it costs per click on an ad, were you to purchase ads.
3. And competition is a number scale from .01 to 1, where the closer to 1 it gets, the harder the competition.

We can see that a lot of the keywords here refer to a specific piece of software. If you don’t use that specific piece of software, you’ll probably not have anything to say about it, and thus a lot of these keywords aren’t relevant to you and your website.

That’s no problem. Don’t worry about it.

You’ll need to use your own best judgment when selecting keywords. You know what makes sense, so use those keywords.

But, you could also take those “useless” keywords and turn them into something useful.

To fit this example, you could write a blog post about why you don’t use that software. Try to come up with ways you can use these keywords and still provide value to your readers.

Some of the other keywords here are useful, too.

“Home designer software” has high competition, but it wouldn’t be hard to write up a blog post about your favorite software that you use, and why. Plus, it would provide value to those who are looking to become home designers.

As we’ve discussed before, teaching what you know is a great way to build a following.

Another keyword there that can be turned into a blog post that would benefit those who are learning to become home designers is “home designer salary.”

You might be thinking “I can’t use that keyword because I don’t have a salary. I work alone; my income fluctuates.”

So what? That’s your blog post right there. Keyword it “home designer salary” and then talk about how there may be no such thing. Or, if you’ve been a home designer for a big firm where you did collect a salary, talk about that.

The most important thing about keyword research isn’t finding what keywords will work for you, but to find what keywords people are searching for and make them work for you.

While UberSuggest is great for looking up lots of keywords, if you just want to get some quick info on a keyword, we suggest a Chrome/Firefox plugin Keywords Everywhere.

With Keywords Everywhere, you just go to Google.com and type in your keyword. At the top, it’ll show you quick info on search volume, cpc, and competition rating.

At the bottom, it’ll show you Google’s quick suggestions, and their search volume, cpc, and competition rating.

If we just need to look at something quick, this is what we use. It’s a lot faster than trying to run a keyword through UberSuggest, which sometimes takes a few minutes.

If you’d like to learn more about how you can apply this knowledge to improve your search rankings, please join our free SEO for Building Designers email course. Signup below!

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Garrett Mickley is the Communications Director for AIBD and has over eight years experience working in digital marketing.