The Right Space is an interior decorating company in Cary, North Carolina that transforms homes through décor and color. The owner, Stephanie Financane, is a talented interior designer who burns the candle at both ends. She runs her full-time business while also raising three children as a single mother. In addition, she is studying online to complete her interior design degree. Even though she was strapped for time, she focused on her website for a few weeks, and it really paid off!

Her Former Website

Her first website was a do-it-yourself effort on Wix. She designed it when she first started her business in 2016. Unhappy with the site design, she worried that if a potential client looked at her website, it might scare them off from doing business with her. The problem was that she was very busy with her core business and did not have the time to completely redesign her website.

Her Main Pain Points

1. Her former website was designed in Wix and hard to maintain.
2. Her photos were small and dark. Therefore, they did not showcase her interior design talent.
3. The navigation was confusing—her design packages were buried in the menu and the page took you to another website that did not link back to her real website.

She knew she needed to redesign her website—and soon. As an interior decorator, she understood how she was getting judged based on her website. A visual business really needs to look the part. [CR1] She wasn’t sure, but she had a feeling she was losing business.

The Website Goals

• To convert website browsers into interior decorating leads
• To be found on Google when someone looks for an interior decorator in Cary, Durham, or Apex
• To showcase the projects that have the most inspiring before and after photos, knowing that potential clients would get inspired from these projects
• To allow Steph to add blog posts and post them easily from her website

The Process

The first thing we did was review the pictures in her design portfolio that she had collected from her first three years in business. We discussed which clients had the most dramatic before and after pictures. I knew that an interior decorator needs stunning photos. I initially thought she needed to hire a professional photographer, but using Photoshop, I was able to edit her iPhone photos to make them lighter and more visually appealing. She also realized that taking photos of vignettes* created an upscale look that was not as difficult to photograph.

*A Vignette is a small grouping of objects that creates a pleasing focal point.

Next, Steph paid to have a physical business address so she could have a Google My Business page pointing to a dot on the map. She did this herself and made sure that the directory on Google My Business pointed to her website. Another contributing factor was asking former clients to leave testimonials on her Google My Business Page. This was key in improving her Google ranking.

The Result

The Right Space version 2.0 was rolled out in June 2019! Steph announced it on Facebook and emailed her former clients. Almost immediately, she started getting emails that we knew were from the website.

Since the roll-out, Stephanie has been so busy that she has had to schedule out her work for more than a month. She told me that her website has already paid for itself in clients. That means she received more than a 100% return on investment within a few short months!

Her Google ranking as of November 2019 is already #1 for some keyword phrases. I taught her how to research keywords so she could create a strategy for her blog posts and continue to get found based on other keywords that users type into Google. Shhh… it’s a secret what those are.