Interior Design Keywords for SEO 

Only 8% of homeowners who renovated their home last year hired an interior designer. Twenty-nine percent hired a general contractor.

That number comes from the 2026 Houzz & Home Study,which surveyed more than 20,000 U.S. homeowners. Interior designers came in tied with architects at 8%, just ahead of kitchen and bath designers at 7%. It is also the single most important thing to understand before you choose your interior design keywords for SEO, because it explains something you can see clearly in the search data below.

Fewer than one in ten renovating homeowners hires a designer at all. The people searching for design inspiration are a far wider pool than that, and most of them are looking for ideas, not for you. So a keyword pulling 33,000 searches a month for interior design inspiration is not thirty-three thousand opportunities. It is mostly an audience that was never going to call.

Compare that to “living room interior designer,” which averages 140 searches a month. Far smaller, but every person typing it has already decided they want to hire someone. And almost nobody is competing for it.

That is the whole tension in this category. The keywords with the biggest numbers and the keywords that produce clients are rarely the same keywords. So there are two questions worth asking before you build a page around any term:

1. Is this the right keyword to be going after?
2. What is the intent behind it?

The right interior design keywords are how you show up in local search, on page one of Google, and in AI search results. The wrong ones quietly fill your site with traffic that never converts.

We pulled a full year of search data across every interior design keyword available to us to figure out which is which. Here is that list.

How We Came Up With Our Interior Design Keywords List For You

Every keyword you see below came from Google Keyword Planner, the free research tool inside Google Ads. It reports search volume from Google itself rather than a third-party estimate.

So here is how we did it:

1. We pulled the top-performing keywords for each service category: interior designers, living rooms, bedrooms, kitchens, and commercial interiors.
2. We limited the results to the United States, since including global data inflates volumes with searches from markets you will never serve.
3. We then set the date range to July 2025 through June 2026, so that we could see the most recent full twelve months of data available.
4. We then sorted each category by average monthly search volume.

Interior Designer Keywords

Where Interior Designer Keywords Belong on Your Website

When you start to look at this keyword list, you realize there are actually two very distinct types of keywords that people are typing into search engines.

The first is hire intent. Keywords like “interior designer near me,” “interior design company,” “interior design firms,” and “interior design companies near me” belong on the pages that are asking for the call. Typically that is your main service page. Use “interior designer” plus your city as the H1, and work the same phrase into the title tag so it shows up in the search result too. Every city you serve should get its own page rather than sitting as a line item on your About Us page or buried in a list at the bottom of your services page.

One caution before you go after the biggest number in the table. “Home decorator” pulls 165,000 searches a month, which makes it the first thing your eye lands on. It is also High competition, and the people using that phrase are usually hunting for ideas or a stager, not hiring a design firm. Volume that size in this category almost always means a browsing audience.

The second half of the list is inspiration. Mid century modern, art deco, minimalist, japandi, scandinavian, feng shui. These are searches built around a mood board, and they are worth having, just not on a service page.

Start with your portfolio. If you designed a mid century modern renovation last year, that project page should say mid century modern in the headline, in the photo captions, and in the copy describing what you did. Almost no design firm does this. They title project pages after the client or the street. Meanwhile you are sitting on original photography of a real room in a real house, which is the one thing a national publisher cannot produce.

Then use blog articles to go deeper on the angles your projects raise. Something like “Tips for Designing a Mid-Century Modern Family Room with Young Children” works because it is specific, it is a real question people ask, and it lets you show how you think. The more you demonstrate genuine expertise through that kind of writing, the better the whole site performs.

Living Room Interior Design Keywords

Turning Living Room Design Searches Into Service and Portfolio Content

This is really where understanding the context of SEO keywords comes in handy. If you look at the search terms for living room interior design, you start to recognize that most of them do not even use the word “designer.” You have things like “living room decor” at 14,800 searches a month and “living room design” at 9,900, both national numbers.

What we do recognize is that these are the root keywords behind what we call long tail searches. The strategy is not to go after a term like “living room decor,” because you will be competing against national brands like Wayfair. What you can do is build one page around “living room interior designer” plus your city or town. It may average only 140 searches a month, but the intent is cleaner and the keyword difficulty is far lower than anything in that table.

Using these keywords as roots lets you compete for terms like “small living room design in New York City,” or turn one into a blog post titled “Coastal Living Room Decor: Five Rooms We Designed.” Each of those pieces links back to your living room service page. The inspiration content earns the traffic. The service page converts it.

Bedroom Interior Designer Keywords

Adding Your City to Bedroom Interior Design Keywords

The thing that stands out most in the bedroom table is the competition level. It is not high for most of these terms, it is high for all thirty of them.

Treat these the same way you treat the living room list, as root keywords rather than targets. Take “master bedroom interior design.” On its own it is a fight you will not win. Add your market to it, so “master bedroom interior design in Baltimore, Maryland,” and the difficulty drops off sharply, you get in front of homeowners actually searching in your area, and the conversion rate goes up with it.

Kitchen Interior Design Keywords

Kitchen Interior Design Keywords are Worth a Dedicated Page

The volumes are smaller, but kitchen interior design keywords tend to be the searches that turn into real projects.

Every interior designer should have a dedicated kitchen interior design page. Put your city into the keyword, use that keyword in the H1, and work it into the title tag so it shows up in the search result. Then give the page something to say:

• 6 to 10 photos of kitchens you have designed
• a description of how you handle cabinetry, appliance selection, and contractor coordination
• a clear next step, whether that is a consultation form or a phone number

That combination will outrank most of what currently sits on page one for these terms in a mid sized market, because competition on the hire intent kitchen keywords is genuinely low.

Commercial Interior Design Keywords

Why Commercial Interior Design Needs Its Own Section On Your Website

The mistake we see interior designers make most often is treating commercial work as one bullet on a residential services page.

It is a completely different buyer with a different sales cycle, and they need different proof: budget ranges, occupancy timelines, references from other businesses. A homeowner wants to see your taste. A practice manager wants to know whether you are going to shut their office down for six weeks.

If you offer commercial interior design, it needs its own path on your website, its own page, and its own case studies underneath it. If you specialize in it, go one level deeper and build dedicated pages for the types of spaces you design:

• medical offices
• corporate offices
• retail and small business spaces

How Your Competitors Use Interior Design Keywords To Get Ahead In Search

Knowing which keywords to target is one thing. Understanding how to implement them on your website is an entirely different ball game. In the video below, I walk you through how interior designers just like yourself use interior design keywords for SEO, and how doing so helps them show up in local search results, on the first page of Google, and even in AI search results.

This example covers the search term “interior designer in San Francisco.” And while we are using San Francisco here, you can apply the same approach to any location in the United States.

What The Top Three Interior Design Firms in San Francisco Have in Common

The three studios holding organic positions on that page are Noz Design, Niche Interiors, and Heather Hilliard Design. All three are boutique firms, not national brands, and between them they pull hundreds of visitors a day from organic search alone. Two habits explain most of it.

One keyword per page.

Most designers do the opposite, and it feels like the right instinct. We build a single tidy Services page listing everything we offer, and a single Portfolio page covering every aesthetic we work in, because clean and organized is what we do for a living. What it actually does is force a dozen different interior design keywords to compete for one URL. Noz Design goes the other way, splitting residential, commercial, and individual services into separate paths rather than one catch-all page.

Attach a location to it.

This is the part of the video worth rewatching. “Interior design” on its own is effectively unwinnable, because you are competing with Architectural Digest and every furniture retailer in the country. “Interior designer” is difficult but not impossible. “Interior designer in Baltimore” is a page you could realistically rank in a few months. Same service, same expertise, wildly different level of difficulty, and the only variable that changed is whether the keyword names a place.

Heather Hilliard Design is the clearest example of this working. The firm is based in San Francisco but takes projects across the Bay Area, so rather than hoping one San Francisco page would carry them everywhere, they built dedicated landing pages for the other markets they serve, with the target keyword in the H1 and worked naturally through the copy. They do the same thing by room, with individual pages for living rooms and bedrooms, which is why they keep surfacing for those longer searches too.

Two things you can do this afternoon

Type site: followed by a competitor’s domain into Google. You will see every page they have indexed, which tells you exactly which services, design styles, and cities they have already claimed, and just as usefully, which ones nobody in your market has taken yet.

Then install the Detailed SEO Extension. It shows you the title tag, headings, and meta description behind any page that outranks you, so you can see how a competitor structured a page rather than guessing.

Run both on the three firms you lose to most often. It takes about fifteen minutes and it will tell you more about your local market than any keyword tool will.

Get Some Help With Interior Design Keywords and SEO

If you are an interior designer looking to grow your business but aren’t sure where to start, request a free SEO evaluation from MarketKeep. Someone on our team will record a video similar to the one you just watched, walking you through your website and what you need to do to improve your local SEO, on-page SEO, and off-page SEO so you can start driving qualified homeowners to your website.