Most designers present their work the way it is judged by peers: full-bleed photography, a project name, perhaps the location, and little else. The instinct usually comes from a developer with no SEO knowledge, from a wish to let the images speak for the project, or from not knowing what to write beyond the brief. Yet portfolio seo starts exactly where the gallery stops, because search engines and undecided clients both need what the photographs withhold.
A project page that ranks and converts needs four things: a written design story covering the challenge, the approach and the outcome; its own title tag and meta description; the place and the project type named in plain language; and links connecting it to the rest of the site. None of it compromises the photography. The words sit around the images, not on top of them.
Write the Challenge, the Approach and the Outcome
Google can only read HTML. It cannot judge the joinery in a photograph, so an image-only page gives it almost nothing to rank; a well-written alt text is the best case. An undecided client is in a similar position: before making contact they want to know whether the studio speaks their language, can realise what they have in mind, offers full service or partial, and roughly what that costs. The photographs answer none of it. As Simon Sinek argues in Start With Why, people buy the reason behind the work rather than the work itself, and the reason is exactly what a gallery leaves out.
Krueger Design splits the writing in two. An intro of roughly 150 words carries the challenge: the client, the property, its constraints, the neighbourhood and the project type. Beneath the images, a design story of roughly 800 words carries the approach and the outcome, room by room, in the designer's own words, with subheadings where they help. Most advice on how to write a case study is aimed at B2B marketers; an interior design case study has a simpler job, and this is where case study SEO and portfolio work overlap: say what was done and why it worked.
On a recent project with a London-based interior designer, I rebuilt the studio's project pages from the owner's own spoken words: a room-by-room walkthrough recorded on a phone, twenty to twenty-five minutes per project, transcribed, then written from scratch. What surfaced had never reached the old pages: the emotional language, the specific materials, the reasoning the photographs could not show. A Battersea apartment with irregular geometry and low daylight became a story about how every decision answered those constraints, which is what a reader with a similar flat wants to hear. Where a client is private, anonymise the family, the collaborators and anything traceable, and keep the design decisions. Those sell the next project.
Give Every Project Page Its Own Metadata
Leave the title tag and meta description empty and the platform writes them for you, usually badly. Fill them identically across twenty projects and Google sees twenty pages competing for the same words, which is cannibalisation, and it may suppress all of them. Every project page needs its own.
A title tag runs to 60 characters including spaces and combines the project name, the property type and one keyword people actually search. Two live examples from the same London studio show the pattern: Stables Majlis House Equestrian Interior pairs the project name with the property type and a searchable term; Notting Hill Textured Interior Styling leads with the location and a descriptive keyword. A meta description runs to 160 characters: the overarching idea first, a line that builds curiosity, then a soft invitation rather than a pushy imperative. Battersea interior design in a riverside apartment: bespoke joinery, curved forms and layered materials. Discover how light shapes a gracious London home. It reads like a sentence, not a command.
Squarespace shows both fields when a project page is created but does not require them, which is the convenience and the risk in one. Webflow's CMS can make them mandatory and wire them into the schema markup, one of the differences covered in the studio's webflow vs squarespace comparison.
Name the Place and the Project Type
A page headed Pied-à-terre in Central London tells Google very little: no bedrooms, no bathrooms, no plan type, no building style, so it will not surface for anyone searching with that kind of specificity. Plain language does the work. Victorian terrace renovation in Hackney names the building style, the scope and the location in six words, and each of them is something a prospective client types.
Put the neighbourhood and the project type at the top of the page, in the H1 and the first 100 words, where Google indexes them first, and use the neighbourhood, never the street. This is where portfolio SEO meets local seo for interior designers: a studio with a completed project in Hackney can build a presence in Hackney searches without being based there, and the project page is what earns it.
Keep the Photography, Add the Words
The layout that works on the sites the studio has rebuilt runs in a fixed order: H1, the 150-word intro, a client testimonial, the project images, the 800-word design story, and the call to action as the very last thing on the page. The photographs still own the first screen. The words sit below, where a reader persuaded by the images goes looking for the reasoning.
Text starts fighting the images when it over-explains or describes what the photographs plainly show. The design story covers what the camera cannot: why the joinery curves, what the client asked for, how the light problem was solved. Anything left over from the recording feeds a longer neighbourhood article that links back to the project, and the two pages strengthen each other as a cluster rather than duplicating.
Alt text serves accessibility first: one clear sentence describing what is visible, with the primary keyword and perhaps a secondary one where they fit, and no punctuation a screen reader would announce. A list of keywords with no sentence around them is stuffing, and Google's image SEO best practices say as much. An architecture portfolio website or interior design portfolio website can look immaculate to a visitor and remain nearly invisible to Google until these sentences exist.
Link Project Pages Into the Rest of the Site
A project page reachable only from a gallery grid has one path in and none out. Google reaches it, finds little to read and no context around it, and ranks it for nothing. Link deliberately in both directions: from articles to the projects they describe, from projects to the neighbourhood and service pages they support, and from every project page to the contact page. The worst page the studio has audited led straight into the next project with no prompt to get in touch, so visitors circled the portfolio in an endless loop and left. Any studio asking how to get interior design clients through its website should first check whether a single project page ever asks for the enquiry.
Common Portfolio SEO Mistakes: What Not to Do
Three patterns appear in almost every audit. Image dumps with a one-line caption, either oversized files that slow the page or images compressed until the work looks cheap. The same boilerplate paragraph pasted onto every project, which Google reads as duplicate content and may suppress across the whole portfolio; Google's own guidance on helpful content asks for first-hand depth, not a template. And pages with no design story and no call to action, where the reader cannot understand the project and has nowhere to go once they have admired it. Anyone studying interior design portfolio examples for inspiration should look again for the words: the strongest pages are the ones where the writing does quiet work beneath the photographs.
Which Project Should You Rewrite First?
Start with the project most like the work the studio wants more of; that is the page that needs to be found. In practice the sequence runs newest first: the three most recent projects, since they are the most visible and the most likely to attract current enquiries, then the pages that already draw some traffic, then the rest, with formal case studies left until later if time is short. One page, including the recording, transcription, writing and upload, takes ninety minutes to two hours, and it is the most direct portfolio seo work a studio can do without touching the design.
That view comes from doing it: at Krueger Design, Manuel Krueger holds a UX certification and has trained in SEO with one of Europe's leading marketing companies, applied in hands-on work for independent design studios, rebuilding project pages from an owner's spoken words, writing design stories to a fixed editorial standard and structuring portfolios so the work can be found as well as admired. The studio's guide to seo for interior designers shows where project pages sit in the wider picture.
A rewritten project page reads differently from a gallery, and the Battersea residence by Amalia Boier Studio shows what that looks like live. If you want to know which of your own pages to start with, book a visitor-first site review.
