An SEO Just Opened the Most Strategic Flooring Store Ever — Here’s How He Did It
Most flooring stores are built around samples, salespeople, and slow foot traffic. Ours was built around search engines, affiliate programs, and smart partnerships.
I’m Sean Hakes — a digital marketer turned flooring entrepreneur. After two decades optimizing everything from service businesses to retail giants, I took a big swing: opening a brick-and-mortar flooring design center. But I didn’t do it the old-school way. This is how I combined SEO, affiliate marketing, and contractor incentives into one powerful growth engine.
Start With Leverage, Not Just Inventory
Most flooring stores start by ordering racks of carpet and laminate and hoping people walk in. I started with a completely different playbook — one built on partnerships, SEO, and creative niche targeting.
Yes, we carry the classics: hardwood, luxury vinyl, carpet, countertops, and cabinets. But we also leaned hard into fun, high-margin niches like video game room carpet, arcade flooring, casino carpet, and ultra-custom theater room installs. Why? Because these aren’t saturated — and I know how to rank for the terms nobody else is bidding on.
Instead of waiting for foot traffic, we built landing pages, local content hubs, and affiliate incentives for contractors, designers, and influencers. Our store became the physical extension of a strategy — not the other way around.
Turn Contractors Into Marketers (and Marketers Into Allies)
Here’s the problem with most flooring stores: the contractors who bring in business get zero credit for it. We flipped that model on its head. If a contractor sends a client into our design center, we reward them with co-op marketing funds — paid directly to Sympler or 72 Hour Web Design to grow their business even more.
It’s simple: send us business, and we’ll help you get more. That’s how you create loyalty, momentum, and long-term brand equity — without spending a dime on traditional ads.
We even launched an open affiliate program. Anyone — from influencers to interior designers — can refer a client and earn. That means our reach isn’t limited to zip codes or sales teams. Our entire community becomes a referral engine.
Design for Scroll, Not Just Showroom Traffic
Most showrooms are designed for walk-ins. Ours was designed for Google. From the jump, we structured every product category — hardwood, carpet, countertops, cabinets, even arcade and theater room flooring — into SEO-friendly content blocks built to rank locally and nationally.
Every display has a story. Every niche category has a landing page. Every install we document becomes a blog post, review, or geo-tagged photo on our Google Business Profile. This isn’t just a showroom — it’s a digital funnel wrapped in flooring.
If you’re not building for scroll *and* foot traffic, you’re missing half the audience. Because the truth is, customers aren’t walking in until they’ve already stalked you online.
