From 780 Keywords to Almost Nothing: What Happened to This Interior Design Website?

A closer look at Touchstone Interiors’ website reveals more than a loss of search visibility. There’s a broken conversion path, a context-free project portfolio, contradictory website claims, and a curious network of identical developer footer links.

About this investigation

• Website investigated: Touchstone Interiors
• Investigated by: Vikas Solanke | Website.gy
• Industry: Interior Design & Residential/Commercial Interiors
• Location: Hubli, Karnataka, India
• Historical SEO data reviewed: 2024–2026
• Current website reviewed: August 2026
• Nature of investigation: Historical search visibility and SEO performance, website positioning, conversion paths, project portfolio and content, service architecture, technical implementation, source-code analysis, WordPress and plugin footprint, developer footer links, third-party link patterns, user experience, content quality, and lead-generation issues

A website doesn’t have to look terrible to perform badly.

In fact, some of the most interesting website problems are found on websites that, at first glance, appear perfectly respectable.

The homepage looks modern.

The photographs are attractive.

There are animations, testimonials, statistics, service sections and calls to action.

But a website isn’t just a digital brochure.

For a local business, it has to do some fairly important jobs:

• appear when potential customers search Google;
• clearly communicate what the business offers;
• demonstrate its work;
• establish credibility;
• provide a reliable path to contact;
• and turn visitors into enquiries.

That is why we decided to take a closer look at the website of Touchstone Interiors, a Hubballi-based interior design business.

And the reason we started looking wasn’t because the website looked bad.

It was because of what happened to its Google visibility.

This is exactly why we believe web design should go far beyond visual design.

A business website has to be built around search visibility, performance, usability and conversion – not simply made to look good.

Our approach to web design starts with that principle: understand the business, plan the SEO architecture, design the user experience, build for performance and test the finished website before launch.

The 780-keyword mystery

The historical Semrush data we examined shows something remarkable.

In November 2024, the website was appearing for approximately:

780 organic keywords

The distribution was:

• 1 keyword in the Top 3
• 27 keywords in positions 4–10
• 98 keywords in positions 11–20
• 297 keywords in positions 21–50
• 341 keywords in positions 51–100
• 16 other SERP-feature appearances

Then something changed.

The site’s organic visibility began falling dramatically.

And this is where we need to be careful.

The graph does not prove that Google penalised Touchstone.

It does not prove that one particular technical problem caused the decline.

And it certainly doesn’t prove that the website’s developer caused the decline.

But it does tell us something important:

Something happened.

So instead of guessing, we decided to examine the website itself.

What we found was surprisingly uncomfortable.

First impression: this isn’t an ugly website

Let’s get this out of the way.

Touchstone’s website isn’t some ancient 2008 website that nobody bothered to update.

It has a contemporary visual style.

It uses large interior photographs, modern typography, animated sections and prominent calls to action.

There is clearly effort behind the presentation.

And that actually makes the problems more interesting.

Because when you look beyond the surface, the website starts raising some very basic questions.

The homepage hero looks polished, but its message is remarkably generic.

“We Are Professionals In Interior Design”

That is the main message greeting visitors.

Not:

Complete home interiors in Hubballi.

Not:

Residential and commercial interior design in Hubballi.

Not:

350+ completed interior projects.

Not even a particularly distinctive positioning statement.

Just:

We Are Professionals In Interior Design

The page title is similarly generic:

And the meta description begins:

“Hubli’s premier interior design services! We specialize in creating stylish, functional interiors…”

The underlying page source confirms the title and description as seen in the screenshot above.

None of this is a catastrophic SEO mistake.

But it is a missed opportunity.

Google’s current guidance says title links are an important part of helping users understand why a result is relevant, and recommends descriptive, concise titles rather than vague or boilerplate wording.

The problem isn’t that Touchstone has too few keywords.

The problem is that the homepage doesn’t do a particularly good job of answering:

Why should Google, or a potential customer, understand this website as the answer to a specific search?

Then we found the “30,000 brands” claim

Scroll further down the homepage and things get rather curious.

The website says:

Trusted by 1,000+ world-class brands and organizations of all sizes

And immediately below that:

Trusted by 30,000 world-class brands and organizations of all sizes.

A very large credibility claim – but the website doesn’t clearly explain what “trusted by” means.

That’s a rather large difference.

And the natural question is:

What exactly does “trusted by” mean?

Are these companies customers?

Partners?

Suppliers?

Brands whose products were used in projects?

Manufacturers?

Something else?

The website doesn’t really explain the relationship.

And that matters.

Because displaying the logo of a well-known manufacturer and saying that you are “trusted by” that manufacturer can communicate very different things to a visitor.

The irony is that Touchstone already has better numbers

Here’s the frustrating part.

The website itself displays the below data:

350+ Projects

500+ Happy Clients

50+ Skilled Workers

10+ Years Experience

Those are much more useful claims.

Because unlike “30,000 world-class brands”, these figures relate directly to the business’s actual work.

But the website doesn’t make those numbers work hard enough.

If you’ve genuinely completed 350+ projects, show them.

If you’ve worked with 500+ clients, show the projects.

If you’ve been operating for more than 10 years, show the evolution of the work.

Instead, much of the portfolio experience is reduced to photographs.

And that brings us to one of the biggest weaknesses we found.

350+ projects – but where are the projects?

The website has a dedicated Projects section.

And there are plenty of photographs.

This isn’t a case of:

“The company doesn’t have a portfolio.”

It clearly does.

The problem is how that portfolio is presented.

It’s an image dump

Look at the photographs.

There are bedrooms.

Ceilings.

Wardrobes.

Kitchens.

Living rooms.

Partitions.

Lighting.

Renovation work.

But ask yourself:

Where is the project information?

Which house is this?

Where is it located?

Is it a 2 BHK?

3 BHK?

Villa?

Office?

Restaurant?

Which services were provided?

Was this a complete interior?

A renovation?

A modular kitchen?

A wardrobe installation?

When was it completed?

What was the design brief?

What materials were used?

The visitor has to guess.

And from an SEO perspective, the missed opportunity is even bigger.

Imagine turning one project into a proper page:

3 BHK Interior Design Project – Hubballi

Then:

Location: Hubballi
Project type: Residential
Services: Complete interiors, modular kitchen, wardrobes, false ceiling
Scope: 3 BHK
Status: Completed

Then show the photographs.

Suddenly, those same photographs become searchable, contextualised content.

Instead, the current portfolio largely asks Google and the customer to interpret a collection of images.

That’s not making the most of 350+ projects.

The website is making the customer play “Guess the Project”

This is a subtle but important distinction.

The problem isn’t:

“There aren’t enough images.”

There are images.

The problem is:

The images aren’t being converted into useful project information.

For an interior design website, that’s a huge missed opportunity.

A visitor shouldn’t have to look at a photograph and wonder:

“Is this a Hubli house? An office? A kitchen? A project from five years ago? Something they actually built?”

The portfolio should answer those questions.

And then came the most serious discovery

At the bottom of the homepage is a prominent section:

Let’s get together and create your dream home.

Underneath it:

Get Started

Sounds like exactly what a potential customer should click.

So we followed it.

The website’s source code shows that the button points to:

tel:8884476667

The website’s footer, however, lists:

+91 8904241699

+91 8884066378

So we did something that any real prospective customer could do.

We called the number > 8884476667

The “Get Started” button doesn’t get you started with Touchstone

The number attached to that button is:

8884476667

That number is publicly associated with Ameyya Institute, an organisation offering IT-related training.

Ameyya’s own website lists the same number as its contact number.

Read that again.

A visitor comes to an interior design website.

They see:

Create your dream home.

They click:

Get Started.

And the telephone number they are sent to is publicly associated with a completely different organisation.

This isn’t an SEO theory.

It isn’t a disagreement about colours.

It isn’t subjective UX criticism.

It is a broken conversion path.

And potentially a very expensive one.

Because we have no way of knowing how many people have reached that button and assumed they were contacting Touchstone.

This is why “the website looks good” isn’t enough

Imagine the journey.

Someone searches Google.

They find Touchstone.

They look at the photographs.

They decide they want to enquire.

They scroll down.

They see:

Let’s get together and create your dream home.

They click:

Get Started

And the contact destination is wrong.

The website has done almost everything right up until the moment that matters.

The visitor is ready to become a lead.

And the website potentially sends them somewhere else.

That’s not a design problem.

That’s a business problem.

The website’s service structure also needs a serious rethink

The homepage presents services including:

• Modern Furniture Layouts
• House / Apartment Renovation
• Private Residence Projects
• Interior Decorator & Manager
• A Landscape Architect
• Industrial Engineering

The question isn’t whether these services can theoretically coexist.

The question is:

Does this structure help a customer — and Google — understand what the website is actually about?

Someone searching for:

interior designers in Hubli

is probably not looking for an ambiguous collection of loosely related services.

A clearer architecture would make the commercial intent obvious:

Residential Interiors

• 2 BHK
• 3 BHK
• Villas
• Modular kitchens
• Bedrooms
• Wardrobes

Commercial Interiors

• Offices
• Retail
• Showrooms
• Hospitality

Renovation

• Homes
• Apartments
• Offices

That’s the difference between listing services and building an information architecture around customer intent.

There’s another problem hiding in the source code

The website is built using WordPress and a collection of page-builder and front-end components.

The source contains Elementor-related components, ElementsKit, Royal Elementor Addons, icon libraries, Swiper and other JavaScript/CSS dependencies. It also references several Google font families.

Now, before someone says:

“Ah! Elementor is the reason they lost rankings.”

No.

That’s not how serious technical analysis works.

Elementor doesn’t automatically make a website bad.

Plugins don’t automatically make a website slow.

The correct question is:

What does this particular implementation actually cost the visitor?

That’s something we can measure through performance testing.

So this isn’t a conclusion.

It’s a technical investigation point.

Now let’s talk about the footer

At the bottom of the website is:

Powered by [the website development company]

with a link back to the developer’s own website.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with a website giving credit to the company that built it.

That’s normal.

And Google itself says external links aren’t something website owners should be afraid of. External links can be useful and can help establish trust when used appropriately.

But then we started looking at other websites.

And things became considerably more interesting.

The same footer link appears across a large number of unrelated websites

We found the same “Powered by” attribution appearing across numerous unrelated websites.

Education.

Publishing.

Engineering.

Business.

Training.

Different organisations.

Different industries.

Different websites.

But the same developer credit.

For example, among the sites examined were:

• an environmental publishing website;
• an education foundation;
• a business school;
• another educational institution;
• a pharmaceutical business;
• a creative business;
• an engineering company.

The important thing isn’t that a development company has multiple clients.

Obviously it does.

The important question is:

Why is the same sitewide footer backlink being distributed across so many unrelated domains?

And more importantly:

How is Google treating that pattern today?

The same developer attribution appears across numerous unrelated websites we examined.

Google has something very interesting to say about this

Google’s current spam policies explicitly list:

“Widely distributed links in the footers or templates of various sites”

as an example of link spam.

That doesn’t mean:

Every “Website by XYZ” footer link is spam.

It doesn’t.

And we’re not saying that.

The distinction is important.

Google says ordinary external links are perfectly normal.

But if links are part of a paid arrangement, Google recommends qualifying them with rel="sponsored" or rel="nofollow".

So the question becomes:

Is this simply attribution?

Or:

Is a commercial web-development relationship being used to create a large network of followed, sitewide backlinks?

Those are very different things.

And with hundreds of websites potentially carrying the same link, it is a question worth asking.

We are NOT saying this caused the Google collapse

This is critical.

We don’t have evidence to say:

“The developer footer links caused Touchstone’s ranking loss.”

We don’t have evidence to say:

“Google penalised Touchstone because of the footer.”

And we shouldn’t pretend we do.

What we can say is:

1. Touchstone’s historical organic visibility reached approximately 780 keywords in November 2024.
2. The website subsequently suffered a dramatic decline.
3. The current website contains several technical, UX, content and conversion issues.
4. The website contains a sitewide external developer link.
5. The same developer attribution appears across numerous other websites.
6. Google’s current spam documentation specifically discusses widely distributed footer/template links.

That’s enough evidence to justify investigation.

It isn’t enough evidence to manufacture a conclusion.

And that’s precisely where a proper website audit differs from clickbait SEO.

The biggest problem isn’t the design

This is the part we think businesses should pay attention to.

If someone looked at Touchstone’s website for five seconds, they might say:

“Looks good.”

And that’s exactly the danger.

Because visual quality can hide functional failure.

The website can look polished while:

• the homepage communicates very little differentiation;
• the portfolio lacks context;
• service architecture is unclear;
• metadata is generic;
• legacy technical references remain;
• conversion paths aren’t properly verified;
• and a major CTA appears to point to the wrong business.

That’s why we don’t think the right question is:

“Does my website look professional?”

The better question is:

“Does my website actually work as a digital sales and search asset?”

What we’d fix first

If this were our audit checklist, the priorities would be brutally simple.

1. Fix the “Get Started” telephone number

Immediately.

This is not something to put into a six-month SEO roadmap.

Fix it now.

2. Test every CTA

Not just visually.

Click them.

Call them.

Submit them.

Check the destination.

3. Rebuild the Projects architecture

Turn the image gallery into actual project content.

4. Clarify the services

Build the structure around what customers actually search for.

5. Rewrite the homepage’s search identity

Title, H1, description and page content should communicate the business far more precisely.

Google recommends descriptive, concise title elements and warns against vague or boilerplate titles.

6. Audit the technical stack

Measure:

• Core Web Vitals
• page weight
• JavaScript
• CSS
• image loading
• font loading
• TTFB
• third-party requests

Don’t guess.

Measure.

7. Investigate the November 2024 collapse

This is the biggest unanswered question.

Look for:

• URL changes
• deleted pages
• redirects
• canonical changes
• indexing changes
• content changes
• backlink losses
• site migrations
• algorithm timing
• technical changes

8. Audit the developer backlink footprint

Determine exactly how widespread the footer link is and whether those links are appropriately qualified.

So, what happened to Touchstone?

We don’t know yet.

And that’s actually the most honest conclusion we can give.

The historical data shows a website that once had a measurable presence across hundreds of Google searches and subsequently lost most of that visibility.

The current website gives us plenty to investigate.

But we would be doing everyone a disservice if we simply picked one convenient explanation and called it a Google penalty.

There may be one major cause.

There may be several.

There may even be a completely different explanation that isn’t visible from the public website.

That’s why the next stage of this investigation matters.

A website that once appeared for nearly 800 keywords now has a very different story to tell. Whether these issues are connected to that collapse is something the next stage of our investigation will have to establish.

But one thing is already clear: this website deserves a much closer look than a routine “looks good, it’s live” sign-off.

A website can be beautiful on the outside, completely functional in a designer’s demo, and still be quietly leaking search visibility and potential customers every single day.

For now, that’s where we leave Touchstone.

We found enough problems to make this website worth a serious second look — but not enough evidence to pretend we already know exactly why its Google visibility collapsed.

And that’s precisely why we’re not going to guess.

We’ll keep digging into what changed around November 2024, what happened to those 780 rankings, and whether the clues hidden in the website can explain the collapse.

Until then, Touchstone — we hope someone checks that “Get Started” button.

See you in the next investigation.