Does SEO work for artists? Hell, yeah, it does! SEO helps you rank your website in the search engines results, creating visibility for your art and helping you generate more sales. You can do SEO for your artist website just like for any other website. When done correctly, you can position your blog posts as the first organic search result—and even in the featured snippet—outranking even more established sites! Here are some tips on how to make SEO work for your artist website.
When you have your own artist website, SEO is the way to go! SEO helps you rank your website in the search engines results, creating visibility for your art and helping you generate more sales.
I cannot emphasize enough how important it is for artists to build their own website. Social media platforms are getting more and more obscure, making it harder and harder for users to grow an organic following. Their algorithms work in favor of the company’s financial interest and to the detriment of the users. Believe it or not, social media can even kill your art career.
Search engine algorithms are way more calculable than social media, and having your own website allows to forge genuine and authentic connections, as opposed to the superficial follow-for-follow, like-for-like on social networks.
That's why it is so important for artists to have their own website and optimize it for search engines, because—hell, yeah—SEO works for artists!
If you need help creating a website for your art, check out the best website builders for artists or how to make an artist website with WordPress.
But now, without further ado, let’s get into it:
Is SEO an art form?
Nope, SEO is definitely no form of art. SEO stands for search engine optimization and is dry, fact-based science. No creative guesswork like “maybe if I do this, I’ll get that result.”
Search engine ranking criteria are not like the nebulous algorithmic clutter you know from social media. SEO is based on clear benchmarks you can rely on and there are real SEO experts you can learn from.
As opposed to Instagram and the like, Google itself offers you a whole lot of helpful articles on how to make your site get found in the search!
Does SEO really work for artists?
Now, you could ask me: “Angie, how do you actually know that SEO works for artists?”
Well, I can tell you. I’ve been learning a lot about SEO and using it for my posts since I started my art blog—and yes, SEO does work for artists.
But images say more than a thousand words and before I continue on telling how good SEO is for your artist website, let me show you some screenshots of my blog posts being the first search result and even outranking more established sites—only five month after sending my website live!
My blog post about “feeling lost as an artist” has made it to the featured snippet at the top of Bing’s first search results page, outranking longer existing sites with a higher domain authority.
Just good luck?
Well, you could say so if it only happened once. But I have a whole range of posts that rank on position #1—and #0 (featured snippet) in the search results. Let me just show you four more examples:
Another example of one of my blog posts on how to emotionally support an artist being the featured snippet and the first organic search result on Yandex.
My “Social Art Dilemma” made it to the featured snippet on Bing—ranking with the official Instagram site in the side box. Not bad at all.
My 5-step tutorial on how to make storytelling through artwork effective got again the featured snippet, ranking with the highly competitive keyword “storytelling” on Bing’s first results page.
How to do SEO for your artist website?
Well, you do SEO for your artist website just like for any other website. SEO works—no matter whether you do it for an artist or for any other person.
Search engine optimization basically consists of three pillars:
- Technical SEO
- Site Structure SEO (Architecture)
- On-Page SEO (Content)
If you manage to implement those three types of optimization in your art blog, you’ll have the best prerequisites to rank your website in the search results real fast.
An essential part of SEO is keyword research.
You’ll need to know what keywords people actually type into the search engine and use those keywords in your blog posts. Otherwise, you can publish the most helpful articles but nobody finds them because you’re just not using the words people search for.
I’ve recently created a blog post on how to find the best keywords for artists.
If you want to take it a step further and achieve even better results, you can use a keyword research tool. Keyword research tools are so powerful because they can show the easiest keywords to rank for.
They analyze the competition level for each term and suggests most searched keywords for with the lowest keyword difficulty in your art niche. In other words, they guide you directly to the low-hanging fruit!
Below is an example of the KWFinder showing the keyword difficulty of search terms related to “surreal Photoshop tutorial.” The lowest hanging fruit on the list is “surreal photography tutorial” with a keyword difficulty of 24, marked in green (= go for it!).
Apart from the KWFinder, there’s a range of other (free, paid and freemium) tools that are great for keyword research:
Who to use for SEO?
You don’t need anyone to do SEO for you. You yourself can do the SEO for your artist website. Everyone can learn the ins and outs of search engine optimization.
I have a couple of free tutorials for you, on how to get traffic to your website and how to create blog posts that will get you clicks.
To level up your game with a guided approach, you can get my Ultimate Guide to Build an Artist Website for Success.
If you’d like to have more personal guidance, you can schedule a one-on-one website consulting call with me!
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What’s your experience with SEO? Have you tried to make SEO work for your artist website? Feel free to share your experiences in the comments below. I’d love to hear from you! Make sure to sign up for my email list so you don’t miss out on new blog posts and other cool stuff. ♥
Spot on with this write-up, I actually suppose this website needs rather more consideration. I’ll most likely be once more to read way more, thanks for that info.
Glad to hear you like the content (: Looking forward to staying in touch with you!