You’ve created a website for your art and now you are waiting for people to come and visit? SEO is the name of your secret weapon! Search Engine Optimization is crucially important to get traffic to your art website. In this post, I’ll explain how to do SEO for an artist website and I’ve put together 5 SEO tips for artists that will help you make a difference!
Some artists still think that it’s enough to post their art on social media—and then wait for the likes and comments to roll in. Unfortunately, that’s not how it goes (anymore).
Constant and unpredictable algorithmic changes on Instagram and other platforms have shown us that we cannot rely on social media to get the word out about our art. What used to work doesn’t work any longer. Algorithms work in favor of the platform owner (aka paid ads) and many artists have seen their reach crumble overnight.
If you want to keep reaching a wider audience in the long term, you’ll need to diversify your online presence as an artist.
Start by building a website for your art. This is a great way to display your work in a professional manner and make yourself independent of platforms that only have their own interest in mind.
Related: 10 Reasons Why You Should Make A Website For Your Art
SEO stands for ‘Search Engine Optimization’ and refers to the process of organically ranking your website highly on search engines.
In other words, the more optimized your artist website is, the more traffic you’ll get to it!
Optimizing your site for search engines is significantly different from how you gain exposure on social media. While getting your art noticed on Instagram, Facebook, and others mostly relies on your algorithmic luck, there are solid SEO strategies to get traffic to your art website.
How to get traffic to your art website?
Using SEO as an artist is a free method to drive traffic to your online content and artwork.
Ultimately, Google wants to give the searcher the most relevant results for their specific search query. By optimizing your art website for search engines, you make sure that your content can be found and is shown in the search results.
It’s a win-win for everybody.
Google is able to show the searcher relevant results, the searcher is happy to find what they are looking for, and you are happy to get traffic to your art website!
Since SEO is completely free, you don’t need to worry about spending money for ads. Likewise, you don’t need to worry about ever-changing algorithms no one knows how to handle.
Even though Google is rolling out constant updates to improve the users’ search experience as well, you can be sure that your website will show up as long as you provide useful content that helps people solve their problems.
In this post, I’ve put together a bunch of simple SEO tips for artists anyone can use to boost their page rank.
So, let’s get into it!
How to do SEO for an artist website?
Doing SEO for an artist website is basically the same as doing SEO for any other business website. You are using the same strategies and techniques—only the keywords you’ll focus on are related to your specific art niche.
Apart from that, everything else works the same.
I’ve been doing SEO for my artist website (the one you’re on right now)—for each and every blog post, right from the start.
I know what works and what doesn’t. I know what to focus on and what doesn’t matter.
→ How To Find The Best Keywords For Artists To Boost Your SEO
In this post, I'm sharing with you 5 SEO tips for artists to help you get traffic to your art website.
All these tips are proven to work and really easy to implement. But despite being so easy and straightforward, they are highly effective and have the potential to give your art website an organic SEO boost!
So, here we go:
5 SEO Tips for Artists to Get Traffic to your Art Website
SEO Tip #1: Conduct keyword research.
My first SEO tip for artists is to do keyword research. Before you start creating a blog post or writing about your artwork, make sure to find the keywords your audience is actually searching for.
Because if you address topics no one is searching for, you will never get traffic to your art website!
To avoid that you must be sure that your content matches what people are looking for.
So, what could be some keywords for your art? Well, this all depends on your genre and the art-related topic you want to talk about.
For example, when you describe an original artwork of yours, you would use different keywords than when talking about creative techniques or tools. As a rule of thumb, you should be as specific as possible. Instead of just writing about a “digital artwork,” narrow it down to, for example, “surreal digital Photoshop art.”
When you speak about your art, it’s likely that you already use relevant keywords. For more ideas, you can try using tools like AlsoAsked.com to create a mind map with alternative keywords that your audience may search for as well. This is especially useful for art bloggers.
Another important SEO tip for artists who have a blog is this:
When you just started blogging, it’s a good idea to focus your posts on long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords usually consist of 4 or more words and are a lot more specific than short-tail keywords.
Short-tail keywords are frequently searched for and therefore highly competitive, meaning there are already lots of blogs addressing those topics. That makes it more difficult for a new website to rank for those terms.
Long-tail keywords, on the other hand, are searched for less frequently, but the number of web pages geared towards them is also lower. In return, you have better chances of ranking higher in the search results when you optimize your post for those keywords.
Long-tail keywords are relatively easy to find. Simply start by typing in a query into Google’s search bar and see what auto-complete suggestions come up. You can also scroll down to ‘People also ask’ on Google’s results page to find related long-tail keywords.
Another possibility is to use keyword research tools to find great keywords with a relatively high search volume and low competition. Some free and paid options include:
SEO Tip #2: Optimize your posts.
Now that you’ve figured out the right keywords, it’s time to optimize your content for exactly those terms. There are several ways to do that.
Let’s start with the post title:
• Title tag
The title of a post or page is always the most important heading. In the website code, the title is tagged H1, meaning it’s a first-order heading.
You should always include the relevant keywords in your main title—as much as at the beginning as possible. You will notice that it’s not always possible to have it directly at the beginning because you still want your title to read naturally.
Don’t force things when it doesn’t fit.
For example, if your focus keyphrase is “how to overcome creative block” and you have 10 strategies to achieve that, your title might read “10 Proven Strategies To Overcome Creative Block.” You see what I mean?
Even though your keyphrase is not at the beginning of the title in its exact wording, it’s enough to tell Google what the post is about and what to rank it for.
• Body text
Of course, the relevant keywords also need to appear in the actual content of the page, the so-called body text.
The amount of times you mention the keywords throughout the post depends on the length of the text—and on the length of your keyphrase. As a rule of thumb, the shorter the keyphrase, the more often you’ll need to mention it!
In any case, you should make sure to use your keywords evenly—at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end of your article!
• Headings
The heading structure is not only helpful for SEO, but also for your readers to scan the content.
While every web page can only have one main H1 heading, it can have several sub-headings.
That means each section of the page can have its own sub-heading, usually an H2 (second-order heading). If you want to break up those sub-sections even more, you can use smaller sub-headings, from H3 to H6.
• Slug
The slug is the part of a URL that comes after your domain name. The slug of this web page, for example, is ginangiela.com/seo-tips-for-artists/. The yellow part is the slug.
For good SEO optimization, you should always make sure to include your primary keywords in the slug.
Google itself recommends using hyphens (-) instead of underscores (_) and not joining words together in your URLs. That means the URL should neither read ginangiela.com/SEO_tips_for_artists/ nor ginangiela.com/SEOtipsforartists/. Instead, ginangiela.com/SEO-tips-for-artists/ is the best option.
• Meta description
The meta description is the short summary you see below each website title on the search results page.
While Google used to show the exact meta description you would write for a specific page in the past, it now tends to pull short descriptions directly from the content on a page.
Nevertheless, it can still be helpful for SEO to specify a meta description. The meta description is usually around 150 characters and should include relevant keywords.
Depending on the platform you use for your artist website, you’ll have different ways to define the meta description.
If you are using WordPress, then free SEO tools like RankMath and YoastSEO will allow you define a meta description under “Edit page” or “Edit post.”
SEO Tip #3: Optimize your images.
As a visual artist, you already know that images play a vital role for the appeal and user experience of your website. But they are also a key factor when it comes to SEO and can help increase your search ranking.
As you know, you can directly search for images on Google Images and other search engines. When your images come up in the visual search, it’s a great opportunity to get traffic to your art website.
Here are some tips on how to optimize images for the best results:
• Image size
Of course, you want your art to look good on your website. Therefore, uploading high-quality images is a must, but you also have to keep in mind that too large files may slow down loading times. And fast loading speed is a ranking criterion as well!
Make sure your images look good on desktop and mobile devices, but don’t make them too clunky. Usually, they don’t need to be larger than 1200 pixels at the max.
Additionally, you can use image compression tools like TinyPNG or Google’s WebP format. As for image galleries, you can use lazy loading to make sure images will load gradually as the user scrolls down the page.
• Image file name
The name of an image file plays a role in SEO, too, as Google will read your file names as well.
So, instead of naming your images something like picture_xyz.jpg, give it a descriptive name that includes some keywords in its file name.
As a rule of thumb, at least one image on the page should include your focus keyphrase.
• Image title
Optimizing image title and alt tags is something you’ll need to do in the backend of your website. If you’re using WordPress, you’ll be doing it in the Media Library.
Once you’ve uploaded an image, you have the option to enter some meta data, such as title, alternative text, caption, and description. That meta data is invisible to the website visitor, but search engines will be able to read it.
The image file name will automatically appear in the title field. When you’ve already used a descriptive file name with relevant keywords, you won’t have to make any changes here. Otherwise I recommend adding some keywords to your image title.
• Alt tags
First of all, you must know that the alt tag or alternative text will be shown when an image doesn’t load properly. Then, it will also be used to describe the image to visually impaired people visiting your website with the help of a screen reader.
These are already some good reasons to make the alt text descriptive and relevant. But besides that, alt tags are also read by search engines to determine what your page is about.
All in all, the alternative text should describe the image in more detail and be easy to understand. Include some relevant keywords, but don’t overdo it!
• Image captions
As you can see in the screenshot below, you can also enter image captions in the backend of your website—but you don’t have to, though.
What you should optimize for SEO in particular is the caption below the image on the web page, which is also visible to the website visitor.
Not only is it nice to get a quick explanation what the image is intended to show, but it also helps to rank your website in the search!
Another SEO tip for artists is to optimize images, including file name, alternative text, title and caption. The screenshot shows you the backend of the WordPress Media Library where you can enter the image meta data. In the example, I’ve optimized the featured image of my post on why every artist should have a blog.
SEO Tip #4: Optimize your internal linking structure.
The internal linking of your website has several functions. First, it helps you organize your pages and makes it easier for your visitors to navigate your site.
Secondly, internal linking also helps Google discover your pages and index them correctly.
As a matter of course, the most important pages should be linked in your main menu. Pages or posts about related topics should link together as well.
Additionally, you can use breadcrumbs on your website. Breadcrumbs are links below the top menu that tell the user where they are currently located on your site, in relation to the overall structure.
When you take a look at the turquoise bar below the main menu on my site, for example, you’ll see that you are currently on the blog, in the subsection “Build Your Artist Website.”
SEO Tip #5: Submit your sitemap to search engines.
My last SEO tip for artists is to submit your sitemap to search engines.
An XML sitemap is automatically generated by your website building platform, be it WordPress, Squarespace, Simvoly, and others.
If you have installed an SEO plugin for WordPress, such as RankMath or YoastSEO, that one will create a sitemap that you can submit to search engines. All posts, pages, portfolio sites, products, etc. will be automatically added to that sitemap as soon as you publish them.
You usually find your XML sitemap by entering /sitemap.xml or /sitemap_index.xml after your domain name. My sitemap, for instance, can be found at ginangiela.com/sitemap.xml.
To learn how exactly to submit your sitemap to search engines, there’s a great tutorial on Kinsta for you to check out.
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I hope that these 5 SEO tips for artists were helpful and that you got some new ideas how to get traffic to your art website. Let me know what you’ve done, so far, to optimize your website for search engines in the comments. I’d love to hear from you!
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Great tips! I’ve been trying to improve my website’s visibility, and this post made SEO feel less overwhelming. Your tips are super helpful. Definitely going to try these suggestions—thanks for sharing, Angie!
Hey Bredow, that’s great to hear (: Let me know how it’s going with your SEO or if you need further assistance!
Hello I am so delighted I found your website, I really located you by mistake, while I was looking on google for something else, Anyways I am here now and could just like to say cheers for a tremendous post and a all round entertaining blog. Please do keep up the great work.
Hello Jewel, thanks a lot for dropping a comment! So great to hear that you enjoy reading my blog. Looking forward to staying in touch with you (:
This is a very useful blog giving very valuable and practical tips to bloggers who blog but don’t succeed in achieving their goals. Thank you for that!
Hi Nikky, glad the post was able to help! I wish you all the best for your blogging journey and that you achieve all your blogging goals! (;