8 Digital Marketing & Search Strategies for Art Websites
How to make the most out of the web for art businesses
How to make the most out of the web for art businesses
Art websites, either auction houses, artist communities, or online art galleries, have revenue and engagement goals like any other business. But they also have specific digital needs due to the nature of the cultural products they present: high net worth audiences, picture-heavy sites, uniqueness of the artworks, etc. This means that digital best practices still apply to them, but have to be tailored to meet their exact needs. In my experience of art appraisals, art auctions & galleries online, I have seen these eight content marketing and search (SEO) strategies be successful for a lot of clients.
1. Update Your Homepage Content Daily
Why: To get crawlers and users to come back often to your site
Make sure to change your content on a daily basis so that users find a reason to come back and discover other parts of your site. Google bots will also recognize you as an active site if you keep updating your content. You can check when your site was last crawled by clicking the little arrow on the right to your site name in the search results and hitting “Cached.”
2. Link Your Content to Current Art Events
Why: To create urgency and increase engagement
Content and campaigns created around current topics related to your industry are performing best, as you give the users what they are currently searching or have on their mind. Be sure to cover art fairs or art exhibitions in your area, or post about fashion photography around fashion week. These are ways to create engagement. If you are selling artworks, make sure to time special sales around these main events to create interest, and make them “limited time offer” to create urgency.
3. Create Landing Pages Around Art Categories
Why: To rank for evergreen art category keywords in organic and paid search results
If you specialize in specific art categories, make sure to have corresponding landing pages for each of these, such as contemporary art, abstract art, digital art, impressionism, etc. This direct link will allow you to organically rank higher for this keyword and create specific, more successful (and less expensive) pay-per-click campaigns. These pages need to be optimized for the search engines with at least the following:
- Meta content following Google best practices and including the art category keyword
- The H1 being the name of the category, such as contemporary art
- On-page description of the art category: a written paragraph about the history of the art category, related artists, and artwork series
- Friendly URL (all lowercase, words separated by dashes) with the art category name included
4. Tag Artists & Artworks with Schema Markup
Why: To rank better for artist names, events, and pictures in search results
Markups are not very widespread yet as only 1% of websites use it only, but Google and Bing openly said that this was the future of the Internet. There are many types of markups for social media, search, etc. but the most widespread one is unsurprisingly Google Schema Markup (also recognized by Bing). So get on it to be part of the early adopters. This will allow you to tell the search engines what your business and sites are about. The most important “entities” to mark up are:
- Artists as “persons,” with fields on the page, such as birth/death dates, job titles, full name, etc.
- Art events (auctions, art fairs, gallery openings) as “events” with all related information on location, description, date, time, etc.
- Artworks as “creative works” if they have no price listed, or as “products” if they do
Read more about schema markup on Google blog >
5. Use Google Shopping for Artworks with Prices
Why: To increase revenue potential for artworks
By listing your works on Google Shopping, you can extend your online reach a lot in only a few clicks. However a lot of art websites refuse to use it because the audience is not “high end” enough. If you are afraid to dilute your brand, you can also post only the lower-priced works on Google Shopping and keep the higher-prices items on other specialized platforms. Please note that Google Shopping does not support auction artworks, but it works with “purchase now” works or the ones with a fixed retail price.
6. It’s Not All About Design and Pictures
Why: You need content and texts to be found by the search engines and rank well
A lot of art websites spend their entire digital budget on design and “text-light” user experiences. But you need to find a good balance to avoid hurting your SEO. Text is still the main thing that search engines read, and art sites tend to forget about this. Do not make this mistake. Think about artwork captions, blog posts, homepage content, and event descriptions. They are user friendly too, to help your visitors navigate your site and know what they are looking at.
7. Talk to and Engage with Your Social Media Audience
Why: To improve brand impact and recognition
Engagement on social media is key to build your brand impact. If your business is mostly online, this is one of the only ways you will be in contact with your audience. So engage a conversation. Mimic personal relations online. Even high net worth clients don’t want to talk to a machine. By following strict posting guidelines and being human, you will stand out among the many art Twitter or Facebook accounts that just post artworks. Anybody can post a picture of an artwork for sale with a caption. Think about what your audience is interested in and is looking for: fun facts about an artist, why this artwork is a hot purchase, and give them what they want. It’s not about you, it’s about them.
8. Send Targeted Emails
Why: To improve click-through rate and engagement metrics
The most successful campaigns are targeted. This is no secret. If you send a photography e-newsletter to people interested in or collecting photography, your chances of having them open your email are much higher. The challenge is to identify this subsection of your audience. Make sure to get data on your users by asking them for their preferences or create surveys to capture these interests. Data like this is invaluable to tailor your marketing campaigns to the right people.