There are companies where some employees only worry about one thing every day: the search engine optimization (SEO) of the website. And there are industries such as the arts where SEO doesn’t seem to play any role at all. A missed opportunity.
It is common knowledge that the vast majority of artists are poor. But it can also be expressed in figures. According to the Künstlersozialkasse, the average income of visual artists is 17,130 euros per year (as of January 2021). Although there is great financial resentment, there is a great aversion to commerce and capitalism in the art scene. Artists want to sell their work – even for a lot of money – but under no circumstances do they want to actively market their work or even market themselves. Accordingly, every artist’s dream is to exhibit their work somewhere and have it seen and bought by interested parties (ideally art-loving collectors). For well-known artists with good gallery owners who can charge 17,130 euros for a work, this even (still) works, but not for those who earn that much throughout the year.
Websites and social media are permitted
It is interesting to note that there are quite strict online marketing conventions in the art scene. For example, websites and Instagram accounts are quite common and permitted among artists. Newsletters are also legitimate in principle (but hardly anyone uses them because they are uncool). However, the how is much stricter than the what. For example, it is a no-go to write texts about your work yourself or even mention prices. The image descriptions on Instagram are usually as short as possible: “Untitled, 2021, 50×50, acrylic on canvas”. The same game on websites. This, in turn, is a key problem. For art laymen, two questions are of particular interest in addition to the visual appearance: What is the story/idea behind it? And: what does it cost? These are precisely the questions that artists don’t want to answer. After all, you don’t want to be an explainer (at least not in public).
Which keywords are relevant for artists?
The conditions for optimizing an artist’s website for search engines are therefore extremely poor, especially as the circumstances mentioned above mean that not only are there generally few texts, but even those that do exist are written by art historians. They are therefore anything but search engine optimized. Although Google has improved its semantic analysis in recent years and can already recognize meanings and contexts quite well, the search engine does not have a doctorate in art history. There are still elementary SEO rules regarding the structure of a website and the structuring of its content.
For example, you should always mention important search terms (keywords) in the headings. Which keywords are important is determined by the keyword research. Put simply, these should be terms that 1. fit the product, 2. have a high search volume and 3. are not too competitive. For an artist from Cologne, for example, “artist Cologne” (approx. 250 search queries/month) or “buy art Cologne” (approx. 100 search queries/month) could be relevant. Although the first keyword has a higher search volume, the second could be more important for sales, as this is a transactional search intention that is clearly aimed at the purchase of art.
What are the benefits of search engine optimization?
Even in the art scene, Jörg Minrath is probably only known to a few, because according to his exhibition CV, he is not particularly well known. Nevertheless, he and his gallery appear in fourth and seventh place in the two searches mentioned above – and thus ahead of Gerhard Richter, who lives in Cologne (who should not mind, as his name alone is searched 50,000 times a month). In view of the low search volume for “Künstler Köln” and “Kunst kaufen Köln”, Jörg Minrath will hardly join the club of millionaires thanks to the good local rankings, but one should not forget that most artists are starving and that just five more paintings sold per year can mean a considerable jump in income. And such specific “long tail keywords” are definitely suitable for this.
Whether it is easy or difficult to appear high up on Google logically depends massively on the keyword and the associated competition. When searching for “contemporary art”, it is likely to be difficult or even impossible for an artist to achieve a top 10 ranking, whereas it is comparatively easy for local searches.
Conclusion: Artists should address the topic of SEO
A search engine optimized website is certainly not THE way for artists to get rid of their financial worries overnight. This is simply because SEO is always designed for the long term and it sometimes takes months for measures to have a noticeable effect on Google rankings. Nevertheless, SEO should not be underestimated. Search engine optimization is an important topic, especially when it comes to increasing general visibility online and being discovered by art lovers interested in buying. This applies to artists and even more so to galleries. One mistake you should never make is to play your website and social media off against each other (“I don’t need a search engine optimized website because I already have a lot of followers on Insta”). The channels and the target groups you can reach through them are far too different for that.
PS: You can check the search volume using the Google Keyword Planner or KeywordTools.org, for example. The figures above come from the Sistrix SEO tool. Depending on which tool you use, you will unfortunately see quite different search volumes.
