Marketing Topic of the Week:
“How to Drive Traffic to Your Website- Getting to Know SEO”
SEO stands for search engine optimization. Basically, it’s the process of helping your website rank higher in search results, in return, making it easier for new people to stumble across your site organically, without you having to send them there.
Most of the time, you rely on your business cards, social media posts, newsletters, or other marketing efforts to direct people to your website. Implementing SEO strategies will take some of that work off your plate because it allows people, who you do not know, discover your site on their own.
How exactly do you implement SEO on your website?
Making your site SEO friendly is all about letting search engines know exactly what content is on your website so that they can put your site in front of the right people. You want to make sure that you’re including words and phrases that your customer base would likely be typing into Google when searching for the kind of art you make. Ensuring that those words appear on your site makes you more likely to show up in the search results of your ideal customers.
A good step to take is to make a list of the keywords that your ideal customers might search when they’re looking for your type of artwork. Don’t just stop at “watercolor paintings”. Try to put yourself in the mind of the customer and not the mind of the artist. They might be searching terms like “home decor”, “contemporary art”, “minimalist wall art”.
Here’s a Checklist to Getting To Started With Making Your Site More SEO Friendly
Make sure your site has a title, not just a logo. This will improve your odds of ranking higher on search engines when someone is looking for you specifically.
When you add images to your site, make sure your file names are descriptive of what the art piece is. Don’t just call your photo “Image 1”. Search engines will actually take in the information from your image title and use it in search results.
Your website platform most likely has a section in its editor that allows you to type in an SEO description on each page on your website. Take advantage of this tool, and type out a short, concise description of what kind of content you have on that page. For example: "Explore original abstract paintings by Jane Doe. Affordable art for collectors and interior designers."
Use keywords in page titles and headings
Add alt text to images. Alt text, or alternative text, is a brief written description of an image. Typically, alt text is used by people who are blind or have low vision and use screen readers. When their screen reader comes across an image on a web page, it will provide an audio transcription of what the image is using the alt text provided by the website. This also helps with SEO because you’re allowing search engines to understand the content that the image portrays.
Utilize tags and categories for your art pieces as an additional way to describe them.
Consider adding a blog to your site. This offers more opportunity to talk about your work and earn organic traffic through keywords, while also providing something of value to your community. Try to post consistently, as this will allow search engines to consider your site active and be more likely to send people to it.
You can also improve SEO by doing the following:
Make sure your site layout translates well on mobile devices. People often forget to make sure their website is mobile friendly. This is crucial as most people will actually be viewing your site from their phone. Search engines will be less likely to direct people to your site if its ease of navigation is poor.
Make sure your image size isn’t large enough to slow your site’s loading speed. You of course want to offer clear images, but make sure that you aren’t using unnecessarily large images.