An easy-to-follow guide to SEO for artists who want their work to be found online.
The vast majority of my writing is published exclusively online, so when Professional Artist magazine asked me to write an article about the business of art, I jumped at the chance. At the time, I was right in the middle of designing a new Squarespace website for my aunt, figurative and landscape artist Danute Mahady. As we went through the process together, I realized there are a few things specific to how an artist would optimize their website. So I pitched Professional Artist an article on search engine optimization best practices especially for artists.
I started out by googling common terms I thought people would use to find artists online, for example, “portrait artist” and “oil painter”. Often, I had to go several pages of search results deep in order to find an individual artist’s website. But two websites did come out toward the top of the search rankings for their respective keywords, and so I contact those artists to learn more about their experience of building the website and what they’d done, if anything, to optimize their site for search: muralist Morgan Bricca (whose mural is pictured above) and painter/instructor Julianna Kunstler.
The resulting article appears in the August/September issue of Professional Artist, available on newsstands and at most art supply stores, as well as at professionalartistmag.com (though I highly recommend you pick up the print version). You can also order a digital version of the entire magazine. And while you’re at it, keep an eye out for the October/November issue of the magazine, which will include my feature article about virtual reality in fine art.