Is SEO a good way to sell art online?

SEO is not a viable way to sell art or photography in today’s marketplace. Very few artists are getting significant sales from people typing generic keywords into Google—like ‘pictures of birds’ or ‘Newport Beach photos’—and then buying art on the spot. Most artists have been sold a myth that you can just put keywords and meta descriptions on your website and Google will magically send you traffic. Those days are long gone. The reality is that SEO is dominated by massive sites like Fine Art America, Etsy, Wayfair, Society6, and other marketplaces. If you search for something like ‘photos of grizzly bears in Alaska’ and look at Google Shopping results, you’ll find pages and pages of these big platforms—not individual artists. Even in regular search results, individual artists rarely appear on the first page. And even when they do, the traffic is often other photographers, not art buyers. SEO is extremely difficult and time-consuming, and for the vast majority of artists, it’s not where you should focus your marketing energy. There are much more effective channels for selling your work.

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Asked by an artist asking about SEO optimization · Answered by Patrick Shanahan · art-marketing-podcast · 2021-07-27