SEO for artists: how people find your work without a feed

What search actually does for an artist

A feed decides who sees your work. Search doesn't. Someone types "commission a pet portrait" or "linocut print artists uk", and whoever shows up gets the visit. Nobody had to be shown anything first.

That's the whole appeal, and also the whole limit. Search only reaches people who are already looking. It won't build an audience out of nothing the way a post that happens to travel can. What it does is catch the ones who are already halfway to buying, and it keeps doing that while you're asleep, on holiday, or off social entirely for three months.

In my experience the split is roughly: social brings volume and mood, search brings intent. If you only have time for one, and you sell something, search is the one that pays.

Keyword research in plain words: what people type when they're looking for art

Three shapes, and they want different pages from you.

They want a thing

"abstract landscape print", "custom family portrait painting", "risograph poster". These are shopping searches. They want a page showing that thing with a price and a way to buy.

They want to know how

"how to price original art", "what is a giclée print". These bring other artists more often than buyers, which is fine if you like writing and want peers, and a waste of an afternoon if you wanted sales.

They want you specifically

Your name, your shop name, your name plus "prints" or "commissions". Small numbers, highest value. Someone saw your work somewhere and went looking. If what they find is a dead Linktree and a 2019 Tumblr, you lose them there.

Start with the first and third. The middle one is a long game.

Your artist website is the only address that can't be taken away

Every platform you use is a rental. Accounts get suspended by mistake, feeds change what they show, whole sites shut down. None of that is paranoia, it's just what has happened repeatedly to people I know.

A site of your own doesn't need to be impressive. It needs to exist, load fast, say what you make, and be reachable at an address you control. Four pages is a real website:

• A home page that says what you make, in words a stranger would use
• A work page, or one page per body of work
• A shop or commissions page with prices, or at least a range
• A contact page with an actual email address on it

That's it. You can add more later. What you can't do later is get back the three years you spent sending everyone to a profile you don't own.

What belongs on a single artwork page

This is where most artist sites lose search traffic, and it's the cheapest thing to fix. A page with a beautiful image and the caption "Untitled, 2024" tells a search engine nothing at all.

What helps, roughly in order:

• A title with words in it. "Harbour at low tide — oil on canvas, 40×50cm" beats "Untitled 14". You can keep the poetic title, just don't make it the only text.
• A short description. Two or three sentences. Medium, size, what it is, what it's of. Written like you'd tell someone at a market stall.
• Price and availability. "Original sold, prints from £35" is a complete answer and stops a lot of emails.
• Alt text on the image. Describe the picture for someone who can't see it. That's the accessible thing to do and it's also the text an image search reads.
• A sensible file name. harbour-low-tide-oil.jpg, not IMG_4471.jpg.

None of this is writing. It's labelling. An afternoon of labelling across a portfolio usually does more than a month of posting.

Image search and alt text: the part most artists skip

You make pictures. Google has a search engine specifically for pictures, and hardly anyone selling art fills in the parts it reads.

The parts it reads are: the file name, the alt text, the caption or text right next to the image, and the page title. It cannot see the picture the way you do. It reads the words around it and guesses.

Two practical things. First, upload at a sane size. A 12MB export slows the page down and slow pages get visited less, which quietly costs you more than the extra detail gains. Something in the region of 1600–2000px on the long edge is plenty for a portfolio. Second, don't hide the work behind a JavaScript gallery that only loads on click. If the image isn't in the page when it arrives, it often isn't in the index either.

Where Instagram, Etsy and ArtStation fit

They're all fine. They're just not yours, and they each answer a different question.

Instagram is for the people who already follow you, plus the occasional stranger the algorithm hands you. Its links barely count for search. Treat it as a room you visit, not a house you live in.

Etsy has its own internal search with its own rules, and those rules are about Etsy, not Google. Doing well there is a separate craft. Worth learning if that's where you sell, but it doesn't transfer.

ArtStation, Behance, Cara and the rest are portfolios with an audience of other artists and the people hiring them. Good for work. Rarely where a print buyer starts.

The useful move is to have all of them point at your own site, and your own site point back out. Then whichever one is having a good year, you still own the middle.

Is it working? Google Search Console, ten minutes a month

Everything above is guesswork until you look. Google Search Console is free, it is the only place that shows what people actually typed before they landed on you, and it takes about ten minutes a month once it is set up.

You verify that the site is yours, wait a few days for data to appear, and then read one screen: the queries people searched, how often you were shown, how often they clicked, and roughly where you ranked. That is the whole thing.

What to do with it, in order of usefulness:

Look for queries you didn't expect. If people are finding you by searching for a technique, a material or a colour you never thought to name, that is a page waiting to be written — and the words are handed to you.

Look for pages shown a lot and clicked rarely. That usually means the title and the description under it don't match what the person wanted. Rewriting those two lines is the cheapest fix in search.

Ignore the position number for a while. A new page moves around for weeks. Impressions going up at all is the early signal; position settles later.

The data lags by a couple of days and it only covers Google. It is still the most honest mirror you will get for free.

How an art website earns links, without asking for them

Links from other sites are still how search decides who is worth trusting. For artists this is less grim than it sounds, because the art world already runs on being written about.

The ones that come naturally: a gallery or collective listing you, an open call or prize that publishes its shortlist, a local paper covering a show, a supplier or workshop featuring what you made with their materials, a collaborator crediting you on their own site.

The useful habit is to make yourself easy to link to. A page per body of work with a stable address, your name spelled the same way everywhere, and a short bio someone can copy without rewriting it. Most missed links are not refusals — they are someone giving up on finding the right URL.

What not to do: buying links, swapping links in bulk, or paying a directory nobody reads. It is the one part of search where the shortcuts are actively detected, and an artist site is too small to absorb the damage.

If you only do four things

1. Get a site at your own domain, even if it's four pages on a cheap builder.
2. Give every piece a title with real words, two sentences of description, and alt text.
3. Put a price or a price range where someone can see it without emailing you.
4. Make sure searching your own name brings up your site first, not a stale profile.

That's a weekend. It's also most of the benefit.

What this won't fix

Search won't make people want what you make. If nobody is searching for the thing, ranking first for it is worth nothing, and there are whole categories of art where the demand simply isn't in a search box. It also takes months, not days. And it doesn't replace showing up in front of people, it just means the ones who go looking afterwards can find you.

If you're reading this hoping for a lever that works this week, honestly: post the work somewhere people are, and do the labelling while you wait.

Common questions

Do I need my own site if I sell on Etsy?
For selling, no. For being found under your own name, yes. A marketplace listing ranks for the object; your own page is the only one that can rank for you, and it is the only one you keep if the marketplace changes its rules or its fees.

How long before any of this does something?
Weeks for your own name, months for anything competitive. A page has to be crawled, then it has to be judged against pages that have existed for years. The honest expectation is that the small, specific searches come first and the broad ones may never come at all.

Should prices be on the page?
Yes, or at least a range. "Price on request" filters out the people who were ready to buy and keeps the ones who want to negotiate. It also removes the words a buyer searches with.

Does posting on Instagram help my ranking?
Not directly. Links from social platforms are almost all marked so they pass no ranking signal. It helps indirectly, when someone sees the work there, searches your name later, and finds a page that answers.