Have you ever wondered where the top Galleries get their web traffic from – well wonder no more, if you go to www.similarweb.com and type in the name of any major website, including major gallery websites (try Gagosian, Hauserwirth, David Zwirner, Whitecube, Pace Gallery) you can find a detailed report on how they market their websites, where the traffic comes from and what they spend their advertising budget.

There is a lot to go through, but there is one common pattern that is useful to us:

1) Google is a huge source of traffic

2) The most important search terms are the artist names

This is great – because it means that the top search terms are what SEO experts call “non-competitive,” for example, if you were selling insurance you would be fighting to get to the top of search rankings with range of other insurance companies for people Googling insurance.

Tag Your Artists on Your Website

To get up the search rankings you need to make sure that your artist are properly tagged on your page in three important ways.

1) Media files have <Alt> tags that Google reads to try and understand what the image is about. Makes sure your all of the images are tagged with the name of the artist and a good description of the image

2) Use an <H1> tag for the the artist name on their page – because Google pays attention to this

3) Include the Artist name in the <title> tag for their page

Consider Using Add Words for Special Events

You could be in a great position to get cost effective and highly targeted paid marketing from Google because you are using artist names as the key search terms.

When a business pays Google for a search term they pay-per-click through to the advertising website, regardless of whether the user buys or not. So the worst thing is to pay lots of money for people who come to your website and aren’t interested in your product. 

The price per-click varies depending on the search term. For example the word “insurance” costs almost $60, while “iphone” costs $2.40. The price per click for many artist names is only a few cents.

The other great thing about using artist names is very few people are searching for them compared to the competitive search terms. iPhone has more than a million people searching, but, artist names often have below 100 searches, which gives you a nice, tight targeting, increasing the chances that the you are getting people to your site interested in your art.