Welcome to the Art Storefronts Success Coaching video series. In this video, we’re going to focus on search engine optimization, but specifically the importance of performing keyword research before implementing search engine optimization information onto your website. And here we’ll be working with nature photographer Dan Greenberg.

So Dan is trying to build his traffic, and the first thing we did was we asked Dan to fill out a worksheet that we provide in order to understand what his sales breakdown is by the niches that he covers.

And so this is a synopsis of what Dan provided us. So here’s his sales breakdown by subject matter. Dan did some of his own research and figured out that his garden photographs are 30% of his sales, followed by waterfalls, forest, coastal, and other. And so as a nature photographer, it can be particularly difficult to hone in on a specific niche because you do cover a lot of different types of subject matter.

But the important thing is to really dive into your data and your information based on what you have sold over the years doing fairs and shows, or in galleries, or any type of information you have to really understand what the true breakdown is by subject matter category. Because this is gonna help you focus on what niches are the highest priority. And this is important for two reasons.

First, just overall from a business standpoint, that if you try to be good at everything, you’ll end up being great at nothing. And so it’s good to understand where you’re great, and where your customers think you’re great, so that you can focus on that. And secondly, the same goes for search engine optimization on your website.

You can’t optimize every single type of subject matter all over your website. You can certainly do that but you will not be great at SEO for any particular category. So if you can really hone in on two, three, four, five categories, then you’ll be in a much better position than trying to optimize 20 or 30 different categories. Now if you just have a ton of content, there’s nothing wrong with optimizing 30 categories or more on your website. You certainly should do that if you have that many categories.

But you do need to focus a little bit on your top selling categories because you might need to give them more prominence on your home page, in terms of, not just placement of your categories, but also, the text content that you have, and the SEO content that you have. So the first thing that we’re gonna focus on here is Dan’s bestseller, garden photographs. So let’s take a look at his website. So what I’m gonna do is go into this Garden category and analyze the SEO. So now that I’m in the category I’m gonna click Edit Site.

And then go to the SEO Options here. And I see for your title, you have Fine Art photographs taken in the Garden, available on metal, canvas and fine art paper. And this is where we have the problem. So if I take Fine Art photographs taken in the Garden, and I try to make some sense out of that in the Google keyword planner, I’m not gonna find any results. What we really need to do is find out what the main keywords are for selling garden photographs or garden art. So what I’m going to do here is change this to garden photographs in the keyword tool.

And, interesting. So Google comes back to us and says, they like garden photo better. As we go down you can see some of these other terms they’re describing here.

And some of these just don’t seem like they’re art-related. They may be, you know, people looking at gardens and wanna look at pictures of gardens rather than buy garden art.

One thing I like to do is immediately go to Google and just do a search, and just see if it yields the results that we’re looking for. So I’ll type in garden photographs. And I just see images of garden, I don’t see, you know, the usual suspects like Art.com, with ads. I do see a Fine Art America way down here, but I don’t see any art for sale. And that’s a little strange to me. That’s an indication that this is probably not what most consumers are typing in when they are looking for garden art or photographs, in the sense that we’re trying to think of it. So I’m gonna go back to the keyword tool and just try garden art, and see what happens. So here we have, 9,900 searches, and competition is high. Now let’s go back to Google here, and try a search. Okay so we’ve gotten somewhere. So now we’re seeing products for sale.

We see Etsy here. We see AllPosters.com, and Minted Quality Garden Art Prints, so people are starting to sell art here.

If I go up to this Google thing and I click on this shop for products here, you can see that these aren’t exactly art prints, they’re like statues and different things like that. So that’s still not quite what I’m looking for. So I’m gonna add prints onto the end of this and see what happens. Okay, now we see pieces of art. We see canvases, we see framed prints, we see Art.com, Fine Art America, AllPosters, Etsy.

All of the top results are art-related and so now we’ve honed in. So let’s go back to the keyword planner and type in garden art prints, and let’s see what we see. Alright, so the searches are low. But we just found out here, as we scroll down, that garden wall art has 5,400 average monthly searches. Garden prints has 140. You can scroll down and see some other things you might want to do. But it looks like, in this case, that garden wall art is probably the best term. Now there’s a very important point to make here.

Usually, in a lot of different categories, we advocate the term photographs to be used if you’re a photographer, and we advocate the word art to be used, or fine art, if you are an artist. And this is a great example of how you need to use the keyword tool to test that theory, because your specific niche or your specific subject matter may have some nuance to it in the way that consumers are searching for it.

And so, with a word like garden, you can see that consumers searching for art have been forced to type in terms like wall art or prints in order to get what they’re looking for because there’s too many other people searching for garden images to just see images of gardens because they’re probably trying to make their garden look nicer.

So now knowing that garden wall art is the term we’re looking for that’s going to get us in these results, and where people are in the mindset of buying art, we can go back to our website, and our SEO information for this page, and implement that in the SEO title, the description, and the meta keywords. And this should be done according to the advice that we lay out in our SEO lesson on Critical On-Site SEO Setup. And you can just search this out on our blog. In addition to that, I see you have lead content here, according to our advice, which is great.

You’re gonna wanna change this information as well to use the garden wall art keywords. And at the same time I also recommend adding garden art prints, or any other words that might be applicable as you scroll down here, because that’s going to tell Google that this page is on target and it’s relevant. And you can do the same thing for your ending content, down here at the bottom as well.

Okay so now that we’ve covered your category page for garden, let’s go ahead and look at one of your products. Let’s start with this first one, Orange Tulips. So now I’m gonna click Edit Site. And SEO Options tab. And for your title here, you can see that you have just Orange Tulips. But you don’t have any reference to art or photography again, so let’s again go back to the Keyword Planner. And let’s type in tulips. Now this is obviously a very general term, and it’s got 301,000 keyword ideas.

If we type in tulips, we’re probably not gonna get. So now there’s people trying to sell us flowers. It’s nothing to do with art. So again, we have to use the same logic.

So what we’ll easily do here is just go tulip art. And let’s see what happens. So here we go, tulip art, 590 search results. If we come back here to Google, we type in tulip art just as a sanity check, you can see we’re looking at wall art, once again. And we see the usual suspects. So this is where the demand for tulip art is. So then, once again, coming back here in your site manager and your SEO Options, you’re gonna wanna change your SEO title to include tulip art, according to the same SEO lesson we pointed out before. Your meta description and your keywords as well.

You also need to change your on site information to reflect this as well. So anywhere on this page where you can put the keyword phrase tulip art, or anything related to tulip art, is going to help you out quite a bit. So in your description here, you can add a long description and do it there. If you’re willing to put orange tulip art in this heading, that would be a very strong indicator to Google.

I understand you may not wanna do that, but if you’re willing to do that, that would be a big help as well. So as you can see overall, while garden photographs are your bestselling category, you, at the current moment, do not have an optimized search engine optimization setup for garden photographs, or garden art. And so the important thing here is that you have to learn to think like Google.

Google is a digital encyclopedia, and every search engine is the same way. If you wanna rank well for garden art, then your site needs to contain pages of content and as much verbiage as possible about garden art.

And so tulips are obviously a part of gardens, and so if you have tulip art underneath garden art, then you’re telling Google and other search engines that this website contains a lot of information about garden art and tulip art, and therefore they will reward you by ranking you higher. So your goal is to think like Google, and then just give them what they want.

If they have a search result for garden art, they are going to logically provide a search engine visitor with the most relevant result they can. This is how Google stays in business. And so if you have the most information about garden art, then they’re going to rank you higher than somebody else that doesn’t. So this covers how you should approach your garden art segment, and what you wanna do is take the same logic, and apply it to waterfalls, forests, coastal, and any of your other categories that you might have.

And the benefit of all of this is that when you have a proper SEO setup, that’s based on keywords and keyword research, you’re going to best position yourself to receive traffic from SEO, where people are searching for the products that you’re selling. And as we have shown in other Success Coaching videos on SEO, search engine optimization not only works, but it converts at a very high clip for Art Storefronts customers.

So there’s a lot of reason and incentive to get this done, and to get it done properly. So that about wraps it up for this video. Thanks again, and we’ll see you next time.