Forgive me if this question has been covered on this forum before.
I've just been asked if SEO for artists is pointless because it's good for selling some products but it's not good for selling original art. We probably all rank well for our own names on search engines, but has anyone tried to get higher up the rankings for any other terms, and if so were there quantifiable results? Personally I think SEO is just part of an online strategy and we don't necessarily get results from just one element. I haven't had a strong web presence for long enough to see results, so I'd be really interested to hear others' experiences.
I haven't seen anyone mention this in the 15 months I've been here. But I was prompted to look into something similar just the last few weeks when I got an offer from Google for $100 free use of their ad words. I really didn't expect much but decided to experiment and see what happens when I type in something like 'bird art', 'wildlife art', etc. You can do it yourself and then see what ads pop up. After I saw the results I just couldn't see any reason to buy those ad words. So I looked for terms that might be better, like 'original bird art', etc. The results weren't much better. To put it simply I couldn't see that I would gain anything from using Google ad words for the generalized terms I think potential customers would be likely to use.
However I've known about minimal, i.e. no work and no headaches, SEO for a number of years. I particularly use it in the metadata section of my primary web site. And it does tend to work. But it works for things like 'pastel bird drawing' that are more specific. The problem with that is that I don't think too many people are out there searching for something so specific.
Another interesting thing I just read is that Google now ranks its results by many criteria, not just the value of links back to your page. One of the new criterion is 'recency.' This is supposedly due to the Twitter age, where everybody wants everything that is new, new, new. So if a great artist doesn't update his site but a mediocre one does the mediocre one may get more results. This was from a very good book called 'The Shallows' about how the internet affects our brains. So it wasn't from Google and I can't say for certain that it's true. But I had noticed that my sites were getting less and less hits. I updated some for other reasons recently and my ranking seems to have gone up. So recency may have some affect.
But the whole time I've been looking at this in the back of my mind my thought has been this: successful artists today still become successful the traditional way through galleries, shows, etc. For all the visitors I get very few result in sales. Hopefully someone gets something out of their visits, outside of free images. My few sales have come from people in various parts of the US, and a non-sale to a Brit who didn't respond after I told her the price, who I'd never have even heard from without the internet. I'm sure that my own simple use of SEO helped those sales. But my own feeling is that it's not worth spending money on. You just wouldn't get good results. But I'm just one person, and one who doesn't sell much to begin with. It would be interesting to know what others have found.
Later edit: Out of curiosity I later searched for 'original bird art.' Alan's site came up on second page of results. So maybe he has some ideas on the subject.