How to fix SEO mistakes on museum & theatre websites
Search Engine Optimisation has the potential to greatly increase organic traffic and drive revenue to museums and theatres online. We’ve published SEO guides for theatres and museums, and now we’re taking a look at 10 common SEO mistakes that you’ll want to avoid when managing a website.
Our list stems from what we’ve encountered most often when working with our theatre and museum clients. Some mistakes can be remedied with technical solutions, while others require planning and strategising across different teams.
1. Not doing redirects when launching a new website
When you launch a new website, there’s a good chance that the URLs for many of the pages on your site will change. This can cause a cascade of problems, interrupting inbound links from other websites (which contribute to your reputation and authority), confusing search engines and potentially even breaking your internal links.
This can be mitigated using ‘redirects’. These automatically point browsers and search engines in the right direction, converting the old URL to the new URL. Forgetting to include URL redirects when designing and launching a new website is likely to be detrimental to your organic traffic and performance on Google. There’s no quicker way of throwing away the hard-earned value you have built up.
To prevent this from happening, it’s best to collect all of your old website’s URLs before migrating them over to a newly designed site. During this audit stage, we suggest seeing which pages on your old website receive the most traffic, which pages have the highest conversion rates and which rank the best on Google (i.e. high authority pages).
Screaming Frog helps websites audit URLs during a site migration.
A tool like Screaming Frog SEO Spider crawls your website to pinpoint broken links, errors and redirects. It also lets you export all of your existing URLs to a nifty Excel spreadsheet — especially helpful for larger websites.
Generally speaking, the simplest approach is to keep the structure of your URLs the same when launching a new site. That way previous visitors won’t have trouble finding the new page and you won’t lose page authority on Google. In some cases, though, your old URLs might not be optimised for search engines (such as including a string of numbers or strange ID codes) and fixing them might be part of the reason for the redesign - in which case a website relaunch is the ideal time to fix the URL structure.
Whether you are changing URLs for a new website, or removing pages completely, it’s crucial to have 301 redirect URLs that automatically take your visitor from the old page to the new one. Even if the new page isn’t the exact same as the previous one, you can redirect your visitors to a relevant page. That’s much better than having them hit a dead end 404 ‘page not found’ error.
2. Calling things by names that nobody else uses
When you’re living and breathing your museum or theatre day-in and day-out, the internal production names for events, workshops, resources or programmes will make complete sense to you and your team. That might not carry through to anyone outside of the office - including your customers and visitors.
People search using descriptive keywords. If you don’t match this search behaviour then people who aren’t familiar with the specific name you use won’t be able to find it. And that’s not good. A clever but obscure project name isn’t going to do you any favours online.
This is where understanding your audience, recognising what they’re looking for online and knowing how they get to your website comes into play. Conducting keyword research with tools like Google Search Console, SEMRush and Google Trends will help you see what visitors are actually searching for and how they’re landing on your museum or theatre’s website pages.
In order to optimise your website for search, you should use words and phrases that are relevant, informative and beneficial to your audience (i.e. you answer their questions). We’re not saying to completely toss your unique names and terms out the window, but do make sure they are supported by relevant keywords and structured in the right way on your website (see #6 below).
3. Slow page load times
‘Page load time’ is a measure of how long it takes for the content on a page to display to the user. Even if you have a fast server delivering your website, variables such as images, design features, file types and your chosen CMS can drastically affect individual page load times. Remember also that home internet speeds still vary in different areas and that websites still need to load fast when people are using mobile devices away from wi-fi.
Quicker load times not only improve the visitor experience but also help your ranking in search engine results. Why is that? Because Google would rather send users to a page that promptly gives them the content they are after - clicking a search result and having to wait thirty seconds for the page to load is not a good user experience. Optimising page load times therefore increases your chances of appearing at the top of search results, especially if you have competitors with efficient websites.
The good news is that there are free tools like web.dev and gtmetrix that test your site and tell you how your page load times are performing across the board.
Some factors are beyond your control - such as the browser and device being used by the visitor, and their internet connection. You may not have much choice in your web hosting provider. Setting those aside, there are still many things that you can optimise, including:
Using smaller resolution, efficiently compressed image types (JPEG, PNG or WebP) that don’t waste unnecessary data. Don’t serve up a 4k hi-res image if it’s only being used in a thumbnail on an events page.
Reducing document and file sizes that take up bandwidth and storage on your server. Does the downloable PDF brochure need to be at professional print resolution?
Removing unnecessary redirects (see #1) that are causing your page to load slower. Make sure visitors (and search engines) are taking the most direct path to their intended destination.
4. A lack of evergreen content
‘Evergreen’ content is defined by not having a fixed shelf life. It will be just as useful, relevant and interesting six months or two years later as it is at the time of its release. It’s a brilliant way to grow traffic over time, because quality evergreen content is always relevant to your audience and answers questions that consistently get asked online. Google values this type of content as its goal is to help people find answers to their queries, and quickly (see #3).
Building evergreen material into a theatre or museum’s content strategy can be challenging, given that websites are often focused on shows, exhibitions and programmes with a limited time span. A Christmas theatre production is by definition not ‘evergreen’.
What kind of content should museums and theatres create to remain relevant and useful over a longer period of time, then? What can be done outside of the short-term programme cycle to give your website more longevity and stability in the eyes of search engines?
Museums and galleries can focus on producing new content around a particular subject matter that they are uniquely positioned to cover, such as ‘contemporary art’ or ‘medieval history’. You are the experts in your area and this can be demonstrated online, with permanent, evergreen resources that exist outside of specific exhibitions.
Theatres, on the other hand, would benefit from having content that relates to the genre that they’re known for. Whether your theatre puts on comedy shows or opera performances, becoming a resource that people can learn from and enjoy visiting even from home will grow your organic traffic. It could even become a way for customers to discover a type of theatre they haven’t tried before.
The key to evergreen content is being useful for your audience. Drawing upon your museum or theatre’s expertise, you can create material that informs and intrigues and positions you as an authority in the field. Visitors will appreciate your wealth of knowledge while search engines will reward you with more advantageous rankings.
5. No schema markup
Most of the time, search engines are making assumptions about intent and meaning on web pages. They don’t always get this right. ‘Schema markup’ is code that allows web pages to communicate with search engines more directly. Through tags that you add to the HTML on your website, schema makes it easier for search engines to understand your content and display your page results in the best possible way. The search engine is able to identify useful information without ambiguity: dates of events, pricing, event names and so on.
Examples of content that museums and theatres could use schema for include events, exhibitions, reviews, people, products and creative works like blogs and books. You can find the different content types that have corresponding schema tags on Schema.org. Similar to evergreen content, optimising your pages with schema is about being more helpful to your visitors.
The New Theatre Oxford uses schema markup to display upcoming events at their venue.
When schema is used on your site, search engines are then able to generate rich ‘snippets’ underneath a page title on search results pages. This helps users get information more quickly and raises the visibility of your website — a win-win.
6. URLs and page titles that aren't human-readable
URLs and page titles are an important way for search engines to scan and understand the content on your website when indexing search results. That means, to communicate clearly and effectively with Google and human visitors, your website should use readable SEO-friendly URLs.
When we say SEO-friendly, we are referring to the keyword most relevant to the page. The V&A, for instance, has a Collections page dedicated to Alexander McQueen. As they would like to rank for ‘Alexander McQueen’ on Google, they have used the following URL: https://www.vam.ac.uk/collections/alexander-mcqueen.
Hyphens in between the page’s keywords, like above, also help search engines and readers know what the page is about (hyphens are the standard for differentiating words in a URL, as spaces are not allowed).
While the ultimate goal is to have readable, keyword-driven URLs across your entire website, we suggest sorting pages by category to make the restructuring process more manageable. Theatres, for example, could organise URLs into what’s on, workshops and blogs, while museums might have online collections, e-catalogues and shop pages.
Tip: keep URL structures simple, for your sake and your visitors.
7. Not having a content plan
We’ve said it before but it’s worth mentioning again: search engines are usually the biggest driver of traffic to a museum or theatre’s website, contributing between 40-60% of visitors.
That’s why it’s so important to know how to set your website up for SEO success. Getting the structure of your content right is important -- the redirects, URLs and schema markup -- but you also need to focus on the content itself. Drawing up a content plan is essential to ranking better on search engines and attracting new visitors to your site.
In addition to creating quality evergreen content around subject-matter related terms, a content plan helps you see which content is performing the best and plan to be more purposeful with what you are putting on your website.
Here are some top SEO benefits of having a content plan:
Knowing what content is the most popular so you can produce more of it in the future
Identifying the keywords that your website does and does not rank for
Making sure your content is organised and SEO-friendly (page titles, H1, H2, meta descriptions and tags)
Being more consistent and showing up regularly for your audience
If you’re designing your first content plan or looking to improve an existing one, our team at One Further regularly helps museums and theatres audit their site to help identify new opportunities for optimising for SEO. Get in touch and we’ll have a chat.
8. Not promoting content that has been produced
It might sound like a no-brainer, but even if you have valuable content and resources on your website, no one will know it exists if you don’t tell people about it.
Content marketing helps others find your website in the first place and can contribute to your organic search ranking.
How does marketing your content boost SEO? Depending on the channel you use to promote your content, a few different factors go into more favourable rankings on search:
Engaging content attracts visitors to your site and grows organic traffic at the same time
Shareable social media content gains backlinks from other online publishers
Advertising on social media or Google increases traffic to your site and builds your brand reputation online
Selling your shop’s products on marketplaces like Amazon and Trouva can also raise brand awareness, attract high-quality visitors and increase conversion rates
Sharing content organically or through paid promotion is how people get to know you and end up visiting your site. Search engines also take content promotion including click-through rates, backlinks and target keywords into consideration when indexing your website.
When it’s working, it’s a big feedback loop that is demonstrating interest in what you have to offer, and thereby improving your SEO (which in turn attracts more interest…and so on).
9. Deleting pages that have lots of lovely links
When an exhibition or show ends, some museums and theatres delete the event’s corresponding landing page. It’s all gone and the event might as well have never happened. Unfortunately, that leaves visitors and Google in the dark when they try clicking on a link to that page from another website or a search results page. When that happens, they get taken to a 404 error page — a virtual dead end. Ironically, this will be compounded by the success of the show: a bigger event will likely have had more links to its landing page, which means more broken links if the page is deleted.
This not only delivers a poor experience for users, it also risks being penalised by Google with a resultant drop in your search ranking. You don’t want Google to think that you’re an unreliable content provider.
The National Gallery has a page dedicated to past exhibitions so visitors can still find details and information on them.
It’s much better to either create an archive of outdated content or redirect visitors to a new or relevant page (see #1).
By redirecting users to an archive or a new page altogether, you don’t break any links and your content remains searchable. This keeps search engines happy (good for SEO) while guiding your visitors to a more helpful destination.
10. Not structuring a site correctly in the first place
Museums and theatres should avoid having websites with a flat structure. This is when all pages link from the homepage, providing no logical hierarchy of information. Events, blogs and donation pages are effectively grouped under the same umbrella.
Not having a well-structured theatre or museum website makes it more difficult for visitors and search engines to navigate your site and find the information that they’re looking for. A poor user experience as a result poorly affects your rankings on search.
The solution to a flat structure? Creating landing pages for each section of your website. For instance, having dedicated landing pages for events, blogs, workshops and collections so you can publish all of your events on one page, your blog posts on another, and so on. In the end, your website will be much better organised with a more intuitive flow of information.
Never underestimate the power of effective organising. It adds value to your user experience and indicates to Google that people can find what they need.
Want help improving your SEO?
Optimising your website for search engines can feel like a guessing game at times, especially if you’re not sure where to begin. When we work with museum and theatre clients to improve their SEO, we recommend starting with an audit. These reports are a great way to spot gaps and identify new opportunities in your SEO strategy.
If you’re considering taking a fresh look at your SEO or would like some guidance on how to enhance your website’s performance, get in touch and let’s have a chat.
Photo by Andrei Popescu on Unsplash.