Art UK
improving organic search performance for the UK’s public art collections
Art UK is a cultural education charity on a mission to make the nation’s art available to everyone – for enjoyment, learning and research.
By bringing together the UK’s public art collections on one platform, they improve the accessibility and sustainability of art in the UK. Their platform provides free digital access to over 250,000 artworks from 3,300 collections, shares the stories behind the art, offers free learning resources, and does much more besides.
The challenge
As is the case with the online collections websites of many of our museum clients, organic search is responsible for the largest proportion of traffic to the Art UK website.
The team wanted to understand how they could further improve their performance and increase their visibility.
What technical aspects of the site’s setup and configuration impact how they are discovered and understood by search engines – and importantly, where this can be improved upon.
What opportunities there are to improve SEO performance across the site concerning their artwork records, educational materials and longer-form content.
Our solution
To deliver the greatest value in the shortest amount of time, we proposed splitting the project into two phases.
In the first phase, we carried out a technical search engine optimisation audit. We ran tests with a variety of tools and backed that up with some manual investigation of key page templates
The website was in good shape, but we discovered several opportunities to make improvements. These could be rolled out across the site, benefiting tens of thousands of pages at a time and with the potential to raise search visibility significantly.
With the technical side of things in hand, we agreed that in the second phase our time would be best spent by focusing content strategy and keyword research.
Here, we were able to combine our expertise around SEO and content production with our knowledge of the arts. We were able to uncover categories of high-potential keywords that Art UK could target to boost their visibility.
We were also able to recommend improvements to article structure to increase the likelihood that, when someone searches for a particular artist or artwork, it’s the Art UK website that they’ll discover.
The result
We provided the Art UK team with:
a prioritised list of practical changes that they were able to make to their website, and
clear recommendations around high-potential topics and content structure
These are being rolled out over time and it’s still early days. However, just a few months on, we’re already seeing that search impressions are up 28% from the previous year, and organic search sessions are up by 40% (from a pretty respectable base).
Can we help?
We really enjoy working on this combination of search engine optimisation audits and data-driven content strategy. We've worked on similar projects for the BFI, British Museum, Family Arts Campaign, and others.
If you think that your website should be getting more traffic from search engines (or it’s something you hadn’t really considered) then please get in touch and let’s have a chat.