In this Squarespace website review, I’m going to be offering up some SEO advice for artists by looking at the website of artist Glenyse Thompson.
Glenyse has built her own website using Squarespace, which is an easy-to-use website builder that I often recommend to artists and creatives who want to create a website on their own without a lot of hassle. Her website looks great overall, but there are some ways that this artist’s website could be improved to get more search engine traffic and to sell more art online.
Watch the video above or read on for the transcript:
The Transcript:
Hi, it’s Mallory, AKA Miss Malaprop, back today for another #BadassCreatives website review. Today we’re going to be looking at the website of Glenyse, who is an artist. She’s awesome, I’ve followed her on Instagram for a little while. She offered up her website for some feedback, so let’s take a look.
Here we’re looking at the website of Glenyse. This is her shop page on her website. As you can see she’s a very talented artist.
I’m going to scroll down a little bit. If I hover over any of these, it gives me the title of the piece, and the starting price points since most of these are prints or original art that come in multiple sizes. Just to click in as an example, let’s just look at this tote bag. This is a really beautiful tote bag. This gives me a little bit of information about what it’s made from, but there’s not a ton of information on this page.
If you watch my website review of Kate and Moose, it’s kind of a similar issue. There’s just not a lot of actual text on this page for a search engine to understand, to look at and analyze more information about what this bag is.
We see that it’s a tote, but to search engine, just calling it a tote doesn’t actually tell them that it’s a tote bag, or that it could be great for carrying groceries, or all these other things that we as humans sort of naturally associate, but that if you’re typing something into a search engine, a search engine needs things explained a little bit more clearly.
There’s not a whole lot of text on this page to help explain what this product is to a search engine. It is a beautiful product. I would say similarly to my review of Kate and Moose, it would be great to have some more photos of this tote bag in action. Maybe somebody holding this bag so I can see how big it is. Maybe a picture of the insides, so I can see how much stuff I can carry in this bag.
I’m also noticing that there’s not, as far as I can tell, any sort of shipping page or FAQ information about general things that I might want to know as a customer if I’m going to give you my money online and order something from you. Now, usually on a website we have some sort of shipping page. What happens if something is wrong, like this arrives and it’s damaged or something? What’s your refund policy? Your potential customers want to know all that good stuff. I would consider adding some of that basic information. Pretty much any website, if you’re selling something online, needs to have some version of that.
Now, your website in terms of how much art, and how many products you’re selling is pretty straight forward. You don’t need a super in-depth FAQ or shipping information. You’re not Amazon.com, right? You don’t need some crazy long list of details, but I think having some sort of information would be helpful. If I am just looking at this page, I’m not even sure if you’re going to charge me for shipping. I have to actually go through the steps of clicking on purchase, and then figuring that out.
One other thing that I noticed is in your URL: “http://www.glenyse.com/shop/colorfulconversationstote” that “colorful conversations tote” all runs together.
I see that you’re on Squarespace, and there is a way to set your URL structure when you’re setting up a new page. Ideally what you would do for search engines, and also just for people, is to have a hyphen between each word, for example: “colorful-conversations-tote.”
To a search engine especially, with the way you have it now, all of this just runs into one big word, and it’s hard for a search engine to understand what this page is about because of that. A URL is a really important piece of search engine optimization.
Now, the other thing that I know is that your website is fairly new, so one thing that I would recommend is trying to build links to this website.
Let me grab just your main URL, Glenyse.com. I’m going to copy this, and I’m going to hop over to a website. This is created by Moz, which is an industry leader for search engine optimization. They have this tool called Open Site Explorer. If you really get into it you can pay for the paid version of this, but you can get a little bit of information just from this free tool. I’m going to pop your URL in here, and we can kind of get a little bit of feedback about how many links you have pointing to your website.
Moz has it broken down into something called, “Domain Authority.” That’s the domain of your whole website. Then there is also “Page Authority,” which is the authority for any given page on your website. These scores are based on a scale of 1 to 100.
They’re giving you a domain authority for your entire website URL of 11 out of 100, which isn’t super great. Then a page authority of 1 out of 100. Notice how it says, “Just discovered links, zero in the last 60 days, and established links.” It sees no links pointing to you. Now, there might be links that Moz just hasn’t discovered. This is a fairly particular tool, and it doesn’t always pick up all the links that may be out there. If you have Google’s Search Console set up, that will usually show more links, and Moz’s Open Site Explorer might not pick up all of the same links pointing back to your website.
It’s important to note though that links are really important. I want you to try to get other websites who might be inclined to link back to you, to point links to you.
Let’s look at some potential link building opportunities, and from what I can see it seems like you are already on the path to doing this, and you’re doing a great job so far.
I clicked through from your About page, and your artwork is posted in a photo article, Energized Abstracts on Artsy Shark. This was just posted very recently, January 12th, 2017. This is a blog post, and they invited some of their artist friends to share a favorite work of abstract art, and you are right up top. It shows off a piece of your art, and they did link to you, which I love. You’ve got a little information, then they shared some other artists too.
That’s probably why this post hasn’t shown up on Moz yet, because it’s a really new fresh link so Moz probably just hasn’t crawled it yet. Definitely keep on this path, and keep trying to reach out and get more features of your work, and get those links pointing back to your website.
Now, one final super nit picky thing, but it’s also a really easy fix. With Squarespace I know that this little box, this cube, is the generic default favicon that comes with Squarespace websites. It’s a really, like I said, kind of nit picky thing. You can see how on Squarespace’s help website and on Moz Open Site Explorer, they have their own little icons that help stick out in the browser, and just make it feel a little more personalized and professional. It’s a really easy tweak.
This article on SquareSpace’s support website actually tells you how to add it, and it’s a really easy thing to do. You just go into the backend of your Squarespace website to your logo and title section, and you just upload a little image. That is a really easy fix that will make your website pop a little bit more.
I hope this artist website review was helpful, and I hope you subscribe to my YouTube channel and check out some of my other videos featuring website reviews and SEO advice for artists:
Ready to learn more about how to get more traffic to your website and make more online sales?
Do you sell your handmade work online? Want to sell more? Search engine optimization, aka SEO, is the process of tweaking your online shop to help your potential customers find you more easily in search engines.
My class, DIY SEO for E-Commerce, offers an introduction to e-commerce search engine optimization specifically designed for artists, makers and online shops:
