5 Best Practices for Your Art Gallery Website

Whether you’re busy with collectors, preparing for an art fair, or off-duty, your website is always working. But even a beautiful website can underperform when not backed by tools that help you reach the right customers at the right time. It’s comparable to how you coordinate different elements of your art program to provide a cohesive gallery experience. Similarly, your website is only one piece of your overall sales and marketing strategy. 

If your marketing tools (including your website) aren’t working harmoniously, they’re destined to underperform. That is why websites built using a template builder rarely perform at the level of a custom website. They often lack the capability to tie your marketing tools together, optimize for search engines like Google (SEO), and provide an aesthetic unique to your brand. This article will consider five suggestions to optimize your art gallery website.

Optimize Your Website for Engagement

“Build a great website, and people will come” is not a viable marketing strategy. Below are five tips that will help turn your website into a powerful tool for generating awareness and interest for your website.

1. Designing for mobile users. Many studies show mobile use is outpacing desktop use, accounting for 63% of the traffic in the U.S. Therefore, you must ensure that your website is responsive; in other words, that it can adapt the layout to your visitor’s device. Additionally, your website should be optimized for mobile search, which requires optimizing images, leveraging browser caching, and avoiding technologies that don’t work well on mobile.
   
2. Prioritizing search engine optimization. SEO helps people find your website faster by placing it higher and more frequently in search engine results. Improving your SEO requires a combination of technical improvements and strategic decisions, including optimizing page load speeds and targeting keywords your audience cares about. And don’t forget to include elements that affect local SEO, like local search intent and your Google business profile.
   
3. Keeping content fresh. People need a reason to stay engaged with your website. And if they continue to see the same content, they’ll quickly lose interest. Take advantage of the feedback you get from customer interactions via email marketing, social media, and other sources to engage your visitors.
   
4. Integrating measurement into your marketing. If you’re not tracking activity on your website, you can’t optimize. One way of measuring popular content is by integrating link tracking into your emails. For example, Smart Mail offers link tracking specific to each customer; and you can get even deeper insights by using the Mailchimp sync with your ARTERNAL CRM. The metrics you gather will show you which topics your users care about, allowing you to tailor your website to include more relevant content.
   
5. Shy away from templates. 48% of people say a website’s design is the number one factor in deciding the credibility of a business. A custom website allows you to adapt your aesthetic to differentiate your brand and improve perceived business validity. It also allows you to build on a solid foundation for SEO, improving your website’s ability to rank well on search engines. After all, research shows that over 25% of people will click on the first search listing.

Use data to power your website

Data is the key to engaging your customers. ARTERNAL helps you better understand your audience by enabling you to collect, organize, and interpret customer data. Our CRM and Smart Mail solutions help you analyze who your recipients are, how they interact with your content, and where they spend their time. Learn how you can stop guessing and start building better relationships.