Say “SEO” and my stomach churns a bit and I feel a low grade anxiety, but I can’t place its source. It’s just a phrase that describes the rules that govern how other people search stuff online. According to web wizards like Neil Patel, how your product/ offering/ service is searched by the majority of us humans is the guide by which you should choose your keywords— and not how you would maybe categorize it or describe it yourself.
Search terms can be very specific (like a name of a person or object) and very broad categorically, and there will be a score and a monetary value attached to that keyword. Some keywords are very competitive (“fine art”) and others will be less so (“fine art for sale near me”). So it makes you have to put yourself in the mind of the online “hive” to figure these things out. Well, that’s the source of my anxiety: that I have to think about how the majority of others think. This is unfamilar to me since I’ve always had a bit of a blind spot for so called “normal” thinking. In fact, my whole life I’ve been told I do things, ahem, “differently” and so I have a tough time discerning what’s typical in thought patterns (and sometimes social behavior).
The good thing is that with the Google console search interface in my webhoster, I can learn directly what these search keywords are. Apparently, my name and website turn up in a lot of searches related to The Old Farmer’s Almanac garden calendar because I’ve been doing it for so long. Did you know there’s a thing called “backlinks”? Me neither. When another highly rated website links your website to it, the backlinks serve to raise your own search rating. A rating is just how directly your website is found. So when Yankee Publishing posts my website url on their site, it raises my own website’s rating. Well, now that I know this keyword and search (“long tail string”) I’m using it to tag my stuff like crazy.
So recently I fell down the rabbit hole to understand how to acquire web cred. Whew, at times it turns my mind to jelly but I’m committed to growing my business and learning what I can, only occasionally having to crawl under my covers with a mug of tea to veg out. I’ve undertaken a crash course in the inner workings of my Squarespace webhoster too so I can tweak my website’s visual appeal and ease of navigation. /eeek\ Fortunately their help articles are thorough and direct so it hasn’t been too too bad.
If you want to find out how your domain scores, you can have Ubersuggest (Neil Patel’s site) crawl it for one free check. The report will tell you which page links are broken, what keywords are returning the most searches, and other kinds of useful information such as what your fellow artists’ successful keywords are.
Ok, gentle Art gnomes, more updates on my journey to come. In the meantime, get some antacids or activated charcoal because you’ll need it. And thanks for reading! If you found this information useful for your own business upglow, let me know in the comments. Feel free to share and sign up for my newsletter for shop updates. (Yes, the monsterpots are coming home to this webshop in 2023.)