During the last week of November 2020, Artbrain launched The Auction House Academy, a premium series of online workshops designed to upgrade any auction house’s digital marketing toolbox. The debut workshop featured three special sessions that focused on advanced online marketing for auction houses. Dozens of art world professionals, from top auction houses and galleries around the globe, tuned in online to learn practical tools from marketing technology experts.
Stacey Bevan, CEO & Founder of SNB digital and a Google Workshop Facilitator, provided actionable insights into SEO for auction houses with the ultimate goal of promoting auctions on google, getting more visitors to the auction house websites, and increasing bids. We’ve collected the top tips, tools, and best practices for organic and paid optimization that will boost your auction house’s online presence.
Introducing SEO for the Art World
When collectors use a search engine, such as Google, the results are ranked and displayed according to their relevance. In order to have your auction house rank amongst the top results, two approaches are available: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the free way, hence commonly referred to as Organic; and Pay Per Click (PPC) — the Paid way.
About 70% of users will click on an organic search result. Traffic that arrives at your website via organic means is ‘free’ and although the ROI is tricky to measure, over time, usually months, traffic grows and the ROI improves. Conversely, paid advertisements, on a keyword ‘Cost Per Click (CPC)’ basis, can have your auction house high on the results page within 24 hours. In this case, the ROI is very straightforward to measure.
A search on Google is in fact searching Google’s index of the web. This index is created by algorithms called ‘spiders’ that ‘crawl’ from one webpage to another using links. Google’s software searches the index for pages related to the search terms entered, such as “art auction”. To decide what a user really wants, google asks more than 200 questions, including How many times does the term appears? Does the page include synonyms, for example: “artwork sale”? Is this a high quality webpage? How many outside pages point to this page and how important are they — known as PageRank?
SEO Optimization is essentially trying to make sure your website performs favorably in relation to all these questions.
An auction house’s digital marketing strategy should aim to capture as much of the search results space as possible by conducting both organic and paid marketing.
The Key to On-Page Optimization
There are three core areas of optimization: On-Page, Off-Page, and Technical. On-Page Optimization is what you do on your actual website. Primarily, this refers to creating content (like lot description and catalog pages) with high search volume keywords but also includes having complete meta page descriptions, header tags, friendly URLs, and more.
Keywords are probably one of the most important subjects to consider when promoting your auction house organically. There are two types of keywords: Short-tail keywords which are 1–2 less specific words such as ‘online auction’. These terms have a higher search volume and are more competitive; meaning it will be harder to rank high organically with them and they will cost more on paid campaigns (PPC). Long-tail keywords are more specific sentences or questions with 3 or more words, for example ‘When is the next online auction for fine art in London?’. These will be cheaper to implement but also pull less of a search volume.
Since Keywords are so important, it is vital to invest time in conducting proper Keyword Research. This can begin by holding a brainstorming session with your colleagues at the auction house and making a list of what you think your collectors and potential clients might search for. Also, try typing into Google a term and see what the search engine suggests.
The Google Keywords Planner is a free tool that can recommend keywords related to your own auction house’s website and any initial keywords you input. After choosing the language, location, and time period, the tool will provide a vital piece of information — the exact volume of searches per time period for each keyword.
Check out this great step-by-step video on ‘How to use the Keyword Planner’
After choosing the keywords with the highest search volume you’re all set to use them in your Organic content as well as bidding on them in your auction house’s Paid campaigns. To do this effectively, create a SEO content plan.
As auctioneers, your goal may be to send potential bidders directly to the catalog or lot pages; However, special care must be taken to make sure those pages are ranked high. Since Google usually requires a minimum of 700 words for a page to be recognized and indexed well, another effective method is to create fresh up-to-date blogs, or updating your homepage frequently.
Pro Tip: The body of text is not the only content on the page. Headings, sub-headings, image descriptions and the actual images themselves should all be related to your top keywords.
Off-Page Optimization is largely driven by backlinks from other websites to your landing page. First, use internal links to connect between pages on your website, making sure to provide real, relevant content and smooth subject matter transitions. Consider writing a guide on “How to buy 17th-century art online” that links to your relevant catalog and auction page. Link out to your social media assets and have posts that backlink to your website. Finally, engage entities like online magazines and influencers to create relevant high-quality content and link to your website.
Quality trumps Quantity: It is better to have a few high-quality backlinks than many low-quality ones, as Google will de-rank you if you have low-quality links.
Pro Tip: Google My Business is a wonderful way to take up a big chunk of prime real estate on the search results page.
Pro Tip: Ask your technical administrator to tweak the backend of your website to make sure the search engine spiders can crawl and index your site effectively for optimal organic ranking.
Getting started with Pay Per Click (PPC) on Google
On top of constantly optimizing your organic search engine ranking, Google Ads allows you to capture the rest of the results page through a performance-based advertising model. Simply put — you pay Google only when someone clicks your ad.
When someone searches a term such as ‘Rare Coins’, an auction takes place behind the scenes. Google will prefer the highest bid, or Cost Per Click (CPC), that you or your competitors are willing to pay to have an ad appear. However, Google will also take into account your Quality Score which is derived from your ad and landing page’s relevance and ranking. This is why auction houses and art galleries create specific landing pages for specific advertising campaigns; A relatively smaller spending budget can rank higher than a larger budget if it targets highly relevant landing pages with very well curated advertisements.
Creating a Google Ad campaign is not just bidding on keywords. The first step to setting up a campaign is defining the type of campaign. To have your ad appear on the search engine results page — choose ‘Search Network’.
Next, you can target your clients based on Device, Location, and Language. Deciding how to divide your budget between these variables is industry dependent and should fit your clients. For example, in the art world, most users use a desktop computer when researching auctions. Furthermore, depending on your clientele, it might be a fair assumption that limiting the Location to your country will target at least 70% of your effective bidders.
As any auctioneer knows, bidding is the most important part of any auction. Google allows you to pre-bid Manually by defining the maximum CPC you are willing to spend on each keyword or search term. This is where your Keyword Research comes in. Google will also offer an Automated bidding mechanism whereby it will spend whatever amount needed to rank higher than your competitors. Beware! This can be dangerous if your competitors have large budgets, so be sure to add a daily cap if you’re new to Automated keyword bidding.
Creating your first Ad Group
Once you’ve decided how, when, where, and at what cost to target your clients, it’s time to create the actual advertisements themselves. Ad Groups can correspond to the different categories, auctions, or lots that you have on offer — and there’s no limit.
In an Ad Group for ‘Irish Art’ use only relevant keywords, images, and creative-copy. This will allow you to optimize not only for keywords but Ad Groups as a whole. Google allows you to create 2–3 different ads for each group and will rotate these different ads and tell you which drives the most traffic to your site. This is a form of A-B Split testing.
Pro Tip: Although illegal in some countries, many companies bid on keywords from their competitor’s product line or even brand name. Don’t forget to bid high on your own brand.
Making Measurement your Artform
With so much effort going into promoting your auction house on Google — making sure you are constantly measuring and improving is critical, both for Organic and Paid efforts.
For organic traffic measurement, consider these key indicators first:
- Keyword Performance — How high does your website appear on the results page when you search for your chosen keywords?
Your target is Page 1 — Position 1. - Brand Awareness — What is the search volume of your brand name or a unique lot? Finding this out is straightforward — pop your brand name into Google’s Keyword Planner and voila! You can also try Google Trends or a plethora of commercial companies that offer this as a service.
- Benchmarking — How do you compare against your competitors? Put any one of your keywords into Google and note: How far you are from the top? Who is above you? Research their websites to understand what they are doing right.
Pro Tip: This is worth testing for different regions (change the regional setting in Google) and on other search engines too.
4. Traffic Volume — How much organic traffic is being sent to your website?
Pro Tip: Link your website and Google Ads account to Google Analytics, another free tool from Google, to measure in detail the full performance of your website and marketing activities.
5. Traffic Source — Where does this traffic come from? Backlinks, Blogs, Social Media?
6. Conversion and Lead performance — How many new bidders or logins register as a result of an organic result?
The Google Ads Dashboard is a wonderful tool that will show you exactly how many views and clicks each Ad group gets and for which keywords, what is your conversion rate, how much you’re spending, and if you’re making a return on your investment.
These various platforms may seem daunting at first, but every minute spent learning and tweaking the measurement tools will allow you to discover the channels that drive the most traffic, and take action to improve your ROI.
The Auction House Academy by Artbrain — takes Arts and Collectibles Marketing into 2021
Measurement of online marketing campaigns is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the amount of data available to arts and collectibles businesses. The next Auction House Academy workshop, scheduled by Artbrain for March 2021. We hope to see you there. For more details and to reserve your spot — email us at artbrainacademy@artbrain.co
