Case study: Art UK

Helping the nation’s art get found in search

We helped Art UK increase the visibility of their artist, artwork and article pages in search engines, in support of their mission to increase access to art.

Client
Art UK
Who they are
Art education charity and online collection

The challenge

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 much more besides.

As with the online collections of many of our museum clients, organic search brings in the largest share of Art UK’s traffic. The team wanted to understand how they could improve their performance further and increase their visibility:

  • Which technical aspects of the site’s setup affect how it’s discovered and understood by search engines, and where these could be improved.
  • What opportunities there are to improve SEO performance across their artwork records, educational materials and longer-form content.

What we did

To deliver the greatest value in the shortest time, we split the project into two phases.

1. A technical SEO audit

We ran tests with a variety of tools and backed them up with manual investigation of key page templates. The website was in good shape, but we found several opportunities for improvement. Each could be rolled out across the site, benefiting tens of thousands of pages at a time, with the potential to raise search visibility significantly.

2. Content strategy and keyword research

With the technical side in hand, we focused on content. Here we could combine our expertise in SEO and content production with our knowledge of the arts, and uncover categories of high-potential keywords for Art UK to target.

We also recommended improvements to article structure, so that when someone searches for a particular artist or artwork, it’s the Art UK website they discover.

The results

+28%
search impressions, year on year
+40%
organic search sessions, from a respectable base

We gave the Art UK team:

  • a prioritised list of practical changes to make to their website, and
  • clear recommendations on high-potential topics and content structure.

These are being rolled out over time, and it’s still early days. But just a few months on, search impressions are up 28% on the previous year, and organic search sessions are up 40% (from a pretty respectable base).

We really enjoy this combination of SEO audits and data-driven content strategy, and we’ve worked on similar projects for the BFI, British Museum, Family Arts Campaign and others.

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