Google Website Tips for Pet Portrait Artists

Welcome to my first pet portraits business news post for 2024 and I thought I’d start the year off with some Google website tips for pet portrait artists. Do you run your own pet portraits website? Perhaps the following will be interesting and hopefully useful for you too.

Having run a pet portraits business for over 25 years I have seen so many changes online over the years. New technology came and went – anyone remember Flash?! It was meant to be the new big thing! New inventions you can’t ignore like social media. New rules for web designers – who once had a dedicated links page? Things come and go. Things we once did to help get our websites to the top of Google are very different in 2024.

What is SEO?

So if you are a newcomer or you have a website that’s not going anywhere, you do need to know about SEO. What is SEO you ask? Well, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which is the process of improving your website’s visibility and relevance for search engines like Google or Bing. SEO can help you rank higher for keywords that your potential customers are searching for.

So probably the biggest keyword all pet portrait artists seems to want to rank highly for is “Pet Portraits“. You may well be there already. Lucky you! There are caveats. You might be jumping up and down for joy to be listed on your computer or device for that keyword, but have you thought it might only be for you on your computer? It might be different 100 miles away, or 1000miles away. So let’s look at this in more detail.

Google Results for Pet Portraits…

When you search for “pet portraits” on your computer, Google (or other search engines) tailors the results based on various factors. It’s main aim is to provide YOU with the most relevant and personalised information.

So to start with it is looking at your computers IP Address. This helps the search engine determine your approximate location. Google uses this information to provide results that are geographically relevant to you. So imagine if you were looking for a pet portrait artist locally to you, where you wanted them to visit your home and take photos of your dog. If you lived in the UK it would be no help being shown pet portrait artists who live in California! So Google will show you a page of results relevant to you.

Have you registered your business with Google My Business? This provides information like your location and your service. So on the same example above, if you searched for a local artist to you in the UK, you would hopefully not be shown one in California.

Showing websites you have already visited…

Another point to remember is that if you are logged into Google or Google My Business and have a habit of searching for pet portraits, it might personalise your search and show websites that you have visited before. So if you are always clicking on your competitors website to see what they are up to, their website may well show higher in the search results for you.

Search engines also consider the type of device you are using. For example, mobile searches might emphasise local results due to the on-the-go nature of mobile users, while desktop searches may provide a broader range of results. If you also have set your preferences to English, the search engine will prioritize results in that language.

Don’t forget search engines are constantly updating their algorithms. These changes may affect the way search results are displayed from week to week. Scroll down to read more Google website tips for pet portrait artists…

Competition for the First Page for your chosen keywords

If there are a lot of pet portrait artists living around you and your area, you will all be competing for space on that first page of google. So if you live in London it will be much more tricky to get to the top of the searches for “Pet Portraits in London”, than it might be for Nicholas and myself to get “Pet Portraits in Wales” as its less populated. So to start with, choose keywords that are more easily attainable.

Don’t worry that you might not be there for Pet Portraits, there are a whole host of other keywords that you might like to try to be found for such as “pet art”, or “pet artist”, “”dog portraits”, “cat portraits”, “oil portraits”, “pencil pet portraits”, “animal portraits” etc.

But lets hold that thought for a moment. Those keywords are ones you have chosen. What are your clients searching for? Have you ever asked them? They could be searching for something that you have never even thought about!

You can use tools like Google Keyword Planner, Moz Keyword Explorer, or Ubersuggest to find relevant keywords for your niche. I have written more about these below and linked to them. You can also look at what keywords your competitors are ranking for and try to target similar or related ones.

Pet Portraits Quality Content

There are many factors that affect your ranking, but quality content is one of the most important factors for SEO. You need to create plenty of content about pet portraits on your website or blog that is original, informative, engaging, and relevant to your keywords and audience.

Apart from the helpful pet portraits information that you have on your website about your service as an artist, you can create different types of content too. Of course you can have a pet portraits blog like mine, and you could say this blog post google website tips for pet portrait artists will help my ranking in google, or it might, but you can also make videos, podcasts, or write an eBook. I will be adding a follow up blog post this year on the kind of content you can be writing about, so don’t forget to subscribe below! The more content you create, the more chances you have to rank for different keywords and attract more traffic. Time consuming – yes, but it could be well worth it.

Optimise Your Pet Portraits Content for SEO

Once you have created your pet portraits content, you need to make sure that it is optimized for SEO. This means that you need to include your keywords in strategic places, such as the title, headings, URL, meta description, your image names, image alt text, and body text of your content. It will depend on what platform you are using for your website and blog and what it allows you to do.

Research the SEO options of your platform to see what is available to you. Remember Google doesn’t see images, so if you post a recent pet portrait of a Labrador that you are really proud of and call it image1.jpg Google wont rank that image in a Google image search for “Labrador Pet Portraits” as it hasn’t a clue what the image is. Of course this may change soon with AI but we are talking about the limitations of SEO in today.

You also need to use synonyms and variations of your keywords to avoid keyword stuffing and make your content more natural and diverse. You can use tools like Yoast SEO or Rank Math to help you optimise your content depending on what platform you are using.

Pet Portraits Link Building

Lots of website might give you advice on link building. It’s the thing we all did back in the day. We had a page on our pet portraits websites for swapping links. We would start out by writing an email to a website owner to explain that we were pet portrait artists, we loved their website and would they like to swap links. Which most of the time they did.

The issue came however when people stated abusing this system asking for three way linking. You link to one website and they will link to yours from another. Google didn’t like this. Our site would get put on a scummy directory just full of links. No one goes to directories. When was the last time you searched for something on a directory? Google, in my opinion, doesn’t really like directories either as mostly they don’t have any content.

So link building these days has morphed. One that you have to watch out for is paid links. Have you ever received an email from a content writer asking to write for your website or blog for payment? I have received about 5 already this year. Don’t be fooled or lured by the dollar or pound signs. It might seem amazing that they would pay you… but ask yourself – Why they are paying you for doing nothing!?! They want access to your squeaky clean website!

Google’s Guidelines on Paid Links

Ultimately they are placing an advert in a link form or multiple links, on your website in a page of text to advertise their services or pet products. Also remember that not all of the websites they are advertising are good quality. They are just paid content writers, its not their websites they are advertising. They also may ultimately damage your websites ranking in Google too. PLUS!! Don’t forget its also against Googles guidelines!

It’s against Google’s guidelines to buy or sell links in order to boost rankings. This activity is viewed as a link scheme. If detected, it can result in search engine penalties that ruin your SEO.
1 Jun 2023

Personally I always delete the emails when they come in, but of course you can make your own mind up. I hope that you are still enjoying my blog post google website tips for pet portrait artists, keep reading to find out more!

So How Do You Build Legitimate Links?

You can build links to your website by creating valuable content that other websites want to link to. For instance, if you like this pet portraits blog post and you think it is informative, you can link and mention it in a blog post you might be writing. It might give your site extra credit from Google as you will have linked to an informative blog post, which in turn will help your readers learn more about this subject.

You can also gain links by perhaps collaborating with other pet-related businesses, by being a guest on other blogs or podcasts, online magazines, art websites, or by your clients giving you reviews on various platforms. There are many other ways of doing this and perhaps this could be a future blog post. It probably needs some research. Ideally, you want legitimate links exchanges, with good lovely people and employ good working relationships with other pet portrait artists or pet related businesses.

Can social media help your SEO ranking in google?

This is a question that many pet portrait artists may ask themselves and hopefully my Google tips for pet portrait artists can help you decide! Ultimately yes social media can definitely help you with your ranking. We can’t deny that being active on social media can increase your brand awareness and reputation. It can definitely drive more traffic to your website. This can increase your chances of converting them into customers, as well as being a signal to Google that your website is popular and relevant.

It also enables you to share a more diverse array of content such as images, videos, stories, polls, live streams, etc. These, along with using the relevant hashtags can all help your exposure and allow you to grow your following and also allow Google to find you.

However, there is always a caveat. Social media is always changing their algorithms within the software and you can quite easily get lost in a sea of thousands of artists all posting similar content at the same time. So where as I would say yes it helps, try not to rely on it as ‘the thing’ that’s going to make your website show on the first page. It’s simply not going to.

Google Console

Have you implemented Google Console for your pet portraits yet? It is a web service by Google that lets you see the indexing and performance of your websites and webpages on Google search. It is a powerful tool to confirm that Google can access your website and that you don’t have any problems. Plus it’s completely free and once you have yourself set up, you can access various tools and reports that help you measure your site’s traffic, fix issues, and optimize your content for Google Search.

You can see which queries bring possible pet portraits clients to your site, how many clicks and impressions you get and also submit sitemaps and individual URLs for crawling and review your index coverage. Google Console can help you improve your website’s ranking by providing you with valuable insights into how Google and users see your site.

Websites to Help You..

If you want to improve your pet portraits website’s performance and ranking, its a good idea to monitor its metrics. These are indicators of how well your website is doing in terms of traffic, engagement, conversion, and more. There are many free websites that can help you check the metrics…..

• Google Search Console – A tool provided by Google that helps you monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot your site’s presence in Google Search results.
• PageSpeed Insights – Analyses the content of a web page and provides suggestions to make it faster. Speed is a crucial factor for SEO.
• GTmetrix – Offers insights on your website’s speed performance, including recommendations for optimization.
• SEO Site Checkup – Provides a comprehensive SEO audit of your website, including issues, warnings, and recommendations.
• Ubersuggest – Offers insights into keyword research, backlink data, and competitor analysis.
• Woorank – Provides a website review and SEO analysis.
• Bing Webmaster Tools – Similar to Google Search Console but for Bing.
• Moz Link Explorer – Offers insights into your website’s backlink profile, including the number of backlinks, domain authority, and more.
• Screaming Frog SEO Spider – Crawls websites and provides valuable data on on-page SEO elements, broken links, and more.
• MozBar – A browser extension that can show you the domain authority, page authority, and backlink profile of any website you visit. You can also use it to analyse the on-page SEO elements.
• SEMrush – This is a powerful SEO tool that can help you research keywords, competitors, backlinks, and more.
• Ahrefs Webmaster Tools – This is another SEO tool where you can use it to crawl your website for technical issues.

Checking stats can be very time consuming and you can end up pouring over tiny details of how your website is performing and possibly overly worry about it. Just take the most simplest information and make sure your website is on track.

Using a Statistics Website Integrated on your Pet Portraits Website

My final advice for you is to try to implement tracking software on your pet portraits website. This may depend on the platform you are using as to how easy this will be for you. There are number of different tracers that come in plugin form or if you have access to your FTP you can add the tracking code into the html code of your website. Ultimately they track and report website traffic, quite often in real time.

So the biggest out there has to be Google Analytics. It understand how users find and navigate your website. It can tell you about your visitors’ age, gender, location, and interests, users interactions, including page views, time spent on site, and conversion metrics. I used Analytics for a number of years however I found it increasingly more and more complicated to use. So much so I found I wasn’t actually using it as I didn’t have the time to sit and learn it. So I moved back to my old tracker that I used originally. Analytics may be perfect for you though, so do check it out.

My favourite out of them all is StatCounter. Its pretty similar to Analytics but much more simple and easy to understand. You can use their free version which gives you the same details as the paid for versions (other than real time recordings), it just doesn’t keep your stats for a long time. For me I don’t really mind, it’s today and the last few weeks I just keep my eye on and a general overview of my site.

Google Website Tips for Pet Portrait Artists..

SEO is not a one-time thing. I cant stress enough how it, along with growing your website, is an ongoing process. We are all constantly learning, testing, and updating, just like us as artists are constantly learning our craft! You need to keep spending time on it so you can ultimately attract more customers and generate more revenue for your pet portrait business.

Did you find my Google Website Tips for Pet Portrait Artists post helpful? Please comment below as I would love to hear your feedback. If you have any more ideas on subjects you might like me to write about within the realm of pet portraits and running a pet portraits business, let me know! Post below, subscribe and I will have another helpful blogpost soon. Also if you missed out on my post about Can you be a successful artist without social media, check it out!

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