Sub-Sector Analysis | Arts and Culture SEO Sector Deep Dive

Nonprofits in the arts & culture sub-sector seek to enrich, educate, and entertain people. We examined the SEO health of the following seven charities, which cover a range of topics, from centuries-old plays to the latest films reviews:

• Tate
• BFI (British Film Institute)
• Royal Opera House
• National Theatre
• Royal Shakespeare Company
• Art Fund
• National Gallery

Some of the charities in this group are household names. Tate receives the highest monthly traffic out of all 70+ charities we’ve reviewed as part of our Super Trumps project. This isn’t surprising, as the site contains information on several popular tourist attractions. Tate also leads the arts & culture sub-sector in non-brand keywords ranking in position 1 and number of referring domains.

But size isn’t everything, especially in art. Art Fund, the charity with the smallest audience in our review, has the fewest error codes out of the entire arts & culture sub-sector, with only 131. This is on par with nonprofit heavyweights such as the British Red Cross and Oxfam GB.

That’s the beauty of SEO. You don’t have to have the biggest budget or an in-house team to attract relevant traffic and provide a good experience to your audience. You just need to understand the landscape and – crucially – your audience.

Keep reading for our deep dive into search performance of the arts & culture sub-sector.

Informational Content Hubs

Informational “content hubs” are great for SEO for a few reasons. They allow you to group together (usually in-depth) content by keyword topics, showing search engines that you are an authority on a particular subject or subjects. They also facilitate internal linking between relevant and related pages, making it easy for search engines and real people alike to navigate your content by theme.

Most of all, they are a rich source of information for your audience, allowing you to answer people’s questions, explore interesting or complex subjects, and – if you are in an artistic field – hopefully entertain people. If it’s good for people, then it’s almost certainly good for SEO, too. And we often see content housed within content hubs experience better visibility in search engine results too.

Perhaps more than most other charity sub-sectors we’ve investigated, the arts & culture sub-sector seeks to educate people and enrich their cultural selves – in this case, by easing access and exposing people to art. To do this, many of the charity sites we surveyed feature ‘learning hubs’ on their sites.

The BFI’s ‘learning and training’ hub, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s ‘learn’ hub, and the National Gallery’s ‘learning’ hub are all designated educational hubs which organise content by audience (e.g. primary schools, universities, teachers). Content hubs are an opportunity to feature a variety of media, which the National Gallery does well with its wealth of video content for schools.

These learning hubs are mostly focused on academic education, however. What about evergreen content for your average internet user who might just want to learn more about a particular subject? The approach here really depends on the type of organisation.

The BFI has a rich ‘features and reviews’ section, with plenty of informational content on topics from film reviews to retrospectives on notable figures. It’s not surprising that the BFI gets so many links to it from other sites (second only to Tate in number of referring domains). This is where the real value is, with BFI’s ‘features and reviews’ section ranking for 375 organic keywords compared to their ‘learning and training’ hub ranking for 6. Both sections are useful to the BFI’s audience, but they deliver different levels of search value and impact.

Tate also has a wealth of content grouped into ‘art by theme’, with themes ranging from Black identities to wellbeing. It’s the pages for specific works of art, which are nestled within these categories, that attract many of Tate’s backlinks. This helps explain why Tate gets links from more referring domains than any other charity we’ve reviewed as part of our SEO Super Trumps project.

Prioritising User Experience to Drive Sales

All of the charities we surveyed in the arts & culture sub-sector host public events, from film screenings to art exhibitions. Most of them organise these events in ‘What’s On’ sections, where it’s possible to also buy tickets.

This ecommerce element is another big difference between arts charities and many other nonprofits, which by and large tend to offer support and seek donations instead of selling ‘products’. Since ticket sales will make up a large portion of these organisations’ revenue, it's important to get it right. User Experience (UX) is key here.

BFI, National Gallery, and Art Fund all lead the sector in Core Web Vitals, the collection of metrics Google uses to quantify a user’s experience. This includes elements like page speed, a crucial part of UX and a make-or-break metric in the transaction journey. If a page takes too long to load, or if people have to click through too many screens to purchase a ticket, potential buyers are more likely to abandon their cart and not complete their purchase.

Art Fund has a strong internal search function, allowing people to search for things to do by type of event, location, date, and even by keyword – in line with the Art fund’s stated goal of ‘ensuring as many people as possible can access and enjoy’ art. Features like this are great for users.

Organic Visibility

One primary function of SEO is to get as many relevant people to your site as possible. This may be especially pressing for charities selling tickets to events, as they must compete with each other as well as private businesses all vying to be people’s go-to source of entertainment and culture on any given day.

This is an area where the sub-sector excels above the wider charity sector average. Across all the arts & culture charities we surveyed, their average monthly traffic is estimated at 269k, far above the wider charity sector average of 238k.

Tate increases the average significantly, however, attracting an estimated 2.1 million visitors a month. This makes sense, as Tate Modern is one of the most-visited galleries in the world, with over a million in-person visitors a year.

Tate’s success isn’t all down to brand awareness, however. Tate leads the arts & culture sector in position 1 rankings for non-brand keywords (search terms which don’t reference the organisation’s name in them). The site ranks for 3,292 non-brand keywords as of writing, on par with well-known charities such as Battersea Dogs and Breast Cancer Now.

Again, informational content comes to the rescue here, as it’s Tate’s /art section which ranks for many of these generic searches. For example, Tate ranks at the top of Google for ‘pop art’, ‘abstract art’, and ‘surrealism’, which get 45k, 35k, and 21k searches a month, respectively.

This is especially impressive with ‘abstract art’, which Google recognises could be a transactional keyword; people might be searching for it because they want to buy some abstract art pieces. In this case, Tate ranks in the top organic position, just below some PPC ads for art pieces, and just above a business selling framed art prints.

Why does Tate rank so well when the surrounding results are transactional? Simple: the informational content on Tate’s abstract art page is just too helpful for Google to ignore! It clearly defines what abstract art is, how an amateur can recognise it, and also what the word ‘abstract’ actually means. Google has pulled this snippet of copy onto its results page; users can then click the page to learn about the topic in more detail.

Brand Strength in Search Results

In theory, the charities we surveyed in the arts & culture sector are trying to reach a broad audience. Most people are able to appreciate art, music, and theatre in one way or another. That’s why it’s important to own the top results for your organisation’s branded searches (when people search for your organisation’s name).

Consider the top results for ‘royal shakespeare company’ below. The Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) claims the top organic result, including space for their site’s internal search bar and other key sub-pages, such as the ‘What’s On’ and ‘About Us’ pages. The charity also receives accurate coverage in the knowledge panel to the right side of the results page.

Almost all of the other charities in the arts & culture sub-sector receive similar results for their branded searches. The only slight exception is the National Gallery, which must compete with the similarly-named National Gallery of Scotland – although, if you have location tracking switched on like most people, this will only affect people in or near Scotland, and the search results still make it clear that the organisations are distinct.

Despite this collective strength, however, one area the sub-sector’s charities could further improve is the ‘People also ask’ feature. This search feature is like a list of frequently asked questions compiled by Google. When someone clicks on one of the questions, the question expands and reveals a short answer from a relevant website. People can then choose to click through to the full page on the website or not.

Although not as important as ranking at the top of the search results, it helpful for getting ahead of competition, and. I it's particularly important on mobile due to the prioritised positioning onof the ‘People Also Ask’ box.

Appearing in the ‘People also ask’ feature, especially for your brand’s name, is low-hanging fruit. It’s also a great way to inspire new informational content. For example, see the top ‘People also ask’ question for the branded search term ‘royal opera house’ below.

Google has chosen Vanity Fair to answer this question, and it’s clear why: the source article addresses the question in its page title, and as you can see from the snippet of copy featured, it clearly answers the question. It’s from a secondary source, however – and the article is well over a decade old.

When combined, over 3k people search for ‘royal opera house seating plan’, ‘royal opera house view from seat’, and ‘royal opera house best seats’ each month. The Royal Opera House could address this user need and claim this result by producing a clear, accessible seating plan on their site, along with some tips for choosing the best seats.

Similar opportunities are available for the other charities in our review, too. By exploring additional features in the search results, such as ‘People also ask’, for your target keywords, you can better answer your audience’s questions while also increasing your organic reach.

Images and Video

Here’s the big question: which of our charities is winning when it comes to visual search?

Some organisations cover topics that are better suited to image searches, of course. Tate, which has a variety of content on individual artists, has the opportunity to rank well for artist keywords.

For example, over 18k people search for the artist Barbara Hepworth each month. As of writing, Tate ranks in position 2, just below the official site bearing the artist’s name. Imagery from Tate’s site also appears in the knowledge panel imagery on the right portion of the results page.

When searching directly in Google Images, Tate continues to perform well for other artist keywords. 11k people search for ‘andy warhol art’ each month, and multiple images from Tate appear in Google’s image results.

Google has sourced Tate’s Warhol images from this content-rich informational page, which covers Warhol’s styles, themes, and more. The images alone might not be enough to rank, but combined with lots of detailed, useful copy about the art and artist? It’s no wonder so many of Tate’s images rank well in the image results. If you can arrange all of this helpful rich content in a content hub you are on track for a sure fire winner.

Of course, there’s always opportunities to further improve. Many of the images on the Warhol page have descriptive alt text, but some of them don’t have any alt text at all. This makes it harder for search engines (and people who use screen readers to navigate the web or who have slow internet connections) to determine what the images are.

Summary

The arts & culture sub-sector is unusual among charities in that it does more than advocate and educate – it also entertains people. From creating informational content hubs to optimising images for search, this presents plenty of strong opportunities to rank for more keywords and generate relevant traffic. Technical health is essential, however, so charities in this sub-sector should ensure their ecommerce and internal search functions are functioning and robust, just as a retailer in the private sector would. This is achievable for all the charities we included in our review, regardless of brand awareness or annual revenue. You don’t have to have the biggest budget or an in-house team to attract relevant traffic and provide a good experience to your audience. You just need to understand the landscape and – crucially – understand your audience.

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