Happy Valentine’s Day!

What could be more romantic than a video about how to make your website work better?

(NOTHING.) Hold the roses, let’s talk about search engine optimisation.

Scroll to the bottom to get the free printable checklist.

Think of your website as the really quiet (and hardworking) person on your team.

They’re always there, talking to people about your work.

While you’re asleep, they’re showing people what exactly you do, and how easy it is to work with you.

If people want to buy stuff from you while you’re driving or napping, no problemo. Your website friend has it taken care of.

There’s never been an easier time to have a website

If you just want your illustrations to have a place to live online, it’ll take you no time at all to set up an online portfolio. Whatever you want to do, IT IS GOOGLE-ABLE. Repeat after me: ‘This is easy as fuck. I am an intelligent sentient being.’

It doesn’t matter where you live

You can be an illustrator anywhere in the whole entire internet-connected world, if you’ve got an online presence. I mean, you can be an illustrator anywhere in the world without an online presence too, but it will be trickier for people to know that you exist. I’ve lived in Newcastle upon Tyne, Florence, Venice, Berlin and always had a little trickle of illustration work coming in, even when I was budget backpacking around SE Asia.

I hadn’t even figured out the website things at that point but I had a website, and I kept it updated, so people still found me.

All of my live illustration work comes through this website that you are reading right now. The occasional client will find me from worked of mouth, or see my Instagram (I’m @katiedraws, hi nicetomeetyou) but my website is definitely the hardest working bit of my business. Once they see me on Instagram or hear about me from a friend… guess where they go? WEBSITE.

Get illustration work without an agent

There’s no agent, representation, secret magical person finding me these gigs or approaching companies on my behalf. I’ve worked with Google, Nespresso, Dove, Stella Artois. They’re all just finding me on Google. SEO! Search engine optimisation, babyyyy. Not the first thing most illustrators are excited to learn about but for me it’s had such a huge impact on my business, I couldn’t help but get obsessed with it.

I’ve written in this blog since 2006, so the tips below are a result of 14 years of experimentation. I’ve taken note of what works and doesn’t work. I’ve refined. I’ve completely deleted and rebuilt it.

Lots of love, your resident website nerd.

x Katie