I’m an Artist Who Learned SEO to Sell My Work on Shopify. Here’s the App I Built.

My name is Kevin, and before I ever wrote a line of code, I was an artist. My studio is my sanctuary. The smell of oil paint, the feel of a blank canvas—that's my world. A few years ago, I decided to take the leap and start selling my art online, but I quickly discovered that creating the art was only half the battle. I struggled to get more traffic to my Shopify art store and turn that traffic into sales.

The Problem: Why Standard Shopify Tags Weren't Working for My Art Store

I spent weeks setting up my Shopify store, trying to create the perfect online gallery. I photographed every piece and meticulously added product tags in the Shopify admin: "Coastal," "Abstract," "Oil," "Small Canvas." I thought this was the key to Shopify SEO for artists.

But I hit a wall. All those tags I had so carefully chosen were completely invisible on my live storefront. They weren't helping my customers browse, and they certainly weren't helping my search engine visibility. It was incredibly frustrating. My own organisational system was useless for product discoverability and, worse, invisible to the search engines that were supposed to be bringing collectors to me.

I realised that if I wanted to truly sell art on Shopify effectively, I’d have to fix the problem myself. That’s how I fell down the rabbit hole of SEO and app development, which led me to create Live Product Tags SEO Pro. I built it for myself, initially, to solve a problem I knew other artists were facing.

The Solution: Live Product Tags for Better Filtering and a Huge SEO Boost

My goal was twofold: make it easier for real people to browse my art, and make it easier for Google to find and rank my art.

Step 1: Creating a Better Browsing Experience for Collectors

The first thing I tackled was the customer experience. A potential buyer can feel overwhelmed when they land on a collection with hundreds of pieces. I needed a way to take my backend tags and make them useful on the front end.

So, I designed the app to display live, crawlable product tags as smart filter menus. The moment I tagged my art, those tags became clickable filters on my collection pages. A visitor could now land on my site and immediately narrow down my entire portfolio to find exactly what they're looking for. This immediately improved the user experience, creating new pathways to my products.

Step 2: Turning Every Tag into a New Landing Page for Google

The real game-changer, however, was what this could do for my site's SEO. The app's most powerful feature is its automatic tag page creation. Every time you create a tag, the app instantly generates a brand new, permanent, and crawlable page for that theme. And these aren’t just basic pages; each one is designed from the ground up to be SEO-friendly.

Think about what that means for your Google ranking. Suddenly, your store doesn't just have your main product pages. You have dozens of new, focused gallery pages that Google can index. As I learned on my journey, more indexed pages mean more opportunities to appear in search results.

Someone searching for 'Coastal art for sale' might not find your homepage, but they could land directly on your new, perfectly optimised 'Coastal' tag page. This is how you increase art sales on Shopify—by meeting customers exactly where they are searching.

The Result: More Time Creating, Less Time Tinkering with SEO

I built this app because my passion is creating art, not wrestling with algorithms. My goal was to create a tool that handles the tedious but vital work of making our art discoverable so we can spend less time in front of a screen and more time in the studio.

I hope my story helps you on your own journey to sell your art online.