Most museums hold more genuinely unique, well-researched content than almost any other type of website. Object histories, provenance, materials, dates, makers — nobody else has this. And yet collection pages routinely rank behind auction houses, stock photo libraries and Wikipedia mirrors for searches they should own outright.
Having worked with heritage and collection-based organisations, I keep seeing the same handful of issues — none of which need a developer to fix, and none of which are about "doing more content." The content is usually already there. The problem is almost always in how it's structured.
1. Every object page looks the same to a search engine
Search engines rely heavily on page titles and meta descriptions to understand what a page is about and to decide what to show in results. On a lot of collection sites, every object record shares the same generic title template — "Collection Item — [Museum Name]" — with the actual object name buried in the body text.
That's the equivalent of labelling every drawer in an archive "Box of Things." A search engine can't tell your 1920s silk bodice from your Victorian mill ledger if the title tag doesn't say so. The fix is usually just making sure each object's actual name, maker and date lead the page title — not the institution's name.
2. Alt text that describes nothing
Image alt text does two jobs at once: it's how visually impaired visitors understand what they're looking at, and it's one of the clearest signals search engines have for image search — which, for visually rich collections, is often where the real search volume lives.
"Image1.jpg" or "Object photograph" tells a search engine nothing. Something specific — "Framework knitted silk stocking, Nottinghamshire, circa 1780" — does real work in both directions at once. It's rarely more effort to write; it's just rarely someone's job to insist on it.
3. Missing structured data
Structured data (sometimes called schema markup) is a small, invisible piece of code that tells search engines explicitly "this is a museum object, here's its name, date, and image" — rather than making the search engine guess from the page layout. For collections specifically, it's what allows an object to appear as a rich result, with an image and details, rather than a plain blue link.
Most collection management systems can output this with the right template — the issue is usually that nobody asked for it during the original build. It's a one-off technical task with a long-term payoff, and worth raising directly with whoever manages the website even if that's an external agency.
4. Duplicate pages from search and filtering
Faceted search — filtering a collection by date, material, or maker — is genuinely useful for visitors, but it often generates dozens of near-identical URLs for search engines to crawl, all showing slightly different views of the same objects. That dilutes authority across pages that are all technically "different" but not meaningfully so, and can quietly bury the actual object pages you want people to find.
This one usually needs a short technical fix (canonical tags, telling search engines which version is the "real" page) — but it's worth knowing to ask about, because it's an easy thing for a web developer to overlook if nobody's specifically checking for it.
The pattern underneath all of this
None of these are content problems. Museums are rarely short of things worth saying about their collections — if anything, that's the strength most heritage organisations already have. What's usually missing is someone translating that content into the structure a search engine actually reads.
That's a fairly narrow, fixable job — and one that tends to make an outsized difference precisely because so few collection sites have had anyone look at it properly.