1 The buyer arrives with a list
Serious buyers do not wander. They come to Paris for a fair, a sale, or two days of neighbourhoods, and they build the itinerary weeks in advance from wherever they live. The decision about which doors to push is made long before anyone lands.
That preparation happens in English, on a screen, in another country. It is the single most valuable moment in the entire cycle, and it is the moment at which a French-only website simply does not exist.
2 What a collector actually types
Nobody searches for "art gallery Paris" with money in hand. The searches that end in a purchase are specific, and they fall into three recognisable shapes.
- The artist and the medium. A name plus a technique, a period, an edition type. The buyer wants the work, and finds the dealer on the way.
- The category and the constraint. A style, a date range, a maker, a price bracket. This is how furniture, design and decorative arts are bought.
- The visit itself. Which galleries to see in a given quarter, who shows during a given week, whether an appointment is required. High intent, almost nobody answers.
That the homepage and the about page are dispensable. They do not bring the visitor in, but they decide whether that visitor writes to you. Somebody discovering a five-figure work at a dealer they have never heard of will check who they are dealing with before making contact. The object page brings them; the rest of the site makes them write.
3 Where the marketplaces take your visibility
Artsy, Artnet and 1stDibs index your stock, publish it in structured form, and rank for it in your place. You supply the inventory, they capture the search, and the buyer reaches you as their customer rather than yours.
Understanding why they win matters, because each of their advantages can be reproduced at your own scale.
One page per object, always the same fields
Artist, period, medium, dimensions, provenance, condition, filled in every single time. A search engine knows exactly what it is reading, which is rarely true of a gallery website.
Thousands of pages on the same subject
Every listing reinforces the others. Your single page competes against a domain that has been publishing about this exact category for fifteen years.
Pages that outlive the sale
The object leaves, the page stays, and it keeps attracting searches for that artist and period. Most galleries delete sold works, erasing the page precisely when it had started to rank.
4 The ground a marketplace cannot hold
Artsy has no address. 1stDibs has no opening hours, no viewing room, no visitors ringing the bell. None of these platforms can appear in local results, because there is nothing to locate.
Your business profile therefore occupies a position they do not compete for at all. It triggers on the searches of a buyer already in the city: a dealer in a given quarter, valuations, Saturday opening. Reviews carry more weight than most dealers assume, and their wording matters as much as the rating, because a client describing what you handled attaches that expertise to your name far more convincingly than any about page.
5 Writing in English is not translating
A literal translation of a French gallery page rarely performs, because the questions differ. An international buyer wants to know about shipping and export, about certificates and condition reports, about whether a visit needs an appointment and whether you can be reached before they book a flight.
These are practical anxieties a Paris client never has, and they are almost entirely absent from French gallery websites. Answering them plainly in English is both a service and a positioning, and it costs one page. The mechanics are covered in our French page on international visibility.
6 A market that travels
The fair calendar structures the year, and buyers plan around it. During those weeks the city fills with people who have already decided to spend and are choosing where.
Almost every dealer communicates about what is currently on the walls. Almost none publish what would justify a journey: what you specialise in, which quarter you are in, what else is worth seeing nearby, how an appointment works. That is uncontested ground, and it is available to whoever writes it down first.
Serving buyers who do not read French
The Paris market is international by construction, and the clientele with the means to buy seriously is more international still. A dealer publishing four solid pages in English frequently ranks better on those searches than on the French equivalents, where the whole trade competes.
The same asymmetry appears across every Paris trade that sells to visitors rather than residents, from hotels to specialist retail. Our page on hotel direct bookings describes the identical mechanism in another sector.
Worth doing this week
Take the five works that best represent what you handle. Give each one its own address and a full description: artist or workshop, period, provenance, condition, dimensions, and two paragraphs on why the piece matters. Then add one English page covering shipping, export and how to arrange a viewing.