Stop Banking on “Vintage” and “Retro”

A tried and true strategy for coming up with new designs is, perhaps ironically, to mine the past. From flower power and disco to trapper keepers and wild 90s geometry, “retro” and “vintage” design trends make great nostalgic designs any time. What isn’t so great is trying to use those specific terms to rank well in SEO. “Retro” and “Vintage,” all by themselves, are about as useful as tagging your videos with “FYP.”

(Seriously, stop using FYP!)

On Teepublic, for instance, many of the front page results for “vintage” have 5 digits in their item number, which means they were uploaded somewhere between 1999 and 2010. (I may be exaggerating a little). The point is that these are super saturated keywords and standing out is going to be near impossible. So, avoid leveraging these keywords as your main angle and instead dig deeper and tag/keyword around what you’re actually referencing:

  • Vintage TV
  • Retro Movie Posters
  • Vintage Saturday Morning Cartoons
  • and such as

The strategy will help you connect better with people primed and ready to buy your design, and as you do better with those niche customers, you will in fact start to rank better with “retro” and “vintage” too.

Have a great day everyone, and good luck out there!

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