Is SEO really that important on redbubble?

It's been a while since my last blog post update, and after seeing good amount of views on Threads, and having posted about this topic on Quora as well, I think it is time to address the topic of SEO on PoD platform, specifically Redbubble since it's the only one I have data to share to support my claims. I'm sure you have heard or read it somewhere, at least once on your PoD journey "SEO is all you need to be found" or "The reason you have no sales is that your SEO is bad" and a few other variations on the theme that all involve making you believe that all you need to be seen is good keywords in your title, description and tags. But is it all that there is to it? Is SEO really that important on Redbubble? Here's the tea! SEO is always important, you'd be stupid to not work on that, but it should NEVER be your only strategy, not on Redbubble, or any other PoD for that matter. Here is why in one neat little infographic, curtesy of my own personal dashboard on Redbubble :

Now before I get into the details, note that Redbubble has NEVER been my most successful platform, and that is because it's always been one of the ones I neglected the most in term of promotion. I upload there regularly, I have been a featured artist, I was a runner up in one of their design challenge in 2024, and I got a number of my artwork, including the "Spill the Tea" one featured on the discover page last year, but I didn't promote my work as much as I did with my Spoonflower and Society6 shop (my two top earning shops). I'm changing that strategy in 2026 though. As you can see, Redbubble does provide an analytics tool that you can find on your account's dashboard that shows where the traffic comes each month for the past 12 months. Redbubble generated traffic is all the hits your shop gets from ads and email campaigns created by Redbubble, as you can see, they do help, but don't count on them to bring you loads of leads.I'm pretty sure a lot of the percentage they brought is due to my featured artworks. The next category is the DIRECT category and according to Redbubble is all the traffic that brought people to your shop from a bookmarked link, or a link found in an email or on a website. This is the traffic that you have the most influence on because a lot of it is you sharing your link around. As you can see, it's where the vast majority of my traffic comes from and right now I suspect that also includes traffic from my Threads posts because it's unclear if that is counted under social media or not. The next category is ORGANIC, Redbubble says it's all the traffic coming from search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. This would be the kind of traffic directly linked to your SEO efforts and while it is important, and usually account for more traffic than the Redbubble leads it's nowhere near as important as the traffic I generated from links I shared myself. Then come social media, unknown and other, which are always a bit confusing to me. Not idea which social media is counted in the category, I suspect Threads isn't, and then there is unkown and other which Redbubble doesn't really explain clearly. I think these 3 categories can be everything and nothing, and social media leads might include links shared by other people, not just your own shares. All in all, the 3 main traffic sources are always Redbubble, Direct and Organic and when I shared the infographic above on Threads I also took a screenshot of what these categories meant:

This is why, as I have been saying for years, those PoD platform demand you do your part in term of promotion and sharing. You simply CAN'T upload your design, come up with a good title and description and hope you'll get seen with just that. For a start, all PoD, and Redbubble even more so are INSANELY saturated, they have millions of designs covering all possible niches and themes under the sun. I recently attended a Society6 webinar where they told us that before the platform moved to a curated model they had around 12 millions designs and between March and October 2025 they paired it down to a couple of thousands. You can bet that with that many designs your SEO alone is not going to guarantee you are being seen at the top of results. All those PoD platforms rely on artists to bring them new leads they would not get otherwise, whoever actively brings them that traffic gets priority on the platform, it's as simple as that, and there is always an algorithm at play that will ensure those who do more than the bare minimum will get better exposure. Heck, Redbubble has made it very clear when they introduced account tiers that the frequency of uploads and the quality of traffic you personally brought to the site had a direct impact on which tier you would belong to.

Still from my personal experience with several PoD, the success I get is always proportional to the promoting effort I put it. I started on Society6 and Redbubble at the same time in April 2017, Society6 always got me the most sales, no surprise there since that has always been the one I promoted the most. Same with Spoonflower and to an extent Teepublic which is the 3rd best performing PoD platform for me. I have a presence on a 4th major player : Threadless, but I rarely make any sales there because I simply do not have the time to devote to heavy promotion with them, I rarely if ever share any link with designs I uploaded there so the lack of sale is I am afraid 100% on me with them. What does this mean? Well simply put, it's not as passive an income as you think it is. Too many people are under the impression that it's all about uploading a lot of designs as quickly as possible and then wait until SEO does its magic and bring in sales. This probably would work on a less saturated platform, but there aren't a lot of these around, and the new PoD out there aren't getting the traffic on their own either, so none of them will really help you avoid having to pull your fair share of marketing. Want to succeed as an artist? You got to do the work. Joining a bunch of platforms in the beginning is a good idea but bear in mind you will need to give them all some attention. Once you have figured out which ones work better for you, stick with those and focus all your energy on them to keep growing. You don't need a uge audience to bring traffic to your shop, you just need a bunch of dedicated followers, and a lot of patience.