If you're a photographer with a website and you want to improve your Google ranking then this is going to be essential reading. It might just be that your website is purely a vanity project (and there's nothing wrong with that) but you might still want friends and admirers to find you. If you're a professional photographer you'll know by now how important marketing is to your business and how much time and effort it takes. So read on.
Some Background.
A little while ago I was made redundant from a photographer's job at a local university (its OK I'm not after sympathy) so I decided I would pursue a freelance career. I knew it was coming so in the preceding weeks I thought one of the best things I could do was give my personal photography website (mostly landscapes) a complete overhaul to represent myself as a professional photographer. I looked around at other photographer's websites and noting a few that I admired the design of, I conceived a plan to have a really stylish stripped down site with plenty of slideshows to make the viewing experience easier. I've always kept track of the traffic to my site and was disappointed to see it falling off (from not much anyway!). I convinced myself that Google was just being a bit slow, not updating it's searches and rankings often enough. A few more weeks past and nothing had changed, now I was getting desperate, my job would be ending in a few days and I just wasn't getting noticed out there. I tried a few test searches like "freelance photographer" in my home city or "professional photographer" in my home city and generally found myself somewhere like page 11, in amongst some pretty spurious results.
The Solution
I probably shouldn't be telling you this as you might be in competition with me! But it's unlikely you're going to be doing what I do in my area, a lot of my work is quite specialised. One of the joys of working at a university is there are a lot of very bright people about, so before I left I managed to wangle some professional advice from Henry Enos a senior business lecturer on using social networks to promote my photography business (but that's a whole other blog entry!) and more specifically Matt Hayes who managed the website for the Business School. This guy was amazing, in a jiffy he'd been through a load of pages checking what the visibility was like to Google and giving me reasons why it was, frankly, pants!
The Conclusions
Basically I'd got it all wrong!
Google works on text. So stripped down and pretty websites are basically crap, no matter what design ideas we have. So heavy on the info AND making it look good is the challenge. You need to keyword your pictures & give them titles like Glasgow_wedding_photography, include a description with as much relevant information as possible like where was it taken, who's in the picture, who took the picture (your name or website name) what kit you used etc.
Flash based slide-shows don't allow any titles or keywords to be searched and aren't visible from iPhones.
Your front page is the most important in Google rankings. So you need to get as much relevant information on there as possible without it looking shite!
Each time your page comes up in a search and isn't clicked on it drops in the rankings (and vice versa) so make sure your site descriptions says what it needs to to get people to click and then that it's relevant so that they don't jump right off again. That's known as a bounce rate and wont help you rankings either.
Total clicks matter. So make sure all the blogs, FB pages and Flickr sites are referring people to your site.
Resources
The first thing to use is Google Analytics is a free service that lets you see where your website traffic is coming from, what keywords people are using to find you and how often you get referrals from other sites like your blog.
Google Keywords External is a great site that shows relevant keyword searches for example there are nearly as many searches for "wedding photographer [in this city]" as there are for "award winning wedding photographers [in this city]"
Submit Express do a great search of the keywords used on your site and how effective they are.
Phew, I should start charging for this:-)
No comments:
Post a Comment