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I’m Zach Prez. I help photographers rank in search engines and wrote Photography Web Marketing Guide. I consult some of the top photography website companies in the world and contribute to dozens of well-known photographer hubs. At Social Media Photographer Summit I will help you understand the basics of search engine optimization, like how it works and develop a plan for you to get better Google results. It’s a presentation that I normally charge $125 to see, but you’ll get it by attending the summit. Here’s a preview about some of the SEO topics I plan to cover.

Expect 20% Growth with SEO

What amount of client growth would you like to see in 2011? If you’re a wedding photog, as little as 5 new clients a year might be enough. That’s a 20% increase if you’re getting gigs every other weekend. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the biggest chatter in photography circles because it consistently delivers enormous growth. A single rank on a somewhat competitive term should send about 50 visits a month from search. Convert just 10% of those and you have 5 new clients in your first month of optimization. The cool part is that ranking for a few lower-competition phrases is easy to do and sends more combined traffic than one major term.

How Google Ranks Stuff

I can demonstrate how Google works using Amber, a Los Angeles wedding photographer, as an example.

When Amber’s potential new client types Los Angeles wedding photographer into Google, the search engine looks for web content about that topic (the phrase searched). Google looks not only for webpages, but for images, videos, social mentions, local businesses, and sponsored pages about Los Angeles wedding photographer.

Fortunately, Amber has a webpage about that phrase. Google found it because the html text on her homepage says so in the title, first sentence, and image alternate text (we’ll get to all this shortly). She’s completed the first prerequisite to ranking well. Hundreds of other sites contain similar keyword placement, so her homepage doesn’t rank in the top 10.

How does Google know which one to rank first? Simple – the most popular. Here’s a social media analogy to help clarify. It’s easy to see who’s popular on Facebook by quantity of friends. At its most basic level, Google measures popularity by the number of inbound links (reference links from other websites). Amber has 50 links to her website from other blogs, friends, and directories, but the top 10 search results each have more than 100. Looks like Amber needs more quality links in order to compete in Google’s popularity contest for the phrase Los Angeles wedding photographer.

She doesn’t get discouraged. Over time she plans to build well over 50 links to convince Google of her valuable website. The most quality links are ones from other reputable sites/blogs in the same industry. Since it’s difficult to ask a webmaster or blogger for a direct link, she does some article writing and guest posting. A general post helps to enrich the other website, but most importantly creates a valuable link back from middle of the page. When potential clients search her name, those guest articles appear as well, helping her credibility.

Keyword-Rich Content

A homepage is the most likely page to rank in search (trust me). Amber uses her homepage to rank for the single broad phrase Los Angeles wedding photographer. If she were to add other phrases, Google will get confused and not rank her for any of them. Google and its searchers like specific pages with specific phrases.

Specific phrases earn more traffic in the long run. In SEO speak it’s called the long tail. Many phrases, each with a small volume, generate more traffic than a single big phrase. Brides certainly search for preferred vendors and examples of photos at the place they plan to get married. Amber uses a blog post to write about her best weddings at the Hilton in Los Angeles. It’s easy for her to re-purpose content from previous gigs (old blog posts) into a single post. A “best-of” mashup post will be a perfect landing page for searchers to find so they can see a variety of projects, rather than a single one. It will be easier to rank as well, because there are very few pages on the web about that subject matter and they tend to have lower link popularity. To top it off, brides making specific searches know exactly what they want and are more likely to hire Amber when they find a page exactly about what they were looking for.

Amber writes the post Elegant Wedding Photo Examples for Hilton in Los Angeles. It’s over 300 words with lots of images and related phrases peppered throughout. She links to it from her homepage and one of those guest posts to let Google know it’s important. In the first month Google Analytics showed 20 different keyword variations that users searched and clicked on the post in Google results.

As you can see, people search using lots of different keyword combinations. This post generated 50 visits and 5 booked weddings (10% conversion) in the first month!

Where to Place Keywords

A Google search page typically has 10 webpage results. Each link is really just the title of the page, followed by a short summary (meta description from the page code) and URL. It’s easy to understand what the page is about from those 3 factors before you even visit the site. Likewise, Google and its searchers will make a decision about the page from the small amount of detail shown in search results. That’s why the title, meta description, and URL are the most important 3 locations for quality and specific keywords.

Amber knew that a general audience would search Los Angeles wedding photographer and a qualified audience might search for variations of Hilton weddings in Los Angeles. She simply created pages centered on these phrases and linked to them. Your job is to think about what your users are searching to find your business or services. In order to convert that searcher to hire you, tell them who you are, what you do, and why you’re the best choice for them. Make sure things like contact info, testimonials, and samples of your work are visible on pages that intend to rank. Don’t expect them to visit galleries or the homepage to make a purchase decision.

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