Ah – does your brain hurt already? I haven’t even begun to talk about SEO, but just the simple mention of the acronym can make some photographers cringe. Are you feeling that way? Perhaps you’re thinking that way because you already feel like the photography-industry is a saturated market – how to do you stand out in person let alone worry about standing out in the search engine results.
Fear not! We have some great things coming from the Flourish Academy to help you with your SEO, because honestly, it can make even our brains hurt sometimes!
In the meantime, today I wanted to share with you some of the biggest Misunderstood Facts about SEO that you may not even yet realize.
Now, here’s the thing. When you read this article, you may start by thinking “Wait, HUH? I don’t even know what that IS!” And if that is you, don’t worry. SEO can be a big task in your business to tackle, but the first step to learning about something is simply to become familiar with hearing some of the terminology, and eventually as you learn more you will start to build those important connections that will make you a Search Engine Optimization machine. Wondering where you may already be led astray? Let’s start with these key points:
SEO is all about being first on the list
Untrue. SEO is not only about ranking high on the list of search engine results, but it’s also about being engaging. Have you ever done a web search and found a link at the top that just sounded boring, irrelevant, or complicated? I bet you didn’t click on that link. Having great search engine results AND conversions is about creating wonderful content that leads people to click on your site. No clicky, no clients.
SEO is all about keywords
Yes, and no. You of course need to use terminology that talks about your “industry keywords”, but you also need to include content that uses other relevant terms to what you do. Google is super-smart now, so I can use terms like “Pittsburgh Wedding Photographer” and also “bride, groom, photos, pictures, photo shoots, bouquet, groomsmen, etc…” and Google will put the pieces together. This helps your website content to be more storytelling and less (potentially) annoying to your readers.
SEO is all about repeating keywords in my images
Have you ever renamed your blog images something like this “Pittsburgh_wedding_photographer_01.jpg, Pittsburgh_wedding_photographer_02.jpg, etc…”? Well, you’re on the right track, but that’s simply not enough! Work at really describing your images in your file naming, and that will help with search engine ranking. This can be a hard one for photographers, because it’s often difficult to describe your images if you can see them. Imagine describing a photo to someone who is blind – because, well, Google is!
SEO is something I can work on tomorrow
False. Ranking in the search engine results take an average of 3.4 months to move up – and that’s if you’re doing it all right! It’s a marathon, not a sprint, so the sooner you can incorporate some of the biggest steps, the better you will be in the long haul.
What other ideas do you have about SEO that you’re unsure about? Join us in the Flourish Academy Facebook group to extend this blog post discussion.
Also, are you ready to get started? We have put together a HOME PAGE SEO CHECKLIST to get your wheels spinning on the first big steps you can take to increase your search engine ranking.
