Having Issues with your Photography Website SEO?
if you’re like thousands of other photographers out there, you Google your business name now and again to see how you’re ‘doing’ in the rankings. Is your website showing up? Inquiries are slow – does that mean you’ve disappeared form the internet? Are you still on Page 10? Perhaps when you search, you’re on Page 1, but when your sister looks, you’re on Page 11? What is going on?
If you find yourself having some of these issues, you may feel that any efforts you make to show up in the Google Search Results for your are are futile. You’re over it, and, quite honestly, you’re not even sure if what you’re doing makes any sense. The SEO world is overwhelming, changing, and perhaps even too ‘technical’ for you. What is wrong?
Why your SEO may not be working
There could be a million factors in play as to why your SEO efforts are not working. Perhaps the competition is a little too high. Perhaps your efforts are too little. Perhaps your employing an outdated technique. The overall, and most common reason, however, why your SEO isn’t working? You’re not doing it enough.
SEO is a checklist of items. It’s not just one simple task, a few photos in a post, or including a few keywords in your title. Having truly search-engine-friendly content is almost a masterpiece, and you really need to work hard to get it just right. A lot of photographers feel like SEO should be as easy as a few keywords, but in reality, SEO takes time and effort.
Figuring out where you rank
The first step to fixing your search engine rankings is to truly know where you stand. The reason why you’re #1 in your search, but #101 in your sister’s search may all come down to one thing: INCOGNITO SEARCHING. Your web browser takes into account your search history and location when searching, so if you’ve been to your website (which you probably have), then your website will move up in the search rankings. Google is assuming that your content is important to you, and will show it higher. Your sister may have a lower ranking for your site because she hasn’t been there in a while and also lives out of state.
In order to get a true representation of where you are ranking for any given search term, you need to use an INCOGNITO WINDOW to search. In your browser, go to File -> New Incognito Window (or it might be called a Private window). Now you can search, and Google will not have any idea who you are or where you are located. This will give you a good idea of your true search ranking!
How to fix your websites search engine rankings
Now that you have a true idea of where you truly rank, it’s time to get to work. The best way to fix your Google Search Engine Ranking is to put in work. It will not be instant, and you might have to change a lot of things. You’ll have to write more, describe images, change titles, add tags, organize, delete, and re-arrange.
Find your ‘big’ pages that you’d like to show up, and decide which keywords make the most sense for them. Focus on a few pages first, and then get to work fixing them up to be truly SEO-friendly.
We are focused on helping you get ranked with Google!
We will be talking more and more about it in the next few weeks, so be sure to get on the mailing list to get all of the SEO-goodies in your inbox!
