Original subtitles

Right then, it's a big one, SEO.

This is all about optimising for search, and

understanding how to set up your site to

make the most of organic Google search.

Now, this is an overview of everything I

know and practice.

You can, if you want, go on a

three-day SEO course, if you want to

catch up on some sleep, that is.

I may have been on one of those

courses.

That said, there are some brilliant educators out

there who do offer more in-depth courses

on SEO.

One of them is my good friend, Ash,

and I'll link to his course below should

you want a more detailed approach.

But before you reach out to him, you

should make sure you're doing everything I'm about

to outline, because he'll only tell you to

do that first.

Now, SEO is a marketing tool, and it

has always been a part of my strategy,

and I emphasise part because I don't rely

solely on it, like I don't rely solely

on social media or wedding blogs.

But together with those techniques, it forms a

key part of my marketing plan.

Before we talk about setup and what you

need to do in order to be SEO

friendly, I just want to address a couple

of very important points.

First up, this is a long-term game.

There are no quick fixes or magic tricks

to SEO.

If you ever get those calls from a

sales rep saying, hey, I'm calling from Google,

we can get you to page one.

It's a trick.

They can't guarantee it.

I'm not sure what accent that was, really.

I'm not very good at accents.

Always remember, short-term gain, long-term pain.

If you try and trick the system, it

will come back to bite you on the

ass, and I'm talking from experience.

We'll talk about what to avoid later, but

Google is clever.

Never think you can pull the wool over

their eyes without being penalised further down the

line.

Secondly, SEO should never, ever come at the

cost of design.

SEO is there to get people to your

shop front.

Once they're inside, if it looks like an

eight-year-old school project, the SEO work

was a complete waste of time.

SEO without careful design, a visual aesthetic, user

experience, a journey without clear call to actions

is utterly pointless.

You can SEO your site to the hills,

rank first for every keyword you can think

of, but if it looks like crap or

it's complicated to navigate, you've wasted your time.

Remember what we said the purpose of a

website is?

Always to convert.

If you don't convert, you don't work.

Okay, let's start off with the absolute basics.

Each one of these points are essential to

the foundation of building your site for organic

SEO, and I say organic because we're talking

here about natural search results.

None of this is to be confused with

Google AdWords, the adverts that sit at the

top of Google and say paid next to

them.

I've never paid Google for search traffic.

Obviously, you are totally welcome to, but that's

the subject I'm not specialised enough in yet.

It's something I'm working on, so if I

get to a stage where I can pass

on that knowledge, I'll update this course when

the time comes.

So the basics, number one, your content management

system or CMS. This is the software your

website sits on.

Without the right software, you limit your ability

to optimise for Google.

The most common platform is WordPress, and this

is the one I would strongly advise you

to implement if you can, but it will

require a little more work setting up and

configuring.

Squarespace is a good out-of-the-box

CMS that doesn't require complex installation.

It has great design flexibility, and compared to

four or five years ago, much better SEO

functionality.

The downside is you're tied into their ecosystem,

and the plug-in options are nowhere near

as broad or flexible as WordPress.

I would try and avoid free website builders

such as Wix at all costs.

The coding and level of functionality will hold

you back, and you will outgrow its abilities

by the time you've built a few pages.

Number two, hosting.

If you are in the UK, I would

strongly advise you have a UK-based server.

If you're in the US, a US-based

server.

The only time this becomes irrelevant is if

you decide to use a CDN, which is

a content delivery network, but that comes with

an added cost.

The reason behind wanting your site to be

hosted on a server in the country you're

operating from, or using a CDN, is all

to do with load times.

It will take longer for me to load

an image here in the UK when the

image or site is based on a server

in New Zealand, for example, compared to it

being up the road in Manchester.

And as of 2021, Google placed much more

SEO rank on load times than ever before.

So although a second delay might not seem

too bad, time is valuable and a hugely

important factor.

Number three, mobile.

Much like load speed, Google launched a new

algorithm in 2015 that placed mobile and responsive

sites higher than those that weren't.

Now, Google expects your site to be responsive

and mobile-friendly.

If it's not, you are being penalised heavily.

So much so, if you haven't addressed this,

there is no point doing any further work

until you fix it.

Four, link building.

And this comes in two parts.

Internal link building is the first.

And this is where we build our site

with pages and sub-pages and link internally

amongst those pages.

For example, on my homepage, I can follow

a link to my portfolio page through the

copy, and then to my destination wedding photography

page, then to my pricing page, and so

on.

It's creating a complex web of pages and

links.

Try and imagine Google sending its little robot

to crawl through your site.

But those links are little doors to other

parts of your site.

The robot always needs doors.

Try and avoid any dead ends.

The This is where we connect with other

websites and they link back to ours, which

in turn builds domain authority, telling Google we're

a genuine and trusted website, especially if those

other websites have good authority of their own.

For example, the BBC has huge authority, so

a link from them would be worth more

than several small blogs wanting to feature you.

That's not to say you shouldn't feature on

those blogs, you absolutely should target them, because

you're far more likely to feature on a

wedding blog than a BBC news article.

And over time, those links build up.

Below, I'll put a link to 100 wedding

blogs you can target.

If you have some content you think they'll

want to feature, reach out to them.

Once you have an article on their site

and a link to yours, then tick them

off and approach some more.

Again, this will take time.

So share your images with suppliers, venues, blogs,

all you ask in return is that they

credit and link to you.

Number five, Google for Business.

Another absolute must is your website address, contact

details all logged and set up with Google

for Business.

And also your portfolio.

Is it up to date?

And does it represent your work?

The amount of times I've met photographers who

never update their images on Google, the world's

largest search engine.

When you update your portfolio on your website,

do it on Google for Business as well.

And every time you deliver a client gallery,

ask them nice if they can leave you

a Google review by clicking this link.

Six, homepage keyword.

So this is the main keyword or set

of words you use for a specific page.

And given Google is aware of your location

and heavily weights locality to search results, your

homepage keyword should target your location.

If you can target your location well first,

the rest of your site will only benefit.

For example, I'm based in Derbyshire.

So my homepage keywords are Derbyshire wedding photographer.

Seven, copy and content.

This is an easy trap to fall into.

But remember what I said about trying to

trick the system?

Do not write it for Google.

Write it for the user.

It needs to be readable.

Google knows when you're cheating.

For example, if you're Kevin, a wedding photographer

in Northampton, this is fine.

Write that.

That makes sense.

And it's exactly what you are.

Do not write.

Hey, I'm Kevin from Northampton.

And I'm a Northampton wedding photographer shooting weddings

in Northampton, a Northampton Shire.

You catch my drift?

Sorry if your name is Kevin and you're

in Northampton right now.

That's that's awkward and quite unlucky.

Eight, naming your images and using alt text

on those images.

Google doesn't know what the image looks like.

Although the way artificial intelligence is moving, it

soon will.

It may already be there.

I don't know.

But let's just pretend Google doesn't know.

You need to tell it.

So images should be named with a relevant

keyword, not dsc-004-a-12.jpg. It

should be keyword focused.

So if you shot a wedding at a

certain venue, for example, it should be named

certain-venue-wedding-photography-001.jpg. The alt

text should describe the image.

And the reason we do this ties into

basic point number nine, new content.

And for me, this is blogging.

Blogging Weddings provides Google with fresh signals that

your site has been updated, and then you

get regular traffic because you drive people to

those blogs via social media.

If you didn't blog or update or drive

traffic to it, Google just sees a dormant

website.

So it won't rank as well against competition

that does blog or drive traffic from social.

Now, the reason I keyword name my images

and use relevant alt text is because I

want to make the most of that content

in Google search.

If I'm going to put the time into

blog, it needs to work for me.

So for example, when anyone searches a venue,

let's take Bavington House wedding, for example, a

sign of good page rank is to look

at the image search results.

And there you have it.

One image that takes you to my blog,

and another, and another.

Three images all on the first page for

one venue in the UK.

As with anything I've outlined here, you don't

have to do any of this.

But if you're going to blog, why wouldn't

you want that search benefit?

If you're blogging and not doing that, your

site isn't working as hard as it can.

And this is all about marginal gains.

I don't rely on blogging.

But if each one brings me in two

to three inquiries each year, for every wedding

I blog every year, they soon start adding

up.

And if you pull them all together, what

happens?

It leads to more inquiries, and more inquiries

leads to more conversions, more bookings, therefore more

demand.

And when demand rises, what else rises?

You're thinking about it?

Do you know what it is?

I know what it is.

When your demand rises, your rates can go

up.

So share that content, get it out to

suppliers for their blogs, get it featured.

Every site carries some weight or authority.

And there are always extra benefits to just

being featured.

See this post from Rock My Wedding, one

of mine at Crypto Stone Barn.

That article will always be there.

There's always a chance Brian and Grooms getting

married there will see that image.

And then Rock My Wedding post to Pinterest

for further search terms, further increasing my potential

reach off of that image.

It's all about marginal gains.

And these are the basics.

They take time, but are fundamental to creating

a solid SEO foundation.

Up next, we'll explore some further advanced options.