Original subtitles

Hello, it's Corey and Dylan from fuel your

photos.

And today we are going to be talking

to you about SEO archetypes.

Basically, we're going to show you five different

examples of photographer avatars that are successful with

SEO for different reasons.

Because, you know, there's not just one way

to win with SEO.

There's actually it's a SEO is a huge

field.

It covers lots and lots of different topics

and there's lots of different strategies that could

be successful for photographers.

So today we're going to try to give

you some specific examples of photographers who are

winning with SEO and why they're winning in

the specific types of things that they're doing.

And hopefully by the end, you'll be able

to sort of draft your own profile, your

own avatar of what you are going to

do to win with SEO.

Dylan, you ready to jump in?

Let's do this.

Let's meet the archetypes here.

All right.

All right.

So the first one is local Lizzie, and

she's great at local SEO.

And we'll talk about all of her review

strategies and local business strategies in this presentation.

Nice.

We have nerdy Ned.

And this is someone who is very concerned

with the technical parts of SEO, obsesses over

the details.

Awesome.

Next, we have featured Fatima, all about getting

those blog features, getting a lot of local

or not local press, national press, worldwide press,

winning awards, that sort of thing.

Awesome.

You have teaching Tanya, who is a thought

leader and uses her website to express her

ideas and to gain authority through writing.

And finally, practical Peter, who loves a simple

website and a simple offering that is the

ultimate and user friendly.

Awesome.

Well, let's dig right in.

Let's start off with local Lizzie.

Local in general is such a big part

of SEO.

Dylan, talk a minute about why local SEO

is so important.

Totally.

So many people, when they're searching for a

photographer, they're probably searching from their phone or

device for a service in their own town,

the same town that they're currently in.

So when they type in wedding photographer, wedding

photographer near me, something like that, it's going

to show photographers really close to their actual

location.

So it's that that local proximity is very

key.

So if you can prove to Google that

you're the best and most relevant and highest

reviewed photographer in your local area, you're going

to come up higher in those searches.

Yeah, exactly.

Most photographers are concerned with getting those local

queries, the rankings for things like, you know,

wedding photographer in Portland.

If it has a location in it, almost

guaranteed Google is going to show a map

pack.

And if a map pack is showing, then

Google is looking for local signals, local relevance.

They want to see that that photographer, that

that business owner, that service provider is a

an actual local business that serves the specific

area where that searcher is looking.

So what are some things that local Lizzie

might do to improve her local relevance and

authority?

Totally.

So here's one.

You can review local businesses with your personal

Google profile.

And then in the caption, mention that the

photos are copyright, the photographer or that you

are the photographer.

Another slight trick to that would be to

make your nickname on your Google profile, your

business name, or just have it say wedding

photographer.

So just sharing reviews on Google gets you

a ton of impressions.

It's really impressive to see.

Yeah.

Let's talk a little bit about this, dig

in a little bit more.

So how are you doing this?

What is the methodology?

And you can see this is actually from

your business.

What's the, are you using an app?

Do you do it online?

Where do you do all of this?

Totally.

So you can use the Google app on

your phone, which is the Google Maps app.

Google Maps.

Yeah.

And it's the way I prefer doing this.

You can download the photos from your website

or email them to yourself or however you'd

like to get them on your phone.

I've found the reviews to be much more

reliable if you use your phone rather than

use the desktop.

And you just do a quick review of

the business.

So I shot a wedding at the Evergreen,

which is a wedding venue.

I talk about the features that make the

Evergreen great and why I like shooting a

wedding there and why I think that that's

a great space for weddings and other events.

And then include my images.

Like I said, use the caption to say

that the images are by Dylan M.

Howell Photography.

And I've had the owners or the managers

of these venues, reach out to me and

just be like, thank you for the review.

We really appreciate you taking the time to

share that.

And it just builds that extra little relationship

with them.

Yeah.

And I mean, this one, I think, is

the one that says 8,000.

Yeah, this has 8,000 views.

But I think that's what's old.

What are you past 30,000 or?

I think so.

And it was pretty high.

And that's just from reviewing wedding venues and

vendors, right?

Yeah.

I think that was a test of like

four wedding venues.

And then I did one cafe while I

was at a cafe.

But that test was in early November.

So it's a couple of months, 30,000

views so far.

That's pretty cool.

And even if those things aren't necessarily impacting

rankings directly, it's such a strong way to

become part of the community.

You're really actively participating in the local conversation

about businesses and services that are near you

and that are relevant to your target audience.

Now, you mentioned using your personal profile.

This one's a little bit tricky, the way

that it works.

And I know that I've experimented a little

bit.

The way that I settled on doing this

was I set up all of my business

Google properties through a Google account for the

business.

So things like search console and analytics and

just everything that has to do with verifying

my business, my Google business profile, all of

that uses the same email address.

And then I use that same email account

to do the reviewing for the business.

Now, like you mentioned, when you're using the

app, it doesn't let you necessarily display your

name as your business name.

You may be able to.

It kind of depends on your business name,

especially if your business name is your name,

then just using your name is probably completely

fine.

You could use your business logo or maybe

you holding a camera as your profile picture

for that account.

And you can become a local guide if

you really get into this.

There's a whole local guide program.

Google has advice, they have training, they have

meetups for local guides.

It's like gamified.

You can get points for leaving reviews.

And as you leave more reviews, you become

a higher and higher level of local guide.

And there's lots of theories out there that

local guides get more weight in their reviews

of different businesses.

They're more likely to be shown in the

previews and things like that.

So when you're writing your reviews, make sure

you're including high quality photos.

And also make sure that the reviews you

write are very thoughtful and they're using keywords

that are relevant to that business, to your

business.

You should be able to write some of

these things pretty naturally, but still be very

intentional about the way that you write them

from your perspective as a professional photographer.

So if you're reviewing a wedding venue, for

example, just being able to talk about the

lighting and the atmosphere and the architecture, whatever

it is that you notice as a photographer

about the venue or why you love it

as a wedding photographer, or maybe you don't

love it as a wedding photographer, all of

those are valid things to review.

Perfect.

After that, Lizzie might be writing some local

roundups.

And this is yet another example from my

site where vegans are part of my main

audience and my main potential client base.

And so I made a vegan roundup or

a guide to Portland.

There are some directly wedding related topics here,

like the best vegan wedding vendors, vegan wedding

cakes, vegan catering companies.

But the primary reason I'm writing this guide

is to get a huge number of traffic

from people that are visiting Portland or live

in Portland that are vegan.

And also to show expertise overall with Portland

and veganism in general for my site.

Yeah.

And I mean, writing this has so many

benefits, but one of them is you're listing

all of these entities.

These different businesses are part of Google's knowledge

graph.

Google understands that.

What's that first one on there?

Mistacones is part of Portland.

Like it's located in the same area that

you're trying to optimize your overall website for.

And you are basically associating your business and

your brand with all of these entities that

are Oregon, Portland based.

And so that's one of the really cool

side effects is that Google can see, understands

the relationship between your business and these entities.

Any other things that you can think of,

like good reasons to do this?

I can think of at least one more.

Totally.

So it also is a great chance to

build relationships with other local businesses.

Yeah.

I've met personally with the owners of multiple

businesses that are featured in this guide, and

I just started writing it last week.

So it's just a great way to say,

Hey, I'm a photographer.

Can I take a few photos of your

business?

I'm featuring it in this guide.

Your restaurant's one of my favorites.

And hopefully then they share me and my

photography with people that they know.

And it's just great relationship building with local

business owners.

Yeah.

And pro tip, when you write this first

and go to talk to these business owners

and show them that you've already done the

work to research them, that you know what

you're talking about, that you've actually put together

a thoughtful guide and that they are included

and maybe spoken about positively.

Why would those people not be willing to

give you a quote or maybe share it

if they have an audience?

It's just such a good way to build

a relationship to go ahead and write this

kind of thing first and then reach out.

Totally.

All right.

This leads into collaborating with local businesses.

We have a course member in our group

that's proven this time after time where she's

written really great guides for local businesses.

This one's a dress boutique in her local

city.

She met with the owners.

She took photos of all the studios.

She interviewed them all.

And then she would share links to their

website to blog posts that they've done that

were relevant.

And likewise, it looks like they've shared links

to this guide as well.

So really good networking.

Yeah.

And I think that whenever I think about

link building, a lot of people feel a

little bit cringy about link building or like

it's going to be really difficult.

And I like to just take that and

instead call it a collaboration.

Right.

Say, how could I collaborate with other business

owners to do some sort of joint project

or how can I help them?

And they might also be able to help

me.

And just thinking through collaborations might make it

much easier for you to start approaching other

businesses that would be interested in linking to

your website.

All right.

Winning local best of awards.

This is one that I think I did

when one once really early in my career.

And I wish I still had the little

trophy or something to put on my site

because it was pretty cute.

But yeah, this is another example of networking

locally to get more votes and just be

listed as a winner of an award like

this is a huge sign to Google that

you are an actual local authority.

That it's just proving the fact that you

are the best photographer in town.

So it's definitely worthwhile to go after these.

Yeah, I feel like some of them are

pretty cheesy and cringy.

And, you know, I've seen a lot of

photographers talking about how it's not worth doing

this at all.

And, you know, that kind of stuff.

Maybe it's like, you know, the not best

of or the there's like, you know, expertise

dot com.

And like some of these are just like,

oh, I don't really care about that.

Now, this particular example is from where I

live.

This is in the free times.

It's, you know, just the free newspaper.

They do this every year and it's a

pretty big deal around here.

Like a lot of businesses really get into

it.

It's almost like just an annual tradition to

reach out to your customers and remind them

to go vote for you.

And people get really into it and they

vote every day and they share it with

their friends.

And I mean, if you don't have that

kind of thing in your area, that's fine.

Maybe you can find something else that's similar.

But the idea is just that of like

being part of the community and recognizing that

your community probably has several different methods of

voting or nominating local businesses and then featuring

them in some sort of roundup.

All right.

Hosting and attending local meetups.

This can be huge.

I have one local photographer that I can

think of that hosts like Halloween and different

holiday parties for photographers and just like semi

-regular meetups.

And she's become one of the most successful

photographers in our town because everybody sends her

inquiries and jobs and stuff like that.

And likewise, she's very networked.

So she's sending out all of her excess

jobs.

And so she's the person you want to

be really good friends with.

And so it shows how building those interpersonal

relationships can really help your business.

Yeah.

And I would totally recommend putting these on

websites like Eventbrite and meetup.com and any

other local event hosting platforms because these are

often indexed.

They have different kinds of links out and

some of them let you put your website

and things like that.

But even if you can't put your website,

if you can see in the screenshot here,

Megan on this particular Eventbrite event has hosted

12 events in the past and has 10

upcoming.

And each of those events has its own

page that Google has indexed.

They see that name.

They associate it with doing these workshops and

classes in the city associated with teaching photography

in that city.

Google pays attention to those kinds of things.

So there's definitely in the index and they

can associate that with your brand and your

name.

So just setting these up naturally.

Don't worry too much about like, does it

have a followed link and all of that?

Certainly if that is available, it's even better.

But just having these profiles on these sort

of like local networking sites, some of them

even will allow you to have your business

as the host and let you set up

a whole profile for your business.

So it's pretty cool.

There's more potential to this than I think

a lot of people recognize.

It's one of those things where when you're

doing a local Google search and you see

someone who's ranking and you're just like, their

website's not better than mine.

They're not doing any SEO.

And what is getting these people to rank?

It's often I'm not saying this one thing

is the thing, but like there's some invisible

factors in many cases where it's like that

person's probably popular locally.

They have done some work to build a

reputation and Google has picked up on something

that is showing that they are relevant to

this area.

So sometimes it may be something like this.

All right.

Should we talk about Nerdy Ned?

Nerdy Ned.

What in the world is he building there?

All right.

Well, Nerdy Ned is he's obsessed with technical

things and is very, you know, very into

using tools and data and understanding exactly how

things work.

And this is something that's somewhat intimidating to

a lot of photographers.

They don't necessarily want to be Nerdy Ned.

Now, we know quite a few Nerdy Ned

photographers and they often do very well with

their SEO.

So we're going to include this, but just

recognize this isn't necessarily the only way to

do SEO.

But if you really get into it, you

can win with some of these methods.

All right.

Here's just a quick example.

And it's showing a headings map, which is

a Chrome extension.

And it's also showing keyword densities and how

many times the keyword is used that they're

trying to rank for, which is the salt

marsh hall gardens.

Yeah.

Actually, real quick, just to kind of show

what's going on or like so you can

kind of do the same thing to your

site.

Because I do feel like this is worth

at least poking at sometimes when you're visiting

a website.

If you go on a site and then

you press control or command F for find

and then type in a keyword that you're

interested in or a part of a keyword,

it will highlight it on the page.

And if you look at the right side

where that scroll bar is, it shows you

every place where that keyword appears on the

page.

And what you'll often see on photography websites

that are not very optimized is that there's

like the keyword at the very top and

maybe at the very bottom and the footer

and all the space in between where that

word doesn't appear at all.

And so seeing it distributed throughout the page

and having it pretty even and having it

some headings and having it some body copy,

it can make a difference.

It really can.

We're not necessarily the kind of SEO teachers

that are going to like give you some

exact number for keyword density and tell you

exactly how many times you should use your

keyword and where because we want it to

be natural and written for humans.

But there are certain tools that really can

break it down like that.

One of them is Surfer.

In fact, the person that you're seeing this

screenshot from use Surfer to write this and

Surfer will tell you exactly how many times

your keyword should appear based on the competitors

and how many times they're using similar keywords

and where they're using keywords and alt text

and headings and everything like that.

So that is something where you may or

may not need to get really specific about

understanding keyword density, but sometimes it can really

pay off to really know this particular example.

The photographer had something before they did this

sort of optimization and it was like page

three or four, went in, used Surfer and

reworked the keyword density and variations of the

keyword and things like that according to the

suggestions, went to position three within a matter

of hours.

So it's not saying that that's typical results,

but we do see things like that sometimes.

All right.

Sub two second mobile loading time, whatever it

takes.

So NerdyNed probably is just doing the cutting

edge of performance to make sure that the

website is just instant load.

They might be on a static site generator.

They might have like zero JavaScript at all.

They're literally pulling every little bite out of

their website that they can.

So this is an example from our group.

That's one of the photographers that we see

talking about performance a lot and they're redoing

their website and it's obviously screaming fast and

it shows that it can be done.

You can have a photo intensive photography website

that is still very, very fast.

It's just going to cost money, take time

and take a lot of knowledge.

Dylan, when does it matter for your site

to be fast?

Like I hear a lot of people talking

about performance as like one of the main

things that you need to do with SEO.

Do you think it's one of the main

things?

As far as we know, it's more of

a tiebreaker.

So when Google makes the ranking calculation, looking

at all of the different factors, if you

come out to a rough tie with another

page for who should be ranked better, they're

going to look at which one's performing better

and just say like we'd rather give the

faster result to that site.

Do you think it's important to pass core

vitals?

I do.

I do think that in this day and

age, it's fairly important for most photography sites

to pass core web vitals, although that is

fairly, it's not a given.

It's pretty difficult actually.

Yeah, I would say it's interesting because if

you look at the top ranking sites, most

of them seem like they don't pass core

vitals in many markets, especially for photography head

terms.

The things like Portland Wedding Photographer, I see

that those homepages on photography sites are pretty

rarely passing core web vitals.

Do you think that they're getting penalized for

that?

It seems like they're still ranking fine.

Yeah, so that's kind of a term where

you take it case by case.

Those head term main Portland Wedding Photographer rankings,

in my experience, seem to be much more

authority driven.

And local probably.

Exactly.

Huge backlink profiles, a lot of experience, a

lot of local reviews and citations and those

local links and mentions and everything, which is

going to help them rank even if their

site's taking five to 10 seconds to load.

Likewise, the really competitive topics for maybe informational

content where there's a hundred people writing this

like how to elope in Colorado blog post,

you might have a hard time ranking for

that if your load time is seven seconds

versus two seconds or one second or something.

Right.

I feel like my take on it is

that if you're looking at these kinds of

things and just obsessing over trying to get

better scores, you're probably missing the point in

a lot of cases.

But these scores are indicators for underlying problems.

And if you have a lot of problems

and if you're not passing core vitals, these

days Google has to crawl the web really

fast.

And they're having to dedicate more and more

resources to fighting spam and now checking AI

content and who knows what else they're using

their compute power on.

They don't necessarily want to spend it on

waiting for websites to load and will often

see intermittent problems with Google accessing the content

on sites that are not technically excellent.

Cough, Squarespace, cough.

All right.

Nerdy Ned probably has a subscription to multiple

pro SEO tools.

mentioned surfer a trust and some Russia to

that we talked about quite often.

And these are used for everything from looking

at what backlinks your competitor might have to

their website to doing really in detail keyword

research for different countries and locations and topics

and everything.

Or maybe even tools like screaming frog or

site bulb that can crawl your entire site

and find all these little technical glitches that

you should fix.

Things that most photographers will never, ever need

to learn how to use.

But if you're really technical and want to

take the time and spend the money.

You can see great results.

Yeah, that's, that's exactly what I would say

if you want to be nerdy Ned.

Associate with this sort of avatar then picking

one of these tools and really doing a

deep dive watching a bunch of YouTube videos

on how to use it is practicing playing

with it for hours a week just for

a while to really start to understand what

you can do with it.

You'll be surprised at how much of a

competitive advantage that can give you in many

cases.

So it's not required.

You don't necessarily need these type of tools

to be successful with SEO, but it is

one way that you may be able to

gain an advantage.

All right, checking Google Search Console every day.

This is something that I'm definitely guilty of.

I check it for all of the sites

I'm actively working on every day.

What about you?

You know, I probably check it once a

week.

I'm like slightly less nerdy.

That's healthy, you should say.

I've even been known to switch it from

the normal data view, which is going to

show yesterday's data to now they have show

latest date.

So like throughout the day, you can see

the impressions and clicks coming in.

And I'm always thinking like, okay, it's 11

a.m. I should be roughly like 40

% or so of my daily clicks.

Like, where are we at?

Nice.

Yeah.

You're going to have like a whole monitor

dedicated to this soon.

Exactly.

That's probably getting too fine of detail, but

it's fun for me to see progress and

see changes and see if a post that

I just published last week is getting impressions

and if they're growing and what the ranks

are doing, etc.

I do think that really getting familiar with

Search Console, if you're picking just one tool,

Search Console should probably be it.

And really understanding how the filters work and

how to switch between pages and queries and

be able to look at different devices and

do comparisons of date ranges to be able

to see the difference in clicks or impressions

over a certain period of time.

All of these things are pretty nerdy, but

also quite essential to being able to know

whether the things that you're testing are working.

So if you're doing SEO and you're experimenting

yourself, spending some time to get to know

Search Console is almost always going to be

worth your while.

Yeah, I would say I hear from so

many photographers in our course that, let's say

like 40 to 70% of their inquiries

come from Google.

So having a great way to check how

Google's doing is probably pretty key.

Yeah, and just so people who aren't familiar

know, Search Console is about, it's all about

what happens in Google Search, organic Google Search,

right?

So this is not, if you look in

analytics, you can see traffic from social and

traffic from direct and all of these other

sources.

But with Search Console, it's only organic search.

It doesn't include paid.

It does include like map pack and featured

snippets and things like that.

And there's a few other things that are

in parts of Search Console that you can

get to.

But if you want to know how your

site's performing exactly which queries people are using

to find which pages on your site, that's

all found in Search Console.

Did you want to intro Featured Fatima?

Yeah, Featured Fatima is all about getting their

work noticed, right?

And so a lot of photographers will tell

us things like, I don't want to be

a web developer.

I just want to be a photographer.

Or, you know, I don't want to learn

all this about SEO and be a professional.

I just want to be a photographer.

And this is one way that you can

win by really just being a photographer.

I mean, there's some effort.

There's some things you're going to have to

do.

But these things can really pay off.

And we have seen so many people who,

despite all of the flaws in their, you

know, following SEO best practices, their site could

be absolutely terrible.

It really doesn't matter which platform you're on

or anything.

If you can get a significant number of

backlinks and get featured nationally and internationally, so

that your name becomes known in the industry

and even potentially, you know, among households.

I saw some examples like that recently where

it's like they're getting recognition on morning shows

and like all kinds of stuff as photographers.

Those people at some point will really not

have to worry about anything else.

It's just going to basically give you a

cheat code and you can rank for almost

anything just with very, very minimal effort.

Results may vary, but that's the idea here

is that you can gain authority by being

featured on other websites.

What are some of the specific strategies?

So, one is just having a publication bucket

list.

And I'll admit, I was a little bit

of a featured Fatima earlier on in my

career, where when I thought about SEO, I,

of course, I was trying to do all

the other stuff, but I wasn't, I didn't

have that much technical knowledge.

I didn't, I wasn't great at local SEO.

I barely filled out my Google, my business

as it was called then.

But what I did do pretty well at

was making sure that I could get every

single wedding I shot featured in some sort

of wedding blog and then also submit to

every like wedding photo competition.

I could just try to get those backlinks

and press.

So here's a list from my site.

It's the top, I think it's the top

100 wedding blogs and I need to update

it because it says 2020.

But yeah, just going down that list and

seeing if you can get any sort of

feature from those blogs, any sort of backlink.

Yeah.

The idea with the, um, the bucket list

is that you should have some features that

are really difficult to get.

Know that some of these are going to

be almost impossible.

We do hear a lot of photographers who

are like, uh, I'm, I can't get featured.

I don't have the right style of work.

Well, sorry to tell you, but there's someone

out there who wants to feature pretty much

every style of work.

Uh, and knowing like a top 10 list

of the ones that you know you want

to get on often the best of the

best of these like wedding blogs will have,

um, a process, a specific process they want

you to use to submit.

You may need to play the long game

here.

You may need to like get to know

their editor.

You may need to, um, start interacting with

their blog and leaving comments.

You may need to buy a profile.

There's all kinds of things that you can

do when you know exactly which publications you're

trying to attract and you should go for

those with the work that you know fits

specifically for that publication.

So when you have, in this case, if

you have a wedding that really fits the

green wedding shoes vibe, well, that's where you

submit first and exclusively, uh, the, the big

sites will usually want an exclusive at least

for some period of time.

Uh, whereas some of the lower tier blogs

don't really care if you submit to as

many as you want.

Um, real quick before we move on from

this.

Yeah, we had mentioned wedding blogs and I

imagine that a lot of people watching our

wedding photographers, but what about the ones who

are not wedding photographers?

What's your thought on how to get published

as a newborn photographer or a headshot photographer

or something?

That's a little bit less likely to have

a lot of publications out there.

Totally.

I mean, it's, it's interesting nowadays.

I think you can find a blog or

a magazine or like some sort of publication

like that for almost every specialty.

Um, outside of that, maybe HARO, helper reporter

out, um, for that, you're, you're going to

see prompts for articles that writers are writing

for their publications and they, they need somebody

to interview her.

And, um, you, you just have to kind

of get creative to think about what strengths

you have, what knowledge you have as a

business owner, as a photographer, et cetera.

Um, and how you can offer your opinion

where, where it's relevant.

Uh, but that's, that's been one wedding or

non-wedding related tip I have for link

building.

Let me give a couple other examples real

quick.

One would be some sort of personal project.

So, uh, for example, I worked with someone

before who had a, uh, uh, self portrait,

I think they did 365 days of self

portraits and you know, they were really good

and it was something that got national coverage.

I mean, they submitted it and it was

on, um, Buzzfeed and board Panda and pretty

much like every popular site did some sort

of write up on this photographer and their

journey through a year of self portraits.

Uh, so personal projects are a great way

to get, uh, publications and features.

Um, and I mean, like Dylan said, there's,

there's always some sort of website that's interested

in, in featuring, um, work from photographers.

So you may have to think, how can

I get credited for providing photos?

Um, or my expertise that's like slightly related

in.

So there's, there's lots of opportunities there.

What about for the things that are not

on the bucket list?

What's next?

Yeah.

So you can use publication services.

Uh, two bright lights is one that I

think is quite popular.

Um, and matchology by our society.

Those are like the two big, most popular

ones that we know about for sure.

Um, and they have what hundreds between them

of sites that you can submit to.

Exactly.

And one of my favorite features I've, I've

used to write lights a little bit in

the past.

I actually have a few that I submitted

in the past few months that I need

to check on them.

Uh, but one of my favorite new features

is where you can have a pool of

single images and publishers can grab from that.

If they just need like one cake photo,

uh, they can grab that one photo and

you're still going to get the same backlink

as having a full blog post written about

you.

So, uh, that can be a really good

way to get the, uh, backlinks from a

huge collection of different sites.

Yup.

And while we won't go too much into

this, I think that Pinterest is another good

strategy for a featured Fatima who is looking

to make sure that it's very easy for

people to just happen across their best work

and stumble on those pens that are likely

to get repinned, reshared.

Uh, whenever I was deep into wedding photography,

some of my best links came from me

just pinning things on Pinterest and some, uh,

blog author, just doing a roundup of their

own.

Pens and then writing that and then linking

to my site.

So that can also be another way to

do the same thing.

All right.

Uh, featured Fatima probably knows what it takes

to get featured and is sure to photograph

for that goal for being featured.

Uh, I just grabbed these off of my

last blog post I put up on my

site, but it's just showing like what actually

matters versus what photographers.

Maybe their ego wants to show off and

you just have to think about like what,

what wedding blogs are there for.

And it's to inspire people that are planning

weddings and they like to be inspired by

seeing details and ceremony shots and, uh, shots

of reception, uh, areas that are just the

chairs, everything bare without people.

Uh, so show those, you'll probably get featured

more.

Yeah, this, I think that is really great

advice for like in general, if you want

to get featured a lot, then learn what

most publications are looking for and make sure

that you have some of that.

But that being said, there are publications out

there that try to go against the grain,

right?

There are publications that want to show everything

except for the details.

There are publications that want to show only

moments.

There are publication for only proposals.

There are publications for like all kinds of

things.

And just knowing what exactly they're going for

and making sure that you shoot for that

makes it so much more likely for you

to get accepted whenever you submit.

Speaking of that, you should probably try to

win some photo contests and competitions.

Fearless is a great example of a blog

where it's not detail shots.

It's everything, but, and it's just letting photographers

really flex their creativity and show off their

skills.

And so I think this is a, if

you're not loving just being a stylized shoot

type photographer, go in this direction, really try

to get the best like fearless style photos

or photojournalistic.

Yeah, there've been quite a few popular photo

contests over the years.

Fearless has stuck it out for a long

time.

And I feel like fearless also has the,

there's a certain part of the photography industry

who, if you win multiple fearless awards, they're

really going to start to notice you.

So this is a way for you to

not only like show, it's not necessarily for

Google and for your clients, like they don't

necessarily care which awards you're winning, but getting

the, your name mentioned in the roundups on

the leaderboards on all of those things.

Google may notice those.

And also, like I said, it's just another

way to start networking in the industry to

start getting recognition.

Maybe you'll end up starting to get on

these like 30 under 30 list or top

photographers of the year by some other roundup.

Like that's how you get featured like that

is by submitting your work and proving over

and over again that you can win, that

you are actually one of the best photographers

at doing what you do.

Should we meet practical Peter?

Practical Peter.

I love his outfit.

It's so practical.

I know.

Well, practical Peter is all about making things

very simple and keeping them simple for the

user.

He'll probably just have pricing just very straightforward

on his homepage or on his site, allowing

people to book directly from the website without

having to go through an elaborate contact and

phone call and hide, like hide the nut

kind of thing where like, you just, you

never know how much it's going to cost

until after the shoot and you get to

the ordering session or something.

He's the opposite of that.

He wants everything to be just very upfront,

very clean, very easy to just let people

book and have a very nice workflow.

I will say one thing that's kind of

important about practical Peter is that he's often

offering a service that is already something that

people know that they want, right?

It's the typical service that a photographer would

offer.

So this works really well for search because

if you're trying to meet the typical user,

that's probably the typical searcher.

And if you can really meet the needs

of the average person, the likelihood of you

showing up in Google goes up significantly because

Google is looking for the sites that are

most likely to fit the needs of the

average searcher.

And so it's, it's really, it's a mindset

that says, I think that most people want

this to be easy.

And I think that does very well for

search.

And that's why we've included it as an

avatar here.

So what are some specific things?

You mentioned some, but let's look at some

examples.

Totally.

So a website being extremely easy to use

and work well on all devices.

In modern times, you should probably just be

thinking mobile first.

So next time you find yourself tweaking your

website or starting fresh with a brand new

design, you should probably start sketching it out

on mobile before you even think about the

desktop.

Think about the user experience and, and how

people are going to be interacting with your

site on a phone.

And so keeping that very simple and clean

and functional is going to be key for

a modern website.

So let's make that the easiest thing for

them to do.

Go ahead and look at the pricing.

This is not the right approach for everyone.

Some people will hate this idea, but it

can work very well.

And we see it work very well for

the examples that we're showing here.

We know that a lot of these photographers

have had feedback from the people who end

up booking them, talking, just raving about how

easy it was and how they loved the

experience and how practical it was.

Yeah, here's just an example listing straightforward, full

pricing on the website.

It's, it's just very easy for people to

make the decision.

Do I want this?

Does it make sense for me?

Is this the photographer I should use?

And that right there, they can book the

session.

Right.

This was a headshot photographer and it's like,

if, if someone already knows that they need

a headshot for a specific purpose and they

just need a photographer to do it and

they just need to go book that right

now, they don't want to email back and

forth a dozen times and try to figure

things out and schedule it.

And all of that, I mean, maybe they

have a secretary that does that, maybe not,

but like the idea is if you can

just tell them exactly what they're looking for

and they never have to contact you until

they are ready to book, then a lot

of people really love that kind of convenience.

I think it's becoming more and more common

for searchers to expect to be able to

find this kind of information.

Again, I know there will be people who

will disagree and we're not saying this is

the only way, but just from some feedback

that we've seen, we know this works very

well.

Google likes this kind of thing.

And they will often, they can look at

this and see numbers, dollar signs, specific things

that are likely to be part of packages.

You might see words that are related to

pricing and they know if someone's looking for

packages or pricing or anything like that, this

page is going to serve them well.

And so Google will prioritize that in certain

cases.

All right, they're going to make it possible

to book online.

This isn't possible with every type of niche

or specialty, but making this process simple for

people is going to unlock certain doors.

Like Google might give you the ability to

book straight from search results or straight from

the Google Map result, which is just huge

because the future of Google will be that'll

book straight from a voice assistant or something

like that.

Like book that photography session.

Okay, it's done.

So having that ability on your site can

be a benefit.

For sure.

Yep.

There's lots of different ways to implement that

as well.

Just as a side note, you can see

in this case, this is actually a Squarespace

site that just has the like e-commerce

option and it's like book your session fee.

So in this case, it may be that

the photographer has already talked to the client

a couple of times or like confirm some

things and then sends them directly here to

just go ahead and book that session fee.

It's all about just making things convenient and

easy and using your website as a tool

that makes this whole process easier.

Yeah, here's an example of a pricing calculator.

Do you want to talk about this a

little bit?

Yeah, I love calculators and there are sites

out there that will make these for you.

In fact, this one was built with one

of those types of services where if you

just go and search for like pricing calculator

builder or something like that, there are sites

that will be able to put this together

for you.

You can also hire a developer.

Pretty much anyone who knows JavaScript, any front

-end developer should be able to put something

like this together.

Last time I hired someone to do a

calculator, I think I paid them around $150

or something like that.

So it's not like incredibly expensive to get

something like this made and it's just so

interactive.

It's convenient.

It answers people's questions before they have to

ask them.

They get to like play with it and

it feels like if you go here and

you move the slider around and you like,

you know, check your options.

This one, you can see the check marks

for engagement session and second photographer.

Those are options you can uncheck and you

see the price updating and you're like, you're

able to sort of say, huh, I can

make this work with my budget.

And, you know, that's just, it's such a

good place to start when you feel like

you already understand how the pricing is built

and exactly how it works.

Cool.

All right.

Teaching Tanya.

This is going to be a fun one.

You've mentioned thought leadership.

What is that?

Thought leadership is using, and it's not like

this is the exclusive definition, but we're talking

about using your website to join an online

conversation, right?

To participate in the people who, in the

conversation with the people who talk about the

thing that you want to be known for.

And so you're able to demonstrate your expertise,

your experience, your opinions, and you do that

competently and with authority so that hopefully you'll

find the people who agree with you and

want to follow you.

And so that's the idea of this thought

leadership is you're looking to build an audience

of people who agree with the same kinds

of philosophies, the same opinions, the same things.

And so sometimes this means being controversial, not

always, but that is a really solid way

to become a thought leader is to have

an opinion that only certain people will agree

with.

And then, again, we're talking about using your

website to really prove your authority by written

content, essentially.

Oops, skipped one.

One sign that you're a thought leader could

be that you have a Patreon or a

membership where people subscribe to be taught by

you on a monthly basis.

There are now many sites.

I guess Patreon is probably the most popular

where Google can see if an educator has

a Patreon, that probably proves some level of

expertise.

Yep.

I wonder how much Google looks at the

activity.

Within a Patreon, it's going to be behind

some sort of wall.

I don't know exactly how much they can

crawl or scrape from these things, but I

imagine the ones that are really popular, especially

if they show how many subscribers, I would

imagine Google at least has some data on

some of those things where they can see.

It's even brought to my mind, if you

are a teacher who put something on, started

it and now I can't think of the

name of it, the course website where you

can subscribe for $15 a month.

It's like all the YouTube channels.

You know what I'm talking about?

Is it Coursera?

That's one of them, but there's another one.

I'm sure everybody will know what I'm talking

about.

I know which one you're talking about as

well.

I wonder if the ones that have more

views, like what if you're on CreativeLive and

you have more downloads.

Do people still use CreativeLive?

That kind of stuff, does it matter if

Google sees that you have more viewers or

subscribers on something like this, do you think?

It could.

There's also the indirect metrics that Google could

easily look at.

Does having a very popular Patreon also make

you possibly have more branded search or people

searching, in this example, Sam Heard Patreon?

That's just another sign that you're popular in

the education space.

This isn't really part of our slides here,

but I have a side quest here.

What about social following?

If you have 100,000 Instagram followers or

a large following on Twitter or something like

that, does that matter?

I imagine that most thought leaders do have

some sort of social platform where they are

participating in conversation.

It's one of the easiest ways to have

conversations online nowadays.

Is that part of what Google is looking

at?

I would say that it's definitely another one

of those, at least indirectly, yes.

I don't know if they're counting the number

of likes on a page and then saying

that that's a popular profile, therefore, it's going

to have more authority than the other.

There are so many ways that you can

point to indirect links.

Whenever you have a popular social media account,

there are going to be so many ways

you can benefit from that with your SEO.

I would say it's no matter what a

benefit, I don't know if it's direct or

indirect.

I'm going to give a little thought here

while we're on this little side quest.

If I were making a search engine and

trying to come up with something to give

some idea about whether someone was a thought

leader, whether they were popular, one thing I

would probably look at is frequency of posting.

I'm not trying to claim if you post

a lot, you're more likely to rank on

Google, but it seems like there's a pattern

where you see a lot of people who

are thought leaders post a lot for a

while and then it just goes dead.

I wonder if the ones who don't go

dead, the ones who consistently show up for

years in a row with daily posts and

regular interactions and growing a following over time,

we know that there's at least something with

this concept of velocity.

We know that backlink velocity and review velocity

are both things that Google looks at whenever

they're trying to consider whether someone is currently

relevant or popular.

All of that to say, these are things

that you might want to be thinking about.

If you're trying to be a thought leader,

it takes time, it takes consistency, and the

idea is to build it up over time.

I do believe that there are, at least

theoretically, there are ways that Google knows about

those kinds of things.

I would go straight to branded search.

If you are the person that's just publishing

consistently once a day or once a week,

you're going to have a very even branded

search over time.

If you look at the past 16 months

in Search Console, it's going to be a

fairly straight and hopefully increasing line, whereas those

people that blog every six months, they might

have this, who is this again?

People are Googling it to see what's going

on.

That's such a good little nugget.

Just real quick, when you say branded search,

for someone who might not be familiar with

that term, what does that mean?

The name of your business or you as

an entity.

For me, people searching Dylan Howell or Dylan

Howell SEO or Dylan Howell photography, Google is

going to see that as a signal that

people are interested in me as a topic

or me as an entity.

In general, you want as many people as

possible both doing that search for you and

then clicking on to your entity, to your

website, etc.

I think that's one of those things that

a lot of people overlook.

They'll be like, oh yeah, well of course

you can rank for your brand, but you

want to really curate what shows up in

that branded search and really make sure that

you are trying to encourage people to search.

It's funny, I do branded search for our

own brands sometimes for Feel Your Photos.

Today, I did it.

Someone in our group was asking about site

links and I went to Google and I

typed in Feel Your Photos site links to

try to get to that YouTube video that

I posted.

A lot of people do that kind of

thing.

They know that someone talked about this.

Maybe I would say Sam Heard Prism or

something like that.

I'm sure that probably gets a huge amount

of search volume because it's something that's related

to the person and a concept that they

talk about regularly.

All right, next up.

Cool.

Teaching workshops.

I believe you had a great example of

a photographer who had this education section on

their site and did they delete it or

something and their ranking suffered?

Oh man, yeah, I forgot about that.

This was someone who was ranking first page

for destination wedding photographer.

Everyone was going for this for a while.

I haven't heard it quite as much lately,

but the people who were trying to rank

for that, I'm always trying to tell them

that's going to be really hard because you're

up against everyone in the world.

This guy was ranking for something like that,

had every feature you can imagine, which is

a very, very popular photographer for a long

time who was doing six figure weddings and

stuff like this where it's just big, big

time.

Had a whole thing on workshops on the

site.

Slash for photographers or something like that and

did a popular workshop and whenever they removed

that page, they were like, I'm not going

to do workshops anymore.

I don't really think I need this.

Just removed it from the site.

Just deleted it.

The ranking for destination wedding photographer went down

drastically, like instantly went to page five.

So that was really interesting to see that

in that particular query, we don't say this

is not necessarily across the board, but for

that case, it seemed that there was a

very strong correlation between having something on the

site about workshops and being able to rank

for a term like destination wedding photographer.

Yeah, it's funny to me because it's an

example of how sometimes Google's might see a

trend between the photographers that they think are

all the best for certain locations or locations

in general.

And they might see that all of them

have this for photographers section or workshops.

And it's because they're probably already successful and

they want to teach at that point in

their career.

And so Google then associates that having that

section of your site is a ranking signal

to be a good photographer result.

Yeah, again, not for everyone, but if you're

trying to be a teaching Tanya, then I

think having a for photographer section on your

site is a really strong SEO strategy.

All right, this one's pretty fun.

We don't see this that often, but I

actually came across this example, randomly, a few

days ago, has a media kit that makes

sponsorship or interviewing or being a guest on

a podcast or anything like that very easy

for people.

So if a company wants to sponsor you,

they don't have to email you and ask

you for your headshot and then email and

ask you for your portfolio and then email

and ask for all of your media kit

stats.

You just give it to them, make it

easy, make it easy to be sponsored, to

be a guest, etc.

This was a site I was just blown

away.

This was on their homepage.

They're really proud of the fact that they

have a big following and that it has

these specific metrics.

And they should be because these are strong

metrics.

This is very valuable.

And so they're making it known to companies

and brands and people that would want to

feature them.

Do you think Google notices this too?

Do you think they see media kits?

I guess it's another one of those indirect

factors where if you've got a media kit,

most likely that means you're pursuing teaching at

workshops or speaking engagements or being a guest

on podcasts or something like that.

And that's what really is going to drive

the improved rankings.

But it does seem like it is an

authority signal whenever we right now, you know,

the recent update where it used to be

that Google talked about eat, but now they

talk about eat.

It was expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness, but now

it's experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness.

But it seems like this is the kind

of thing that really demonstrates that an author

is someone who has authority.

Maybe, maybe not.

I'm not sure how much weight they would

put into something like that, but it does

seem like if you're trying to prove that

you're an authority, a way that you can

do that with your website is to just

show that it's easy to book you to

speak.

Cool.

Also, she's going to use her blog as

a tool to share unique ideas, perspectives, and

opinions.

This is an example from a photographer I

know that I remember the night that this

post was published.

It took down his website because he had

so much traffic and he wasn't like on

a crappy shared host.

It was just like Insta traffic, the entire

wedding and wedding photography industry.

Everybody was talking about it.

Like social media was just exploding.

I would just see it like popping up

like multiple times in my Facebook feed from

different people unrelated to sharing it.

That's the power of sharing unique ideas and

perspectives on your blog.

And a side note that when you mentioned

blog, I also would say your YouTube and

other places like that do count.

Those are search engines and those are other

places where you can create a massive audience.

I would say that a place like YouTube

is better than almost any other social media,

but still not quite as good as your

blog.

I think this is right now in 2023.

This is so, so important to have your

own unique ideas, perspectives, and opinions because we're

seeing this rise of AI content and it

is only getting better.

The AI writers are getting better.

They're getting easier to use.

They're more widespread.

Photographers even are pumping out dozens or hundreds

of blog posts that are, you know, they

have the potential to rank, but Google is

recognizing that this is, they're calling it code

red.

It's a major concern for Google and they

are trying to do everything they can to

serve content that's written by humans for humans.

That is going to be an important part

of search engines going forward is having some

sort of way to verify that this is

a real human and they have real opinions

and this is verified to be those opinions.

So practicing at using your blog to share

your ideas and your opinions, this can really

go a long way in becoming a thought

leader.

And right now it's more important than ever.

All right.

Do you have anything else before we wrap

up?

Well, I would love to just mention that

we have the Fuel Your Photos membership.

And if you are interested in the things

that we've been talking about today, these are

the exact kinds of things that we built

a course to teach all of these different

methods.

And we are now selling it as a

membership where we have made the price more

accessible and we really are trying to constantly

add new information.

Right now we are trying to collect data,

do experiments, help students with all kinds of

specific things where they're getting stuck or they

just need someone who is an expert on

these things to give them opinions.

Because like I said in the beginning, SEO

is not a one size fits all kind

of thing.

There's not one course that is going to

work for every single photographer.

But whenever you've been around, like Dylan and

I have been around and seen the photography

industry for, and we've been focusing on SEO,

each of us for 15 years or so,

something along those lines.

And just seeing how the industry has changed

and understanding the context and what works in

certain markets and what works for other specialties

and how can you do this if you're,

you know, whatever the unique scenario is that

you have, we might not know the answer

exactly, but we probably have some insight.

And being able to have a place where

you can have some foundation of information, but

then also have access to a community of

people who have experience and, you know, they

have real data from all around the world

and all kinds of markets.

That's what our membership's all about.

So it's a mixture of education and community,

and we are really excited about it.

And we would love to see any of

you there.

If you are someone who's trying to do

your own SEO or who wants to learn

enough about SEO to be able to hire

someone to help you, we think this is

the place to go to hang out, to

talk about SEO, to learn all these things.

So we would love to see you there.

Dylan, do you have anything else to add

about the membership?

Well, you can help us increase our branded

search by just searching Feel Your Photos and

Membership.

And we'd love to see you there.

If you have any questions, feel free to

reach out.

We're both on Facebook quite a bit.

We have a Facebook group.

So yeah, we would love to see you

over there.

All right.

Well, hopefully you have enjoyed this presentation and

we'll see you later.