Over the past two years, I have invested a lot of time in learning search engine optimization techniques. Making tweaks to my website and creating a content strategy, this work finally started to pay off three months ago. Now I’m going to share the SEO knowledge I gathered in a small series of articles. In this article, I focus on how to rank in Google Search.
Like most photographers who give SEO advice online, I am no SEO professional. The knowledge I gained about search engine optimization and how to rank in Google came from a lot of trial and error. Two years ago, I decided to take the development of my homepage more seriously and work on a sustainable way to get traffic, which is an essential step in generating income from a website. And over time, I finally started to understand what I need to do to rank my content on Google.
Why is SEO important?
Most photographers use social media as their primary means of sharing their work. The reward for building an audience there is mainly likes and comments. You can also get some leads and if you have enough followers, you can advertise your products and even make some sales. But for a conversion – turning a follower into a customer – you usually have to get them to visit your website or store first.
Since I don’t like working on social media, I decided to focus on my homepage and get visitors directly from Google. I value an organic click to my homepage on Google Search much more than a like on Instagram. That way, I’m already one step closer to a conversion.
And if you follow the featured video, you’ll learn how you can increase your organic traffic too. Below I show the evolution of clicks and impressions on my website over the last year. As you can see, it took a long time for the optimizations I had made and the content I had created to finally start attracting visitors.
And that’s typical: SEO takes time. While you’ll get likes on Instagram instantly after posting a photo, it can take weeks or even months to get clicks on an article you post on your website. There is no instant gratification.
The second graph shows the development of mine Bangkok Photography Locations Guide, which is the article I use as an example in the video presentation. For the first two months after posting it, it barely got any clicks. And with five or ten clicks a day, it’s still not a traffic magnet. But imagine 30, 40, 50 or even more for those articles – that’s some serious traffic for a small photography website.
And with enough visitors to your home page, with whom you have already started to build a relationship because you answer their questions, you have a good basis for generating income.
To do this, you can use affiliate links in your articles, you can advertise your services and products, you can collect subscriptions for your newsletter, and if you have a lot of traffic, you can even display ads from an ad network.
SEO Foundation
I look at a lot of photography websites. I do this as part of my SEO research. If a page ranks well, I try to understand why. But the truth is that most photography websites do not rank well. Those in the top 10 of Google Search are usually large sites with a lot of authority. Or they belong to popular photographers who have been very prominent. But in general, you’ll rarely see an individual photographer’s home page for generic keywords.
The question is, how can a photographer compete with these great sites? It would be one thing to get the basics right. But what are these?
I find nothing more annoying than searching for something, getting a result from Google, clicking on it, and waiting a few seconds for it to load. This is the case with most photography landing pages. And if I don’t interact with those home pages because they take too long to load, that makes for a bad browsing experience. Google will know.
The easiest thing you can do for your rankings is to fix technical issues on your homepage. There are many tools available that tell you what’s going on. I usually use the Google Search Console to identify pages that need attention, and then PageSpeed Insights to find things to optimize. This is how I got my homepage to be fast.
Check your home page. If you have numbers between 30 and 50, you should optimize your homepage. Best of all, you get tips on how to improve directly from PageSpeed Insights.
But don’t expect a huge jump in search results just because you have a technically perfect homepage. It’s just the base. In the next two sections, we’ll look at how authority can be built. It’s what will allow you to compete in Google Search.
Content strategy
I found that quality is more important on Google than on social media. Recent changes to the search algorithm further solidified this. Google wants you to use Google Search. And it can only achieve this in the long run if it offers good content, apart from the typical paid content.
That’s why one of the most important SEO rules is to create useful and high-quality content. If you write about your own experiences, things you’ve learned, places you’ve visited and photographed, and focus on providing value to a potential visitor to your homepage, you’re already in a good place.
But to build authority on Google, you need a content strategy. It means that you shouldn’t just write articles about random topics that come to mind. You should find a few topics that you know about and make them the content pillars of your home page.
If you are a travel photographer, you can write about the places you visit and the best photo spots. If you’re a publisher, please share tutorials on post-processing techniques. If you are a wedding photographer, you can write about venues. Having a few main topics that you write about helps Google identify you as an authority on them.
When implementing a content strategy, you should also consider ways to convert readers into customers. For photo editing articles, the idea might be: if someone searches for a photo editing technique and clicks on one of your articles, including a link to a photo editing tutorial in your store, they can generate conversions if you generate enough traffic.
So before you jump in and create more content for your homepage, think about the main topics you want to target. If you already have a blog with a lot of articles, review it and do a radical cleanup. By removing 50+ low quality articles from my blog, I increased my Google Search ranking for all my other articles. I found that having less but higher quality content generates more impressions and clicks than having lots of low quality articles.
Keywords
Your content strategy will guide you in finding article ideas. The next step is to find the right keywords for these. Put yourself in the shoes of someone searching for a topic you want to write about. How would this person use Google Search? Try it yourself and see the search results and alternative search terms that Google recommends. Try not to target generic keywords and rather go for mid-tail or long tail keywords. Otherwise, you will have trouble competing.
You can also use the free versions of Semrush, MOZi seability to find search terms you want to target. I show you how to do it in the feature video. These tools will also give you an estimate of the traffic you can expect. I’ve found that these estimates are usually too low, so don’t be discouraged. I also read this Keywords everywhere it gives more accurate numbers, but it’s not free.
Look for common ground when you browse articles that are already ranking for your desired keywords. What are they about? Google will publish content based on search intent. The algorithm will try to understand the intent of people using Google Search. It can be to gather information about something, to make a comparison or to buy something.
While looking through the results for my desired keyword “Bangkok Photography”, I found that Google exclusively published articles about photo locations in Bangkok. It seems that it had been identified that the intention of people searching for “Bangkok Photography” was to find photo locations in the city. Therefore, it also had to serve that intent to rank for that keyword. As of this writing, I rank in the top three.
conclusion
Now you’ve learned how to create an SEO foundation for your homepage. Tackle the low-hanging fruit first and fix technical issues on your homepage. Making sure it loads quickly on both desktop and mobile devices may not lead to a huge improvement in rankings, but it can help you get ahead of your competition for contentious keywords. Then work on your content strategy, clean up existing content, and write high-quality articles. In the next part of this series, we will continue our SEO journey. I share how to create quality content that ranks.
And if you want to learn even more about SEO, check it out Power your photo SEO podcast. I find it to be one of the best online resources for learning about search engine optimization.
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