Photography Minute » Marketing for Photographers

Book Review: Inbound Marketing – How to get Found

Eric D. Brown — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 16:00:14 +0000

Rather than giving you more tips and hints for SEO and marketing your photography services on the web, I thought I’d take some time to point you toward a book that will answer all your questions and give you all the background you need to start properly marketing yourself.

The book? Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs (The New Rules of Social Media) by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah.

Halligan and Shah are the founders of Hubspot…an extremely successful company helping organizations and people marketing themselves on the web.

If you are wanting/needing to be found on the web, this book will help you understand how to ‘be found’. This book doesn’t provide any specific recipes (do x and y will happen) but it provides the basics for understanding why things will work.

Do the things listed in this book and, over time, you will be found.

This book is an excellent book….go buy it today.

SEO Tips for Photographers: On-page optimization

Eric D. Brown — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 23:17:08 +0000

In this installment of my Marketing for Photographers series, I’m going to follow up the last article, titled “Search Engine Optimization Tips for Photographers“, and talk (or more appropriately, write) a little bit about different methods of SEO.

When you read through SEO websites and “how-to’s”, you might see terms like “on-page SEO” and “off-page SEO”. Both of these SEO methods are extremely important for anyone wishing to be found on the web.

In this post, I’ll talk a bit about ‘On-page’ optimization…look for a future post about ‘Off-page’ optimization.

On-page Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

On-page SEO refers to the many different things you can do on your web page(s) to improve find-ability and search-ability. When looking at on-page SEO, you’ll be thinking about things like page titles, URL’s, keywords and the structure of your web-pages.

According to many SEO experts, the most powerful item on your web page is the page title. The page title receives the most ‘value’ from Google when the search engine indexes your web page, therefore you need to spend a considerable amount of time thinking about your page title.

So…with the page title being one of the most important pieces of your web page, you’ve got to be sure to include your keywords in the title. For more info on choosing keywords, jump back to my Search Engine Optimization Tips for Photographers article for more info.

You know your keywords. You know your audience too. Creating a valuable page title should be pretty easy right? Actually…it is!

Let’s look at an example:

Supposed you’re a wedding photographer in Dallas. Based on research you’ve performed, you know that you want to target the following keywords:

Dallas Wedding Photographer

Dallas Bridal Photographer

Dallas Engagement Photographer

With these targeted keywords in mind, when you’re building web pages and/or writing a post for your blog, you want to ensure you include these keywords on your web page and specifically within your page title if possible.

While creating each page, spend time crafting the title so that your keywords are included as early as possible in your title.

Let’s look at an example:

You want to create a web page about your wedding photography services. Which title would you use?

Wedding Photography Services

Dallas Wedding Photographer – Services

Services – Dallas Wedding Photographer

Based on the previous information, I hope you’d choose #2 – Dallas Wedding Photographer – Services. By selecting this title for your page, you’ve put your keywords at the beginning of the page title and given Google (and other search engines) an excellent idea of what your page is about.

Ok…you’ve got your page title…now what? Try to weave in your other keywords and keyword terms into your page. The more you use your keywords (in context), the more the search engines will understand what your web page is about. Note that i added “in context” to this. You’ve got to write your pages to be readable and easily understood by your visitors. If you try to just cram keywords into your web page, you’ll likely end up hurting yourself more than helping.

Back to our example:

You’ve got your title of Dallas Wedding Photographer – Services. Now, let’s create a few paragraphs of text (I’ve used my wife’s information as an example).

Page: Title: Dallas Wedding Photographer – Services

Subtitle: On-location wedding, bridal and engagement services

Body:

Tracie Brown, the owner of a moment to keep photography, is an on-location wedding, bridal and engagement photographer covering the Dallas and Fort Worth metroplex. Tracie captures your precious moments and creates ever-lasting memories.

Each client and session are different and special – Give us a call today to talk more about how we can help make your wedding memorable – Contact a moment to keep photography today for more information about our Wedding Photography services in the Dallas /Fort Worth Metroplex.

Notice that I didn’t overload the page with my keywords and I made the copy readable.

You’ll also notice that I use links within the text of the page. You’ll want to do the same on your web pages. Make sure to link to other pages on your website to increase the number of links as well as improve relevancy of those pages using the proper anchor text.

Now you’ve got your page built and your keywords on your page….now what? Wait for the traffic to roll in…right? Wrong.

While on-page SEO is extremely important, you’ve still got to get links back to your web page/site. Google uses pointers/links to your site to help determine relevancy and those links are what will drive traffic to your web page. Those links are also what you’ll want to spend a considerable amount of your time building.

How do you get those quality links back to your site? Check back next week for my article on ‘Off-page’ Search Engine Optimization article in my Marketing for Photographers series.

There’s much more to SEO than I have time (or space) to cover here….if you have questions about ‘On-page’ SEO, feel free to contact me with questions.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Photographers

Eric D. Brown — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 16:00:55 +0000

Back in the early days of the Internet, marketing on the web meant putting up a web page up, joining a webring, stuffing your web pages with keywords, posting to forums, paying to be included in portals like yahoo…and traffic would come to your website (of course it was really more difficult than that but you get the idea).

Those times have changed though.

Google change the landscape of internet marketing forever with the advent of their PageRank algorithm that used a more social approach to determine what was the most relevant content on the web. PageRank uses a well guarded algorithm to determine how ‘relevant’ a web page is based on links to that page, what keywords are used when link to the page and a whole host of other issues to determine where each web page ‘ranks’ in Google’s search results.

There’s a whole science behind PageRank and tons of really smart people working on the algorithm. In addition, there are thousands of SEO consultants out there that live and breath this stuff on a daily basis and depend on SEO to pay their bills.

That said, the basics of SEO are fairly straightforward. In this post, I’m going to provide a basic introduction to search engine optimization (SEO) and try to put the basics of SEO into context for photographers trying to market their services.

Being found by prospective clients online is the lifeblood of any service business. To be found, you’ve got to utilize SEO appropriately. Hopefully this introduction and subsequent SEO and Marketing Tips for Photographers will help you understand, use and grow your photography business.

What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

SEO is the art and science of creating content on the web so that the page can be found by search engines. As I mentioned, the previous methods of ‘keyword stuffing’ doesn’t work any longer…today you’ve got to focus on quality content and proper keyword selection so your web page is found and linked to.

The first step in SEO is thinking about the main keywords and terms that you are wanting to capture traffic for. As a photographer, you have a fairly narrow range of terms and keywords (e.g., wedding photographer, etc) but you’ll want to make sure you think through all the possibilities including all the city/state/region keywords and terms you might want to be found for.

Let’s look at an example:

You’re a boudoir photographer in Dallas.

You need to consider what keywords and terms you’d like to be found for when people are searching for your services.

The first term is easy: Dallas Boudoir Photographer.

But the first term may not be the one that the majority of your prospective clients are searching for. What about those people that search for “Dallas Sexy photographer” or “Couture Photographer Dallas” or “Dallas Romantic Photographer”.

One thing you’ll notice is that the city (Dallas) is listed in each search. I don’t have any hard statistics, but most experts will tell you that the majority of searchers will always put in the city name into the search when searching for a local service provider.

So…all of your search terms should contain the city you’re targeting. If you’re targeting multiple cities, states or regions, you’ll need to think about all those keyword/terms in addition to the targeted keywords.

Find the right keywords

How do you know what terms people are searching for? This is where you’ve got to dig in and do some research…or hire someone to research it for you.

Rather than get ALL the search terms, you want to focus on only those that will deliver the most value (and traffic) to your website. To find the ‘right terms’, you can use some online tools to find the most important keywords that are being searched for.

A few tools to use to find the ‘right’ terms are:

Wordtracker offers a free limited version while Trellian and SEO Research Labs are pay for use. The Goolge Adwords Keyword Tool is an excellent option (and easiest to use IMO). Whether you use the free tools are pay for this research, the time and/or money is well spent as it allows you to focus your keywords and terms to the most searched for terms.

So back to our example:

To gather your search terms, jump over to one of the above tools and start searching for keywords to target. Let’s use Google Adwords Keyword Tool and type “Dallas boudoir photographer” into the tool. A screenshot of this tool is shown below.

What do we see?

Google Adwords example for Dallas Boudoir Photography

The results show that the search for that particular term (Dallas Boudoir Photography) doesn’t get a lot of search traffic but ‘boudoir photography’ does.

So…now what?

After some more research and looking through the results, we know that since we are focused strictly on Boudoir Photography in Dallas, we want to focus on that term and we’ll want to ‘own’ that term when someone searches for it (more on that soon). After more research. we’ve decided on two main search terms for our boudoir photography studio:

Dallas Boudoir Photography

Dallas Boudoir Photographer

These terms are easy to target and will bring in the most interested potential clients.

Creating Content with SEO in mind

Now comes the fun stuff! You’ve got to start building your content.

While creating this content, be sure to focus on the keywords you’ve selected. Work them into your content as much as you can but be careful of falling into the keyword stuff trap. You’ve got to create content that is readable and interesting…don’t just stuff your keywords into each post and hope Google finds you.

Let’s look at an example:

You’ve got your blog setup and you want to write a post about your recent boudoir session. Your post might look something like this (my notes are in italic and keywords are bolded):

Title:

Beautiful Boudoir Photography Session in Dallas – or think of something much more creative…but try to get your keywords in the title as early as possible

Body:

I was lucky to meet Julie over the weekend for her Boudoir session. What a beautiful woman! We met at Hotel Zsa Zsa in Dallas (a wonderful hotel and they are happy to host photographers). Julie lives in Plano TX and signed up for her Boudoir Photography Session after seeing the session I did for her friend Denise last month. (use this as an opportunity to link to another post if you can)

Add as many photos as you feel comfortable….and don’t forget to add “Alt Text” to the photos! This helps tremendously in SEO.

{Photo 1}

{Photo 2}

I heard from Julie today and she’s absolutely in love with the photographs and has recommended me to her friends. If you’re interested in booking your own Boudoir Photography Session in Dallas or surrounding areas, please let me know!

See what I’ve done here? I’ve made a readable and enjoyable post that has all my keywords listed as many times as they make sense.

Is SEO all you need?

No.

SEO alone isn’t the answer to being found nor being successful in any business. SEO is a piece of your marketing strategy. Creating a proper inbound marketing strategy includes looking at search engine optimization and SEO techniques but it also includes a strategy of engagement. Engaging with past and current clients and reaching out to potential clients.

Check back soon for more inbound marketing and search engine optimization tips for photographers.

In my next tutorial, I’ll walk through the specifics of writing a blog and what pieces of each post need to be considered. I’ll also highlight the topics that Google seems to think are most important.

Inbound Marketing for Photographers

Eric D. Brown — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 02:10:09 +0000

You take great photographs but nobody ever sees them.

You’ve got tons of high-quality images ready for sale…but nobody ever buys them.

You could shoot a wedding 100 times better than your competition…but you get few calls from prospective clients.

Why is that?

Well….assuming that you’re actually pretty good (and not deluding yourself), the only explanation is that you aren’t marketing yourself well. People just aren’t finding you when they’re looking for a photographer.

If you’re a photographer today trying to sell your prints and/or your services, you have to be found online. How you go about getting found will determine your success or failure in your business.

How can you be found online? You need an inbound marketing strategy for your business.

What is Inbound Marketing?

Inbound marketing is best defined as marketing done in such a way that your potential customers come to you. Inbound marketing is permission based marketing…it isn’t interruption marketing.

Jump over to HubSpot (THE authority on inbound marketing) to read more on the topic of inbound marketing and keep your eye on this blog as I’ll be writing more about inbound marketing strategies and tactics for photographers.

Inbound marketing can provide a tremendous boost to your business.

When was the last time you acted on some offer sent to you via a postcard, cold call or spam email? Probably been a while. While postcards are still a good way for some photographers to reach their target market, they aren’t ideal…the cost / benefit ratio is extremely low. The last research I saw showed less than 1% response rate to postcard mailings…not good.

Now…imagine if you take the money you’d have spent on those postcards and put it to use on the web building your inbound marketing platform. The money you spend on postcards (or other outbound marketing technique) is a recurring expense…you’ve got to keep spending to get new business. Inbound marketing spending is an ongoing expense but you really don’t need to invest heavily multiple times – in fact your largest investment might be your time when using an inbound marketing strategy.

Why is Inbound Marketing important?

Why is any marketing important…it means your future as a photographer.

Being a great photographer means something too…but if nobody knows about you, you’ll starve.

Sure, networking and outbound marketing will still work. In fact, working your network is an absolute necessity still…networking your way into a new project or shoot still works well. Referrals are key in the world of photography.

But…if you are just getting started in the business and/or your marketing hasn’t been working for you, take a look at building an inbound marketing strategy for your business.

This article is the first in a series of articles focused on inbound marketing for photographers. In future articles, I’ll be providing hints and tips on topics such as:

Search Engine Optimization – why it’s important & why it’s really not that difficult (actually…it can be but I’ll show you some basics that make it easier)
Techniques for setting up a website & blog for optimal SEO & Marketing
Techniques for using free and inexpensive tools for setting up your own gallery/portfolio
Hints and Tips for using Social Media for spreading the word about yourself and your services
Why you want to use Flickr and other online photo tools
How you can market yourself while not marketing yourself
+ more!

Look for more of articles on inbound marketing for photographers in the near future.