Whenever I've raised the topic of SEO with other photographers, I see this kind of look come over their face where their eyes get a little glassy and far away. And I can tell that their brain is going very quickly into fight or flight mode where they want to either tell me, like, look, I don't really care, that's not my thing, or they just want to find a way to get out of the conversation. And typically, as a podcaster, I am dedicated to finding topics that are
interesting to you, right? Like, I want you to listen to the show, I want you to enjoy the show, I want you to get value out of the show. And that's not going to happen if you tune out. But the reason that I keep coming back to SEO as a topic is because I know from personal experience, just how valuable a few minor, relatively low impact activities on your end can be. On the backside, when it comes to you getting inquiries into your business. Everybody wants to know, like, how do I get more
inquiries? How can I reach more people, this is a really solid strategy that you have full control over, right? The trick is knowing the rules of the game. And this is where I think a lot of people get turned off, they get scared off because it seems like something that is too big for their tiny business, right? This is like, Oh, well, you know, these big companies have entire teams dedicated to optimizing their websites. And that is true. But we are not in competition with those big
companies, right? We're in competition with other photographers. We've all heard that. That old joke about like the guy's putting on his sneakers. And his friend says, What are you doing, those shoes aren't going to help you outrun the bear. And the friend says, No, I don't have to outrun the bear, I just have to outrun you. So not to inspire lots of competitive thoughts about the people around you. However, getting found on Google is for
sure. One of the best ways to get your business in front of more people. And in the sense that we are in competition with our fellow photographers in our geographic area. The real race is who's getting ranked first, second, and third, who's getting ranked on that first page of Google. These are standings that you have control over today. My guest is Chris Dawkins. Chris is an SEO consultant. He has been working in the field of SEO for decades. So he really knows his
stuff. But beyond that, he's also married to a family photographer and has built his wife's website in such a way that she has never had to do any active marketing to get leads. Chris has an amazing wealth of knowledge. And what that means for you is that today's discussion is going to be filled with actionable tactics that have a big impact. So grab your notebook, grab a cup of coffee, and let's dive in. Welcome to this can't be that hard. My name
is Annemie Tonken. And I help photographers run profitable, sustainable businesses that they love. Each week on the podcast, I cover simple, actionable strategies and systems that photographers at every level of experience can use to earn more money in a more sustainable way. Running a photography business doesn't have to be that hard. You can do it. And I can show you how. Chris Dawkins, welcome to this can't be that hard. How are you today?
I'm doing well. How are you?
I'm doing well. I am excited for what I know is going to be one of those aha packed episodes. We're talking about SEO, we're talking about the, the overwhelm that it can present and how we can kind of get that to the other side. So it's gonna be a juicy one.
Yes, exactly. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here. Yeah.
Well, I'd love to start by having you just, you know, give us a little bit of background, the story of how you came to be a podcaster. Is that is a great one. And I love the name of your podcast, maybe more than any other. Yeah,
so my name is Chris. I'm married to Meredith sinner, a family photographer. I've been an SEO consultant for many years. And when I met Meredith, I created a website for her. I optimized it since then she's gotten enough organic traffic that she hasn't really had to worry about marketing. She has taken lots of courses. She does work on her sales and other aspects of her business. But she has never really had to worry about getting new clients.
So she often tells me though, about what she hears in classes in terms of SEO. And I've always said for years, I've said the same thing. I hear their comments. I'm like, oh, that's kind of old. That's not so great. That's whatever. And I was talking to her one day on the phone. I was in my office and she He was at home and she was saying something that she had learned in a herd in a recent class. And I was like, oh, that's I was explained to her why it was not the greatest
wasn't. And in the middle of that conversation, so why don't we do a podcast about this? Just do this. I'll just kind of debunk SEO myths. And she said, Okay, so we did a podcast the next day, I just scheduled a zoom call, we recorded it, because otherwise I was afraid. I'll just analyze it to happen. So I was like, let's just go we did that. Put it online, we announced it to a small I think we actually announced it to the family narrative Facebook page.
We didn't remember one or two, one or two episodes, because I didn't know is anybody gonna care about this? So put on like, feedback was really good. So okay, let's keep doing it. And at that point, it had no name right was nothing. But during that first episode, one of the first things we did was we introduced ourselves and Meredith introduced herself and said, and then said, I'm married as husband as a Meritus. Husband. There it is. So the name of the podcast and website
is married his husband. That sounds
good. Oh, my goodness. And because I know Meredith, it makes it even funnier, because it's perfect. Like she it is.
It is it's really perfect. Yeah. Meredith is a if you don't know, Meredith, she has a very memorable personality. And I won't say the opposite of that. But yeah, it people, there are people in our neighborhood because we have dogs. Sure. And Meredith walks our dogs during the week. I walk them on the weekends, and very often I meet people and they know our dogs. And they say oh, but you who are you? emeritus husband, so lots of people in my neighborhood also know me as married his husband,
you're famous for being not famous for being beside a pseudo famous person
anonymously, famous. Yeah,
I love it. It's the best way to be famous. I've often said like, I wish that I were the inventor of some like doodad. And could you know, reap the benefits without all the then all the notoriety? That's so good. Well, and your podcast is great. I feel like it the banter between the two of you is really fun, as someone who podcasts about topics that people are sometimes like, oh, I don't really want to think about
this. I know how tricky it can be to make that entertaining, and actionable, and all that sort of stuff. So it's going to be a great conversation today. And I am excited to hopefully introduce your podcast to some new audience members who can use even more of what we're going to talk about,
hopefully, yes, I know, I know. I'm fully aware that a podcast about SEO does not sound exciting.
I know. But I as I was telling you before, I've done a few episodes now on SEO stuff. And they're shockingly like they get so much traction. But you I think hold the record for the person who is the most officially knowledgeable about SEO. So everybody listen up.
I have been doing it a long time. So I hope I'm fairly knowledgeable, knowledgeable. Yeah,
well, you know, the thing is in photography, and I'm sure that this is true in every sector, you know, that you're up to date on the latest and greatest of what you have to know like what your craft is and your art is. And then there are all these kind of peripheral skills that you need to have that, you know, you go to conferences, or you read up on Google or YouTube or whatever. And sometimes what you're getting to your point is not maybe the most up to date, or
not entirely accurate. And it's hard to parse because that's not your area of expertise. So exactly, you know, like we're all kind of learning by playing a giant game of telephone. And when that happens, sometimes things get lost in translation. So going directly to the source with a, you know, somebody who is doing this for real, and you know, the results that you've gotten for Meredith speak for themselves. I think that that is
amazing. And the sort of powerful tool that we all wish we had in our back pocket, but this is the next best thing.
It's not just the photography industry that I that is seems to be behind. It's all my regular clients, everybody is usually I would say 234 years kind of behind in terms of just general knowledge about what SEO is, and kind of where it is at the moment. So that's, that's pretty much par for the course really
well. And it's an industry that moves super fast to I mean, it's sort of like, I don't know, Facebook, advertising, you know, you can learn you can take a class on that that might be accurate right this minute. But if you try and apply those principles a year from now, it could be totally out of date. So
yeah, exactly, exactly. Okay. Well,
let's go ahead and dive in. What I'm hoping we can accomplish today is to kind of hit, let's say three or four of the most common misconceptions or the mistakes that people are making where if they correct those things, those that correction will have the biggest payoff like the sort of the highest leverage things that people can do to optimize their websites for are a better traffic and, and better engagement?
Sure, yeah. So there's a, there's a couple of things that have that kind of a pretty quick impact. But first, in terms of SEO, first, think about using Google just holistically, everything about everything that comes through Google is kind of under the umbrella of SEO, because a lot of times what happens is that people hear SEO, and they just think, oh, keywords and high rankings. And that's it. But honestly, one of the first things I do with almost any new client is what we do, what we
call branded SEO. So just google your own name, your own your own business name, and look at that entire first page, you should really kind of what I call own that page. Because everything they're not, maybe not everything to in the very beginning. But you should have control over most of that, certainly your website, your Google My Business page, your LinkedIn, your Pinterest, or Twitter, Facebook, all those things, you kind of have control over a lot of that first page.
And I'm always amazed at when, when a client hires me, that's the first thing I'll do. And sometimes the links are broken, they go to the wrong pages, they have like somebody else. I know this happens in photography a lot, somebody leaves coupon sites, and they will offer a coupon sites on your photography, they have no
relation to you at all. So you don't you really don't want that sort of stuff appearing on page one when somebody Google's your business name, because those people, the people who are who are searching for you by name are going to at least some of them are going to be your best
clients. So if you were to think about, say, you had an option between having one of two clients, client a, say they just did a search on Google, they found you they went to your website, they didn't check pricing, they didn't read reviews, they just click contact, they're gonna hire you, that's client a, client B is somebody who hears about you, they see you on social or hear they hear about you from a friend, they Google your name, they read reviews, they look at your pricing, they do a lot of
research, that's client B, client B is going to be the better long term client, they're going to stick with because they've already done research, they've already invested time. So when somebody searches for you by name, you want to give a good first impression. So the first step in SEO, Google your own business name, and try to get that page looking as, as good as you can pay, I would say special attention to Google My Business, fill out as many of those fields as you can, it
makes a difference. Because you're just taking up real estate on that first page of Google, you can put images of your products, your own your own images at the very top refuse, you can leave comments, it's, it's really a great way to just make a very strong first impression with an audience that already has some interest in you. Right? So the the chances for conversion are very high. So that's step that's one of the first things I think you should do.
Okay, so quick question about this. And sure, I'm asking because I have a vested interest in this as someone who has a difficult name difficult to spell difficult to remember pronounced like I have always named my businesses, different names, because nobody can spell on me like Best of luck. And, and then on the opposite side of the spectrum, I have friends who have names like, you know, Sarah Smith, or whatever, where there's 14,000, Sarah Smith, photography is out
there in the world. So do you have any quick I mean, I know that that's a whole conversation unto itself. But any quick pointers for people who are dealing with names that can either be easily misspelled or there are common misspellings and or for people who have super common names?
Yes, I would say if either of those situations, you probably want to start an AdWords campaign, just a very small AdWords campaign, and just focus on the misspelling, or the exact, there's a different there's a few different ways you can you can set up your AdWords, an exact match or a broad match, you want it to be an exact match. So if your name were Jane Smith photography, you would do Jane Smith photography with
brackets around it. So there's somebody searches for Jane Smith photography, you, you at least are going to get that very top spot. Right. And it will be and it will be an ad, but you can also control exactly what it says. Great. Okay, so that's a way to take that very top spot.
Okay, good. Thank you. Asking for a friend just getting asking for myself.
Okay. Yeah, yeah, the misspellings are a little trickier. I would say, you know, you could do a blog and you could create a blog about here all the ways people misspell my name.
I have a very specifically thought about doing that.
Yeah, you could do that. However, Google may AutoCorrect. It may like if you misspell your name, it may say Did you mean and automatically give you some other results? So let's see what's happening. If it's something where that is not happening. If Google is not auto correcting, then I would say you know what, do that blog? Yeah, yeah. All the ways people try to spell my name
and See if you can make that funny and fun. Okay, good. Excellent. All right. So we've got, you know, Google your own business, Google your name and make sure that you've got good control over that first page. Yes. What is the next step in the process?
So everybody, I think, has heard the the advice, he got the blog for SEO. But you know, when I hear that, I typically ask the ask why do you know why you're doing that? And very often, the response I get is, oh, well, Google likes a fresh website. And that's not untrue. But that's also not really the reason to blog for for SEO, there are kind of there are two reasons you want to create blogs for SEO? Number one, answering a very specific question. So we would call that
a longtail phrase. Number two is you want to create something that's going to attract links from from other websites. So in attracting so and so that in itself is not easy. And this was not easy for me. I went years in the SEO industry. And I really had trouble with this myself, how do you create a blog that somebody's gonna want to link to? It seems very intimidating. A turning point for me was when a colleague of mine who was an SEO at an in house company they were doing they were doing very,
very well. And they were doing it mostly with blogs. And I had said something to him at one point about about his blogs. And he was like, what we don't do blogs. And I was like, What are you talking about, you have hundreds and hundreds of blog dozens every week. And he's like, Oh, those are resources, we don't we stop thinking about them as blogs. And we started thinking about them as resources that we were creating for people. And that totally changed
our business. And that really kind of resonated with me, and allowed me to start thinking about how do I create blogs, and what do I talk about differently? And to be honest, now, I don't have any trouble creating content now. As long as resources Yes, not are don't write articles create resources. Yeah. And as long as you are thinking about how do I create a resource for somebody, a lot of it kind of takes care of itself.
Yeah. So that is one way, I think, to make blogging a lot less intimidating, and also make it more of a resource and more likely that somebody will link to it.
Because part of what my understanding, and again, correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding about the way that Google likes to reward certain pages. And that sort of thing has to do not just with making sure you're kind of incorporating those key words and phrases and not just being I mean, consistency is important.
And keywords are important, but also having quality content that you know, somebody doesn't just land on the page and then immediately bounce off because this is a garbage keyword stuff, kind of an article.
Yeah, in fact, Google has is just rolling out right now what they call the helpful content update, which is an update to their algorithm. And they're trying to eliminate even more, they've always done this, but trying to eliminate websites that are just paired with SEO in mind that are actually creating helpful resourceful content, right. And on on something you just mentioned. Another kind of common mistake I see is people try, they think of SEO is just oh, I need to add keywords to my
site. And they tried to blanket their entire site with all of their keywords. That actually is some you don't want to do that. Actually, you don't want it if you if you have a particular keyword, you don't want to put that keyword on on every page, you want to focus it on like one particular page. Because otherwise you are essentially are sending a signal to Google, that your pages are competing with themselves. You're competing against yourself.
Google doesn't know which page to rank if you have the same keywords on every page. So you need to do what they call map your keywords to your pages say, this is a you know, looking at particular page and say this is about you know, this particular keyword and then focus that keyword other pages will have hopefully different keywords.
Great. Yeah, I think that that's, that is super helpful. I still see photographers websites where, you know, they have some really clunky paragraph halfway down the homepage that, you know, mentions every town within 50 miles and, and I know what they're going for, but it's like, oh, if I can look at this and say this is, you know, anybody who looks at this is going to know who it's for. And it's for your Google. Yes.
Yeah, I would say you don't There was a time when that was a good tactic to list all the towns and everything. But that, you know, put them in the footer of your homepage. That is no longer a good idea. Yeah, don't do that. That will they'll be more more more harmful than it is helpful.
Right. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah, I think it's for anybody who is like, it's too much. It's too much. The I think my feeling is always be proud of every page of your website like feel, yes. Feel comfortable with if somebody lands on this page out of anywhere. They're going to know who I am. They're going to know what I offer where I am. And I'm not going to be embarrassed that they saw that page first.
Yeah, absolutely. Google will will, will totally take care of where you are. Right. It's going to match up your look. You don't really have to worry about location anymore, okay is where you where you have to put in your you know, I live in Brooklyn. So, you know, we used to have the word Brooklyn all over emeritus site, you don't need to do that anymore. Google is going, they're going to put that together. And otherwise, just like you said, focus on creating just a good
website. Yeah. I mean, Google wants, they want to send their users to good websites, because they want their users to be happy and go back to Google. So and the people that Google are very smart, they're really very, very smart. There's a lot of them, they are going to figure out how to find those good websites. So if you just focus on making a good website, you're kind of on the same side as Google. You're on Google's team, rather than trying to sneak one past Google and, you know, that
always ends badly. Right? You do that? Right? I've seen that happen. Many times,
mom will find out and you'll get in trouble. Yeah, mom, we'll find out. Okay, so we start by googling at our business, and then making sure that we're controlling that first page, then we start owning page one. Right, exactly. And then we focus on content and creating resources, rather than, you know, we're creating blog posts or articles. We're really trying to add value. And then what would what would the next step be?
Well, one of the things that I also people, I think, know that Oh, you have to get links to your website. But I think people really underestimate the importance of this Google was founded in Google is all built on links. So if you think about just the internet, in general, it's just a bunch of websites connected to each other through links, links, make the they make the Internet work. In fact, guys who Fat Larry and Sergey, the guys who founded Google, when they started Google, they weren't
even building a search. And all they were doing was collecting the way websites linked to each other. And they didn't even know what they were going to do with it turns out that that creates a really great search engine, because at the time, other search engines were just there looking at how many times you repeated a keyword on your page.
And if you remember, if you're old enough to remember the very early days of search engines, the results were awful, they were really kind of you had to go through pages and pages, Google came out and they focused on on links. And the results were so much better that they almost immediately dominated the space. And I mean, the rest is history. Everybody uses Google.
And that's all links. So that's why you need links, just to kind of overgeneralize the more links you have pointing to your website from other websites, the higher you're gonna rank and Google nice. There are some caveats, you know, there's link quality, you don't want to get a bunch of links from really spammy websites. But in general, the more links the better. Okay, and that's why
so I'm onboard 100%. Sounds great. I am a photographer, I want to get high quality links, how do I go about doing that?
So there's a, there's different ways to get links, obviously, as a local business owner, there's you can get what they call local link citations. And that's like, you're I'm sure you're familiar with Yelp. And, and these other there's, there's literally hundreds of these, there are industry specific directories like that there are location specific directories like that. And then there are services that will help you get those links.
So that's kind of the foundation for a local business, you want to get those local business citations, because when Google ranks a local business, the first thing they're going to do is go look to see, if you have all those links. Are you a legit business? If you don't have those? Google's going to wonder, is this a legit business because they don't seem to be that present. If you have those links everywhere, on all these directories, and they're consistent. That's you're kind
of in the phonebook. And there are services that will do that one of them is Yext. A lot of them are paid. I, I used to do that for clients. And we kind of switched away from that, because they're paid subscription models, the moment you stop paying for them, who knows what's going to happen to those listings, right. So now I use one called White Spark, it's a Canadian company, it's white spark.ca, I highly recommend it.
The pricing is very good. And the difference is, they will build links for you, and then give them to you. So you will own them. You don't have to pay for them again, you pay once and it's done. And price wise, it's about the same probably as paying for a year of a subscription service. So that's, that's a very good way to go. That's that's kind of the foundation of, of Link Building for a local business. Okay,
nice. So, I love that that's as easy as just paying some money and having that kind of taken care of rather than the Yeah, yeah. Okay, good.
Yeah, you could, you could also you can do it yourself for free, but I will tell you, it takes a long time. It is very time intensive. Yes, it takes. First the process takes many months, because you need to do stuff and then check back and then do more stuff and then check back. So it's probably dozens of hours. Whereas spread over three to six months, right? It's a it's a real nightmare if you ask and staying
focused on it too, because I think that that, you know, it's like we can all be like, oh, yeah, I'm gonna do this. And then yes, three months from now, forget it. If Yeah,
if you told me I had to do that manually for my clients, I would quit. I would I find another career.
Yeah. Okay. So you kind of set the baseline by getting yourself listed in all these various directories and giving Google the distinct impression that nope, I'm for real, I'm not just a fly by night, which a lot of photography websites probably do get overlooked for that exact reason. And then what other kinds of other strategies can you take?
So there's, there's a couple number one, building resource resource blogs, is going to help because there are a lot of other blogs out there that just curate content, and they, they post lists, here's how you do it, here's the top 10 sources to do XYZ. So there's a lot at your guild just get links naturally. That way, if you're creating resourceful content, that's why
that's the focus. The other way is to look at some of your competitors look at you know, wherever your market is, do a search for your most important keyword, look at the few sites that come up at the top, go to I use SEMrush, there's two, there's a lot of tools that will do this so much as a good one, they're free. They're not always
free. But there's a free plan where you can go type in the name of that website that comes up up at the top of Google, and they will show you where you get or where they get their their links. In this a lot of times that will give you ideas like, Oh, I could get a link there. I could get a link there. That's another way to do it. Okay,
nice. And then do you? Or do you have Meredith do any sort of like more organic, you know, reaching out to, let's say that you create a local resource kind of a blog, where, you know, I'm writing about all of the birth centers that are in my area to sort of talk about like, Well, this one has birthing tubs and this one, you know, whatever, like, I do
kind of a round up. And then I email all of those places and say, Hey, I just wanted to let you know, I posted this thing, here's the link, if you're interested in sharing it, in the hopes that you get some, some more, you know, reach that way? Or is that sort of the low and slow? That isn't necessarily the best use of time?
Um, you know, that can be time intensive, but that is the most organic way to do it. Yeah. Like that is to you know, that is the best highest quality way to do it. That's kind of the behavior that Google would want to reward. Right, you know, so yes, outreach, you can push that out via social or directly via email in either of those is fine. And I would say, don't get discouraged if you don't get a lot of links that
way. links are links are one of the more difficult as an SEO company, when we go about building links for clients. It's one of the more time consuming aspects. But also, it's what really separates the very high rankings that you know, the top sites from the sites on page two is usually usually the link. So it is worth the time, right.
What about guest blogging and creating resources for other people's sites?
So you writing a guest blog on a on a on another website? If they will link back? Yeah, sure. There was a time when that was very popular. And so Google kind of diminished the value of those links a little bit just because people were really overdoing it. But yeah, if you're doing it on a small scale, yes, I would say you sort of run into the dangerous area, if you're distributing a blog on say, 100 other blogs, there are what they call blog networks.
And Google is trained to like look for those, and you can actually sometimes be penalized for that. But if you're, if it's an organic relationship that you have with somebody, absolutely
do that. Yeah. Whether you no matter what if it's even if it's a client, you know, a lot of times, as a web designer, I used to get links from all my client, build a website and put a link on it, that's a good way to get links to if you have any client or any partners, obviously, you know, ask for links there too. Yeah,
well, for sure. I mean, a lot of the people who are listening do at least some amount of brand photography or commercial photography for other businesses, and whereas you may not have it written into your contract that you're on their website, you know, like every single photo that they post of yours shouldn't necessarily need to have photo credit with a link but you know, maybe on their resources page, they would be willing to say, you know, so and so photography.
Absolutely. Another thing that I know, photographers sometimes do is you you know, donate, you know, your service a session to a charity of some sort and they auction it off. That can be a tactic to if you want to do that, just look for auctions that you know, list the list their rewards or their what they're auctioning with a link.
If you do that, that link has value, right You know, so there's so there's SEO value there, too, as well, as you know, you're donating to charity and perhaps get one new client, there's there is also the SEO value. Yeah,
that's good. And I think that sometimes it's just a matter of keeping this in the back of your mind all the time. Because if you don't ask for it, I mean, what you just raised, it's a great example, let's say that you donate to a local school auction. Well, the person who's running that school's website is probably a volunteer parent who does website stuff, and they're busy with other
things. And they're, you know, but if all it takes is a single email or phone call to say, Hey, I just wanted to make sure that, you know, that was linked properly. Following up on that stuff does seem tedious, or it does seem like, why am I even doing this, but especially when we're talking about a business that really only needs somewhere between 50 and 100 clients a year, every single one of those kinds of actions can have a
ripple effect. I mean, I've said this before, I'll say it again, I've been in business for 13 years. And just by virtue of the fact that I have been a high quality website locally for that many years, I don't do almost any marketing, I have stopped posting to my own personal Instagram, over a year ago now is, you know, I still get inquiries all the time. And they found me on Google. And I figure that that, you know, it doesn't always have the immediate effect of like, somebody calls you
tomorrow. But it doesn't take that long.
Yeah, I would say yeah, that's an important thing to keep in mind is SEO generally is kind of a long game. Like there's there's not much that you can do that will have an impact tomorrow, or next week, or sometimes even next month. But the results are going to last a long time to like if you get to page one, and you're getting traffic, that's going to last for months, if not years, so. So it's definitely something to keep, you know, kind of in
the back of your mind. And something to the point that you just mentioned, if you're asking somebody for a link from from their website, let's say you donate to a school or something, I would always bring that up in the very beginning, if somebody asks you to do something, say, yeah, absolutely. Would I be would you leave be able to link from your website to my blog, before you do it? That's so much more effective than asking after the show and asking after the fact, I has a very low success
rate. But if you ask beforehand, and if they say, sometimes they'll say, No, we can't do that, then make a decision. If you want to do it or not, that's fine. But if they say yes, then you can always go back. And it makes checking up just a whole lot easier. And more friendly. It's just a much better kind of workflow.
Yeah, and all of those are opportunities to interact with people. I mean, you know, obviously, we're talking about something that is, has to do with robots, basically. And it can feel very
impersonal. However, that is, it's just another door for you to open when I was talking about before about, you know, if you create a resource that links a bunch of local businesses that are aligned with yours, and it gives you a reason to then pick up the phone and call somebody at that business and establish a relationship, you have just
succeeded in on two fronts. So yeah, these are, these are high leverage high value activities, I wouldn't, I wouldn't have Chris here on the show, if I didn't feel like this was going to be something that you know, every single person listening could benefit from, you know, making the time to do it doesn't feel sexy, maybe doesn't feel like you're out there practicing
your photography. But when you think about your business as a long arc process, you know, this is this is the stuff that will make you successful over time. So it's so good. Anything else that you, you know, when you think photographers, and the way that they approach SEO, any other big, like, no no's or things to avoid?
You know, the one other thing that I hear very often is, especially with photographers is, you know, always be sure you tag your images. And with that advice is people end up stuffing keywords into their image tags. Again, there was a time years ago, that was that probably worked, it did work. Now, you really don't want to do that. That's another red flag to Google that says, hey, I'm trying to trick your system. I'm trying to stuff keywords in. So your images should have what
they call alt tags. Don't try to stuff your keywords in there, just make them very natural. Google is becoming better and better at understanding what an image is, especially if there's a person and if there's a face in it. Google is going to know immediately. That's that's a person. So don't try to stuff keywords in just try to make your alt tags very accurate. Explain what the image is.
Okay, so I'm going to ask for a slightly more in depth description of that. So let's say that I have a picture of a mom and two kids sitting on the couch reading a book. Let's say that I'm a photographer in Chapel Hill, how would you write the alt tag for that image?
So the way that I like to write alt tags is I imagine, imagine a sentence that's going to be displayed in place of the image. So the image is not loading, you want to finish the sentence, this is a picture of blank. What's it a picture of a mom and her kids on the couch? Great. Mom reading a book to her kids, great. Don't say Chapel Hill photography,
okay. Unless, if you could, if you if it were a picture of yourself, then you could say, Chapel Hill photographer, he could, you could get away with that. But don't try. Don't make it unnatural. And you'd be surprised people do image searches for lots of different things they might do that somebody might be looking for an image of a of a of a mom and her kids on the couch, you never know. So that's Keep it keep it short, I would say four to five
words is usually the limit. And just use that guideline, this is a picture of kids in the playground, boy on a swing, kids playing ball, whatever it is, okay? And the purpose, the purpose is the purpose of those alt tags is to display to people who are not going to see the image, right. So it's for visually visually impaired, or it used to be, you know, years ago, when we had dial up modems, sometimes people turned off their images. So a page would
load. So they do want to just know, Hey, what is this image that I'm missing? That I don't see? What is it? Is it your logo? Is it you know, so you just want to convey what the image is? Okay, as accurately as possible. Okay.
Yeah. Because I think that the argument would be, well, if I say mom on the couch with kids, and somebody's searching for mom, you know, photos of moms on couches with their can reading to their kids, they may find this, but what are the chances that that person also needs to hire a family photographer in Chapel Hill? Essentially, zero? Yeah, yeah. So it's not so much what you're trying to do is more than anything, reiterate over and over to Google, I am a trustworthy website. This is,
you know, this is quality. And I'm not trying to fix it.
Okay. Absolutely. There is a, one of the current and I think is going to be very long lasting trends in Google right now is what they call EA, T. Expertise, authority and trustworthiness. So, Google is they they know, I know, some of my best friends were hit Google. And they know the amount of misinformation that's out there. And to try to combat some of that they're looking for really
trustworthy sites. So anything you can do also to just to kind of reinforce the fact that yes, you are an honest, trustworthy source of information is going to help you in the long term with Google. Absolutely.
This is good news. This is really good news for most photographers, 99% of the people who are out there, like we are not nobody got into the photography business to like get rich quick. That's not a you know, this is. So we're the fact that Google is coming around to reward people who are trying to honestly create good content that's useful to people is a
positive thing. And I think that if you know, those of you who are listening, take this as an incentive to, you know, whereas before it, maybe you felt turned off by the idea of like, well, what, what is my one little effort going to do? Now I would say, you know, more and more good quality content gets rewarded. So I'm going to close with just one question for you, which is going to circle back to this content creation aspect of, you know, optimizing your website. How frequently do you
make Meredith do that? How frequently do you recommend that a photographer try to create that new valuable content? Because I know that does take a lot of time? And yes,
and that's a that's a good question. I get that question all the time. And, to be honest, there is no magic number about how often I like to say, once a month, it makes your bot blog look fresh. If you have an entry every month, if you miss months, just just from the terms for a user. It's a nice to see as some sort of consistency there. In terms of Google is, it's more about the quality than it is the the quantity or the
consistency. So if it takes you a week to write a great resource blog, great then do one do that. Do whatever you do it weekly. If it takes a month, then do it monthly. If it takes three months, then do it every three months, but focus on on getting quality content. And then if you NSA say that's a three month schedule, I would say look for something to keep it on that
once a month schedule. Look for something lighter, something easier, something like one of your A recent session just something that you can create not as filler content, but something too. Similar to social media, you want to have something that just makes it look consistent. It's not necessarily going to make you rank higher. But from a user perspective, it just looks better.
Sure. Yeah. Nobody ever. Yeah, absolutely. Nobody wants to go to a website and see their blog role. And it's like, oh, that's two years old.
Exactly, exactly. But yeah, there's no, there's no official, there's no real guidelines there in terms of how often you need to have new content.
Great. Okay. This has been amazing. I'm, I'm gonna go get to work. I've got my own SEO stuff to focus on. Chris, tell everybody I know, you've got a new workshop that's available.
I do. I have a new workshop called SEO clarity. It's a four day workshop. And it's aimed at basically kind of debunking myths and doing a lot of same stuff that like we just talked about here, except that it takes it's much more structured, it takes it goes through the process, from start to finish, so you get an idea of the steps involved. And the goal, being to, as the name suggests, provides some clarity, and just eliminate confusion. I love that
you guys, this is a good time of year to be jumping in and tackling these kinds of things. So tell us where they can find that and where they can find you and your podcast. You can
find both on Meritus husband.com. That will link to the workshop and the it will also link to the podcast. But the podcast is also called Mario's husband. So wherever you listen to podcasts, you can just do a search for Meritus. Husband.
I love it. That's so good. Well, Chris, thank you so much for coming on the show. I have no doubt that I will be having you back again in the future to dive maybe deeper into one of these areas, because I know that there's almost a limitless amount of stuff that we could talk about, but But thanks for coming on and joining me today.
All right, thank you. It was a pleasure. Well,
that's it for this week's episode of This can't be that hard. I'll be back Same time, same place next week. In the meantime, you can find more information about this episode, along with all the relevant links, notes and downloads at this can't be that hard.com/learn If you liked the podcast, be sure to hit the subscribe button. Even better, share the love by leaving a review on iTunes. And as always, thanks so much for joining me. I hope you have a fantastic week.