232: Photographers using AI for SEO with Sarah Landa

SEO and AI. Today, Sarah is back on the podcast to talk to me about how, even though she was relatively slow to warm to the idea of utilizing tools like Chad GPT, in the assistance of blogging and SEO, she has come to make peace with the fact that this is really kind of the new way things are done, and has now started to use it in a lot of different parts of the blog creation blog content creation

process. So she is going to give us a roadmap for how you can and how you shouldn't be using AI tools to try to boost your SEO and to try to serve your ideal clients. And I feel like this is one of those episodes where if you are like a huge AI user already, and you've got your workflow dialed, maybe this isn't going to be helpful for

you. But if you're like me, and you've been relatively slow to adopt this process, because you know, learning another thing and trying to incorporate another thing and not being sure whether you're gonna get penalized for it. These are all valid concerns. And and I think that as business owners who are kind of wearing a lot of hats, it can be hard to keep up with this technology. I love the way that Sarah gives us a very actionable, very sort of easy to

digest way to open Chad GPT. And get started with improving your website and your SEO. 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. Sarah Landa Welcome back to this can't be that hard. It's just been too long, my friend. How are you?

spinning. And I'm so excited to have you here to talk about this because it's such a hot topic that I know very little about. So I'm glad to have someone who knows what they're talking about here to guide the conversation. But for anybody who happened to miss your last episode with me or doesn't, isn't familiar with you and what you do, why don't you fill us in? And we'll go from there.

And I think that as much as I try to avoid looking at photography as this like special snowflake of an industry, every industry has its own nuances and sort of specificity, whatever and I love the fact that you come to SEO with this knowledge as a working photographer, of exactly kind of, you know, not only what works for photographers, but also how reasonable certain expectations are in terms of like, we're often the only person working in

our business. So how can we make what we need to do doable in the grand scheme of all of the many things that we have on our to do lists. So I love I love that you come from that angle. But let's I kind of want to dive right

into the AI side of things. If anybody who's listening here missed my first conversation with Sarah, about the sort of basics of SEO for photographers, and some really great steps to getting your keywords and things like that, I highly recommend that you go back and listen to that episode, and I'll link that in the show notes. But let's take that the next step here, one of the things that we talked about a lot in our first conversation was the importance

of blogging. And I know that blogging is kind of a headache, headache inducing word for a lot of photographers. And now there's this relatively new tool that exists out there that's free to everyone. The promise is that it can make it a lot easier, but it feels like a little bit of a landmine. Talk to me about how AI and specifically chat GPT is changing the blogging landscape for photographers.

could pinpoint the time. It was a couple of months ago when I started hearing about Chet GBT, I mean, I think it came out in 2022. I should look up the date, but it went super viral super fast. And I was listening to an educator talk about how to use it. And I was aghast. I was like, No, this is awful. Like, what? What is happening right now, you know, but also, like, so, so curious. And I think within that same day, I did a complete one ad and I'm like, I'm gonna go home and play with

this. Because I can't say it's awful if I've never even tried it. So I immediately started playing with it. And I think I mean, we don't have to get into everything that's problematic about it, I'm sure we could go off about like, are our kids going to be using this to write their papers and all the other things, you know, it's, it's really affected Hollywood and the writing the publishing industry and everything, but I'm not an expert in those areas. So I'm gonna stay away from that.

And I just think, though, that if we can keep our, you know, sort of cringe Oh, meter on and keep our, you know, ethical hat on Yeah, and view this as a tool or an assistant, and not just a cheater, like a cheater way to get around it. I think we can figure out a way to use it responsibly, because AI is not going anywhere, right? I mean, it's everywhere. It's even like my son uses my snapchat account. He's not allowed. That account gets on mine and plays on it.

It's in there. I mean, he has full conversations with this AI bot. And it's just, it's everywhere. I mean, you see it on your phone and predictive text, you see it in Gmail, with predictive answers. I mean, and I think that was creeping in. And I didn't even realize it.

thing. But these tools are out there and I do feel like there's a little bit of a if you are unwilling to at least educate yourself about it. If not use it you're ultimately going to be at a deficit in comparison to the other people out there in your field.

York. So two decades at least ago talking about the the use and abuse of stimulants like Adderall and things like that among elite college like university students and how it was essentially, at that point ubiquitous, and, and how the kids who were choosing not to abuse those medications were at a loss or at a deficit, because they weren't able to stay awake long enough to study.

things are always changing. And if we use something too much, are we going to have to go back in and change at all? So I think right, you know, be be mindful and be aware and be responsible, be ethical. And don't be a plagiarist? And all of those things. Yes, but

phone, just brainstorming. And in the past, before I started doing that, I thought, oh, I should provide them a list, I should come up with a list of things they can blog about. But I very quickly figured out it's going to be unique to every photographer, and how do you generate one list or 10 list that will, you know, be helpful. And there are lists on the internet? They are they're provided by other SEO

professionals. But coming up with a way to generate your own list is I think the the heart of it, because we're always talking about what is my why, and you know, who is my ideal client? So figuring out, first of all, what are your goals for your business? Because SEO is a long game, you're not using SEO to help you book your mini sessions tomorrow. That's what Instagram is for. Right? You're looking to fill your calendar, six months down the road or a year down the

road. So what are your goals and your business? And who is your ideal client? And those are sort of the overarching things of content creation. And Google would agree Google's Google's new, helpful content system that they're pushing is, are you creating helpful content? And do you have first hand experience? So if we can kind of put all of those things together and say, that's going to help me, you know, serve my ideal client. And that's what we're that's what SEO is, it's good customer

service. And I've been saying that long before they came out with their helpful content system. Because it's one thing to get 1000s of clicks on your website, if they're from the wrong people, right? You want to get them from the right people. And you can get those clicks, but that is not going to get you hired, right. So what we want is, does the funnel, the smaller number, smaller number of clicks. But every one of those clicks is the right client.

Right? So how do we do that? So now, so I have this whole list of questions that I go through with my clients that help us come up with these pillars of content that will help us come up with ideas for blogging, but now we can use this extra tool, right? And in really what it's doing is just sort of speeding up the process. And so what I found when I use it for myself, like well, I need to blog about photography, and I need to blog about SEO. And I need to come up

with a lot of ideas. And so I'm gonna sit down and do this brainstorming exercise, but I don't always have a couple of hours to sit down and do this brainstorming exercise. So I can then plug in some of these ideas for INTJs Have GPT and say generate, generate me some blog post ideas. So, and they're not always good and you don't have to know how to word it. Because the more you put in, the more

you're gonna get out. So if you just say, give me five ideas for blog posts for a photographer, you're gonna get some pretty generic topic, right? And they've all been written before 1000 times, sure. And those topics, you could write 1000 word blog post, and keyword it and do all the right things. But 20,000 other photographers have already written those posts, and so are you going to rank for

that. So as specific, so just a quick example, is, you could say, you know, give me five ideas for a family photographer, or you could say, give me five ideas about spring session ideas for a family lifestyle photographer in Seattle, you know, just like, I want to think about my spring session ideas, my adventure sessions, or, you know, whatever it is that you want to do, maybe you're an A newborn studio photographer, so as specific as you can be with the tool, it's going to give you

back some ideas, and, and you know, still a lot of them are, you know, are not going to feel right to you, and you're not going to pursue those, but it is going to give you some ideas that you had not thought of, or give you kind of a new way to think about them.

possible. With Chachi Beatty, it can generate in 20 or 30 minutes, you could get 1000s of ideas, and some of them are gonna be good. I can't say no, I know. Immediate, which Yeah, it blows

early days, right? This is Chet GPT 3.5, this is the free version, they've already come out with a 4.0, which is a paid version. I have not delved into that yet. But it's gonna be getting better and better and more refined. And it could even learn your voice Sure. And speak like you. So if you have generated enough content, it's going to figure that out. So it's going to become a paid thing very quickly. And I think they're just kind of given us the free sample right now.

that sort of stuff. You know, if you have been creating content like that, even probably something as small as longer format, Instagram captions, you know, if those sort of speak to your voice, you have those and you will eventually have ways to take those and kind of teacher tool to help you become more prolific. Your writing. There is, you know, the weird factor of that I think I tried out because I have all this podcast content. Of course, my voice is out there in the world a lot.

And so there was a there's a, there's a tool, an AI tool that will like fix edit podcasts for you where you can go in and say like, oh, I said this sentence, but I wish I had said this sentence. So you type out the sentence you wish you had said and it just says it in your voice and you can sort of stitch it in and I was like nope, that's definitely too creepy for me. Yeah. A little too close to my voice and yeah, so brave new

world out there. Again, glad I'm not in the regulatory industry, but it is for those of us who are using it for good for you know, these sort of innocuous purposes, I think that can be just a very easy or, and it is pretty easy. I mean, the little bit that I've played with it, it is not it is meant to be very user friendly, which is nice. And I think that that as a time saver, I can be lovely. So that's sort of the easy way to

to jump into it. What are the what are the big like, things that you don't want to do?

writing BP content, right? So there used to be a thing of you could get away with it, it's still exist. So scraping, the internet is like, where you're just taking somebody's content and rewording it for yourself, right? You're gonna get more clicks. And that's, you know, that's something affiliate marketers use, and people who are just trying to get a lot of clicks, basically, to make money. That's why they've come up with this helpful content

system. They don't want that they want for somebody who's using Google to get back an answer that's really helpful to them. And we all know, we've we've done those searches where we're looking for something, and we're getting not so helpful answers like, no, that's not what I'm looking for. And even like, when you're looking for a photographer, you might say, I'm looking for a family photographer, but you're not an educated searcher. You know, your client is not always an

educated searcher. They're just saying, photographer near me. Yeah. So and also, one thing I've always wanted to be able to do is say, I want to, to not have something, but because you have the words in there, they ignore the knot, and they give me the something that you're not looking for. So yeah, I mean, there's a lot, you know, we all as searchers have to become more sophisticated about how to search. So I'm kind of going off on a tangent.

that all goes. But in terms of okay, so copying and pasting what the, the draft that AI spits out for you, or even like, even if you refine it and refine it, how are some ways other than like changing of the adjectives or switching the sentences around? Like, how do you go in and take a basic draft of that, let's say a blog post, and make it better in a way that doesn't then, you know, take you back to spending just as much time as if you had sat down with a clean sheet of

you generate a third idea. You could also have it help you with your intro or your outro you could also have it help you with your meta description. I mean, there's so many different ways where as bloggers, we get bogged down, and we're like, this is just too much work. And even if we know the rules of SEO, which a lot of people don't, you know, the things that you're supposed to be putting in there. It's a, you know, a chore to do those

things. Yeah, so So having it, right you that meta description or the summary. Like maybe as a blogger, you don't want to transcribe the whole Podcast, the podcast, but you want to summarize it on your blog? Sure. So like what you could say, you could transcribe the whole thing, put that entire text in and then say, write me a summary. Right? And it's and that I would think that would be completely legit. It's not, you're not saying these are my words, you're just trying to

summarize your content. So there's a lot of just ways that I think it's super helpful, that help you finish the job rather than do the entire job for you. Well,

You should then be taking that you should be putting little, you know, parts of it, little pieces of it on Instagram, you should be sending out a newsletter that talks about that. And when you have that long form content, being able to put it into chat GPT and say, give me you know, five days worth of Instagram captions or, you know, I need to write my audience a lead or a newsletter, and a strategy that I heard recently that I was like, Oh, that's interesting. And I

haven't tried it yet. But I'd be curious to hear if you have either tried this or think it's a good idea is one of the prompts that someone was describing, and I wish I remembered who it was, it was like somebody on the internet was saying, you know, I want you to write it, but I want you to write it from the point of view of a, and then you fill in your own kind of CV. So a 13 year family photographer based in North Carolina, who specializes in working with toddlers, or

whatever, yes. So basically, your it's not just the content that you wanted to spit out, but giving it a point of view that sort of directly mirrors your own, have you played with?

more specific information. Now, again, like the more specific information you give it, the more it's going to sound like a robot, if you tell it to write the post for you, right, because it's going to start adding all these weird sentences about being a lifestyle family photographer, when you're really just trying to talk about, you know, the best kinds of diapers, or whatever, you know, whatever helpful content you're trying to create for your client that maybe doesn't necessarily have

anything to do with booking you as a photographer. So it gets a little muddled, but I would say, Try it, try it and see and then ask it to refine it. Sure. But one of the things you mentioned, made me think about keywording. So I talk a lot about keywording. And, you know, we do our keyword research, which is like our overarching keywords that we want to rank for our, you know, Durham, family photographer, Seattle newborn photographer, and you know, you need to put those on your

website. But blogging and content creation gives you an opportunity to be ranking for hundreds of or 1000s of new keywords. What is a keyword? It's just some a question that someone's typing into the internet. So sometimes I think we get a little bit lost when we write a blog post about incorporating our keyword or we, or we might have this idea, but we might not know what our keyword is, right? So I did an experiment recently, where I put in a blog post into Chet GPT.

And I said, Tell me what my keyword is, oh, and it told me. But so then I'm like, Okay, I need to put this keyword in my blog post title, in my images in my tags in my meta description, so that I am really focusing that one post on that one keyword, and then I'm not going to reuse that keyword on the next post, because then I'm just competing with myself. So how you know you, if you're lost, it will help you. It will help you refine your message in a way.

But but some of these strategies are so helpful, because I really do feel like it's almost like you want to you really do have to think about it as like, I'm the chef. I'm going to make it do my prep for me. You go dice up all the onions, and

forget that. You're not here to get clicks. You're here to serve. So even if you only get one click but it's the right client versus 1000 of the wrong client. That's better, because that person is going to call you immediately and hire you, which is the goal, right? Yeah. So so be mindful of, you know,

Creating helpful content. And and then as Google reminds us putting it in first person, so we're talking about things we have actual experience of, we're not just going to write a blog post reviewing, you know, 20 strollers that we've never even looked at before. It'll do that for you. Right. But you know, you know, we want to make it personal and make it come from firsthand experience. So absolutely, that's what they're looking for. And that's what they're going to reward you for.

So that's what you should be focusing on.

Google. But the fact of the matter is that humans are also getting a lot better, or a lot more discriminating when it comes to clicking into an article and being like, Oh, this is just someone who's an affiliate marketer, or a professional blogger who's you know, getting pay per click or like, yeah, you know, they're they're getting Yeah, it's clickbait for ad dollars, like, clickbait used to work really,

really well, for everyone. And I think that that those numbers are going down and down, because we're all like, oh, yeah, I'm going to click on this thing about, you know, you won't believe what so and so said about such and such, and it's going to be a bunch of garbage. And so always, always, as you are producing any kind of content, try and see it through that filter. If Google sees it as spam. That's bad. If a person clicks on it and sees it as spam, that's way worse as far as it's

thanks so much for joining me. I hope you have a fantastic week.