Website SEO

[mitch_w1]

<p>Just curious how much emphasis you put on search engine optimization for your wedding website. I still consider myself new to wedding photography and feel being searchable on google is an important piece of the puzzle. I'm not saying it's the end-all-be-all, but for me it's a way of getting in front of people that I would not otherwise have had a chance to. Yes, there are tire kickers and price shoppers, but there are also people that value photography and use google as a starting point. There are definitely different schools of thought on this - and I'm sure we'll get some of that here in this thread. I ended up using an SEO guy that was recommended to me by a fellow photographer - no black hat stuff. I live in a medium size city in Los Angeles County. I had no problem getting to page one on my own for my own smaller city but hit a brick wall when trying to rank anywhere of value when searching for Los Angeles wedding photographers. In fact, I was basically so far back in the rankings that I might as well have not even been there. In one month he had me on page one using a couple keyword terms. And a half month after that I'm at the top of page one. It's all been a learning experience for me. But I can say already that traffic and inquiries are up. We'll see if that translates to bookings. Whether or not this was a good investment in my business remains to be seen. Anyone else have a similar experience?</p>

[acedigital]

<p>Get on Facebook, Twitter and Blog as well and link post a lot with links to your website. it will increase your rankings a lot as well as spread the word.</p>

[mitch_w1]

<p> I agree, Mark. I do those things and it got me to page one in my smaller, local market. But it wasn't doing much for me in the huge LA market.</p>

[david_schilling___chicago_]

<p>Take a peak at the thread below this one on marketing. IMO, SEO is over-rated by most new shooters for the reasons I've already mentioned.</p>

[mitch_w1]

<p>Thanks David, I'll take a look. From my perspective though if I book one decent wedding - which to me is a forgone conclusion based on increased inquiries - I will have more than covered the cost of the SEO. I do think there are a lot of factors involved though - region, website effectiveness, being able to capitalize on inquiries, etc that one can't generalize too much. </p>

[shawn_mertz]

<p>David, i agree that WOM is the best marketing but there are periods of time, sometimes years that past clients don't know anyone getting married creating long dry spells. At those times we are in almost the same boat as newbies and need to reach out in new ways. SEO takes time and sustained effort so for it to do much good needs to be worked at all the time. <br>

I don't live in a destination wedding location, but many of my clients don't live here and are returning "home" for their wedding. Often my first contact with them is the bride finding me in an internet search of some kind. More than once, it turned out the bride finding me on the internet in a blind search, later realized she knew me through a friend or relation too. I have met people I know at weddings, that did not refer me to the couple too. WOM is an important part of marketing but other methods should not be ignored.</p>

[david_schilling___chicago_]

<p>Shawn, I never said to ignore other marketing avenues....I said that successful, established studios thrive on WOM and that personal relationships/networking is the key to referrals. Google searches may generate hits and attract the "looky-lous" which don't often translate into contracts.....just sayin'</p>

[frolickingbits]

<p>I agree with the others, I think SEO is an important piece of the puzzle, but definitely not the end all be all. In my market, most of those that are on page 1 of the search results are very talented successful photographers who built their business before the days of Google, and have great SEO because they are out there networking with other vendors, getting featured on blogs, websites, sharing their most recent work, etc. </p>

 

[karl_knographer]

My two cents:

For me, word of mouth and personal networking brings the most business, but I get some of it, maybe 30% from the web alone. This comes from google search and from linking sites like Yelp, where I get a surprising number of click-throughs. Whatever you do, as soon as you can if you haven't done it already, dump your flash site and set up a wordpress based site. Mine utilizes a genesis parent/child theme that's not too hard to customize, looks good, and it's all entirely searchable. All the images, all the words, all the pages. This makes a huge difference in SEO. Flash template hosts set up some minimal html on the landing page, and the best of them like LiveBooks has mirroring html and html5, but still, compared to CSS sites they range from nonexistent to O.K. for SEO. And beyond this are the other basics, like links to your site, active pages, quality of content, etc. I find the whole thing a PITA, to be honest, but a necessary evil.