After working as a project manager and web developer for 10 years, Jessica Grieves started her Houston child photography business. Bubblegum Tree Photography has captured portraits of children that are casual and vivid for 4 years. She’s also chronicled her journey to become a professional photographer on her blog: Hey Girl, Nice Shot. After reading what Photographers SEO book did for her business I asked Jessica some questions about search engine optimization.
What does SEO mean to your business?
I was definitely doing only the minimum before to get my site in front of search engine visitors. Many of my best customers have found me by searching online so why not make more of an effort to get up in the search results? After carefully considering the keywords I want rank for, I realized that I wasn’t even showing up for one of the keyword sets. Within a few weeks of optimizing for that keyword set, I’m now ranked 13th and still moving up. For another keyword set, I moved up from 109 to 12th in less than a month. I’m now showing up in the top 15 for three of my primary keyword sets and expect to continue to see my results improve.
Did something happen that made you realize that your SEO efforts needed an overhaul?
Because the majority of my clients have come as referrals, I never really paid much attention to where I ranked with the search engines. But as I continue to grow my business I wanted to make sure I had exposure to more people and moving up in the rankings will help me attain my goals.
Zach: I think its typical for many photographers to focus on word of mouth. The best photographers use SEO to boost their traffic and client base so they can be selective about which shoots they want to do, or increase their prices to balance out the demand. So in my opinion, SEO can be great insurance for even the best referral-based businesses. Glad you got that.
What’s your best SEO tip?
Make sure your business location or market is all over your site. I can’t tell you how many photographer’s websites I visit that don’t indicate anywhere on the homepage or splash page what city they are in. If I can’t find it, neither can Google.
Zach: Nice! You are away ahead on this one. My ebook talks about this over and over and tells photographers how to rank based on location. Plus, ranking for a location that is not yours does not help grow your business. For example you can rank for “child photography” and get tons and tons of traffic but only a small percentage of those users will be in your area and give you a call.
The other point here is conversion once visitors are on your site. It should be clear to them that you’re in their city, and how they can contact you. Convert those users to leads!
How often do you look at your analytics, and what do you look for?
I look at my analytics data at least twice a week. I look to see if I’ve had a spike in traffic, and to see if I’m getting referrals from a new source. I also look at the keywords visitors are using to find my site, how long they stay on the site, and how many pages they are visiting on the site. This will help me tweak my site to better target potential customers.
Zach: Optimizing existing content is huge for SEO. I talk about how to do this in my video training about analytics. You nailed the two major reports: referring sites and keywords. Referring sites is great to find where others are talking about you.
How do you get links to your websites? You have a few websites… is that for SEO?
I have a number of different sites that link to each other. For example, my blog and main website link to each other whenever possible. I also have the online journal I keep that also links to both sites. I link to my sites from Twitter and Facebook and encourage clients to share the link to their sneak peek too. I’m listed with a number of different local business directories. I’m now writing for a local mom’s resource website too so that also links back to my sites. I have started to revise the way that I link between my sites to optimize for improving my rank.
Do you have a favorite SEO Tool?
Right now I am loving Traffic Travis. It lets me setup my domain and keyword phrases I want to rank on so I can run a report to see where I stand. It will also show me if I’ve moved up or down in the rankings since the last time I ran the report.
Zach: This is why I love the interview series. I had not heard of this tool, but just downloaded and was able to see some pretty cool info in a quick snapshot. I’m digging the SEO Analysis tab where you can analyze the top 10 or 20 results for a given term including number of backlinks, domain age, PageRank, and many more things that I’ve cropped from this view.
Travis Results for Houston Child Photographer
What’s your website setup?
Earlier this year I converted my site over from a hand-coded HTML website, to a BigFolio Flash site. I have the primary Flash site, the HTML mirror site, and an iPhone version. My photography blog is set up in Typepad using an advanced template that I tweaked myself.
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Great tips, thank you so much!