Please SEO check my website

[visagephoto]

I know this request comes up lots on forums these days, but things are getting desperate.

I decided that as I have very little work coming in, I would spend some time rebuilding/rebranding my website which I'm still working on, The best I was achieving at the time was page 35+ for any given search term.

After a stab at some SEO work over the past eight weeks I've managed to get on page 1,2,3,4,5 etc. for phrase like "Legal", Personal Injury" and "Portrait" Photography and Photographers Glasgow etc. But I can't get anywhere near page one for wedding photography etc.

The same two photographers seem to have the two top positions on page one for most search terms and most search engines.

Could anyone offer any SEO advice on improving my site.

Thanks

 

[stuarty]

Hi Alan,

Sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings but you have your work cut out for you in this particular niche. All the same advice applies on SEO/SEM but you will have to dedicate considerable time on this or have it done professionally for you.

Please don't take this the wrong way but your site does you no favours. Compared to your competitors your site design is really poor. Look at the others in your marketplace and look at the quality. There are no calls to action. Photography websites are a specific case of product sells - your product being your photography.

I can't give specifics but we have photography clients and they spend reasonable sums to obtain high rankings. We use heatmaps and A/B split testing to fine tune their site.

On top of this there is social media marketing - again I can't give specifics. But this works extremely well - especially in photography sites.

Stumble works fantasticly well for photography sites. Your photographs may be great quality but your website and the way it presents itself would be extremely lucky to get any referrals from stumble.

You could try PPC but again you will need to have a professionally well designed landing page. This will need to build up over a few months to obtain data and stuff. Tim at attacat I would recommend for PPC

In terms of links you need real quality links from quality websites - don't waste time fine tuning onpage meta descriptions or keyword densities - these are minor factors and would never outrank any of the top sites.

Especially in the photography niche this is precisely where linkbuilding trumps everything else. For example many top sites have no metadata, keywords or descriptions at all but rank extremely highly for the terms you are targetting. Have a look at Banksy and you will see what I mean. No keywords anywhere.

Some things that "will" work for you - but again you need to invest in this and this is best done professionally. Viral work will work absolute wonders but you will need to invest in some capital.

I would strongly suggest converting your site to a blog. You can install wordpress and download a free gallery theme. Professional installation should cost you around £200-300. It's well worth it because it will be set up for feeds, bloglinking, niche linking, sitemaps, seo plugins. Making regular updates and posts on your blog will attract links and you will climb up rankings.

I notice you are listed on Google Local but I could not find you for any of your key phrases. This means you have done the basics but you have not optimised your listing. Professional optimisation of your local listing will work wonders for this. There are hundreds of photographers but only 10 places in these links. You need to build citations and get local links. Note: Citation building for local search is pretty demanding and more difficult than standard link building.

We are launching a site on Google Local search next week but meantime you can read up on optimsation for local search at Why Citations Are Important for Local SEO | GetListed.org

Hope that helps but if you need any more help I'll see what I can do within the rules of the forum.

 

[Tim Barlow]

Hi Alan

From a very quick look of the site, the depth of information you have about wedding photography is very limited. You will likely be competing with sites that are specialist wedding photographers who will have huge galleries, testimonials, tips on wedding photography etc etc.

Search engines want the best site for a query in the number one slot, so with that in mind, focus on being the best, and the search engine rankings will follow.

 

[Brian McIntosh]

I can't give specifics but we have photography clients and they spend reasonable sums to obtain high rankings.

So, without giving any client names away, how much, even a ballpark figure, would it cost to obtain a high ranking?

 

[visagephoto]

Thanks Guys, I appreciate your advice, now I'm off to read up on "H1 tags", "AB splitting", etc. etc. etc.

Thanks.

 

[TomB]

HI Alan,

The site appearance doesn't do it any favours. You need a good looking site for the area you are in.

SEO wise I'm not really much help but you can consider picking a template from one of the open source web design websites and using that. There are some really nice ones out there, and whilst it might not be a unique design it would be a cleaner design.

I'm happy to help you out by donating some time to get you sorted if you like?

PM me if you want to chat further about it.

T

 

[stuarty]

So, without giving any client names away, how much, even a ballpark figure, would it cost to obtain a high ranking?

Our ballpark figures are on our website but these can go up or down considerably depending on the project.

OK for the benefit of others you asked "how much....to obtain a high ranking".

I have to stress...

IT IS NOT ABOUT HIGH RANKINGS

It's about attracting visitors to make sales. You can rank well but not convert.

I could rank you for a phrase related to your business charge you £200-£500 a month for life and sit back.

Regarding ballpark figures...how long is a piece of string? You would need to tell me what your goals were, what your target market was both geographically and by niche. For example, in the case of your website, is it...

a. to sell photographs?
b. to sell photography services?
c. to sell photoshop services?

is it...

1. selling portraits?
2. selling landscapes?
3. selling industrial?

is it in the

i UK?
ii Scotland?
iii Aberdeen?

If your biggest profits came from selling portraits in Aberdeen your website would need to be optimised to focus on "portrait photographer aberdeen". This could be as little as £200-£300 a month plus whatever design changes were needed.

If you were to target all of these services in a single website using selling to the UK then it would be much more costly £1000s per month. You would need to optimise and market each service individually. For £1000s per month we would expect you to be attracting and converting sales to a considerable degree.

 

[Brian McIntosh]

The reason I asked was, a friend of mine, who is a wedding, portrait and event 'Tog, is about to cancel his Yell and Yellow Pages advertising and spend the money on improving his Google ranking. You've kinda thrown me with the phrase "It's not about high rankings". Surely, the whole point of paying someone to work on SEO is to get up the rankings? Once you're there, reaping the rewards of being there is a different story. It's cetainly something my friend needs to consider but, maybe his budget needs to be looked at given your reply.

 

[stuarty]

1.is about to cancel his Yell and Yellow Pages advertising and spend the money on improving his Google ranking

2.Surely, the whole point of paying someone to work on SEO is to get up the rankings?

1. Wise move. Yell is crap - we advise every client we have to spend the money elsewhere. We have reams of data showing exactly how useless yell is.

2. No mate - it never has been. Google's guidlines state that SEO should be for your visitors - not for search engines.

You should be paying your SEO to rank you for phrases that pay.

Lots of SEOs hide behind "rank" so any business putting trust in SEO for this reason would be foolish. Companies have tried to sue SEOs because they assumed they would get sales through rank. The SEO always walk away scot free because they get them rank.

For example - say your friend targetted the phrase "wedding photographer" and paid an SEO company to rank for that phrase. Nothing might happen for 12 months because the niche is so competitive. During this time he would spend a lot of money and possibly achieve no sales. I've seen it happen thousands of times and this is a negative ROI situation.

It takes at least 3 months to gather data on your key phrases and 13-15 months to identify trends and sales peaks. SEO doesn't do this.

A seriously good SEO/SEM should bring traffic and enquiries through right from the start. They will set up analytics and conversion tracking from from day 1. They will target longtail phrases, complement it with PPC, social media advertising, copywriting, make tweaks to the website, advise on blog posts etc

From the data they gather they will see exactly how the phrases are performing but more importantly they will identify longtail phrases. These are ridiculously easy to optimise for and account for 75-85% of website traffic.

Even Google are telling us that rank is less important. Matt Cutts of Google explainshere

 

[peteark]

IT IS NOT ABOUT HIGH RANKINGS

Not strictly true but I understand the logic

All service sector businesses need to have their performance measured and monitored, in terms of SEO experts this can be done by checking

Backlinks Generated
Serps

Basically speaking an SEM/SEO expert provides the flow of traffic to a site, the conversion ratio is dependant on the keywords targeted, (generalised terms convert poorly) and the look and feel of the site.

Generally speaking online marketing is based around

Improving the flow of traffic to a site
Targeting the right keywords
If using PPC take advantage of longtails and geo specific keywords
Adding regular unique content to a site
Adding backlinks in a natural manner
Collating stats
Understanding the process of improving conversion ratios (is it an seo or design issue)
Patience

An SEO experts primary aim should be to make a business successful, part of the process is search engine position. This is not the primary aim, simply because getting the wrong term to the top spot may not result in an increase in traffic, so the quote

IT IS NOT ABOUT HIGH RANKINGS

is true, but a client needs to have tools at their disposal to measure the performance of their provider. If measuring tools are not implemented you could be throwing vast amounts of money down a dark hole. This is the reason I advocate using a provider who's own site ranks highly for competitive terms and they have a list of genuine testimonials, this certainly separates the wheat from the chaff.