On today's podcast, we are talking all about websites, SEO, blogging, content marketing. Oh my goodness, all of the things you guys, our website is mission critical with any photography business because even if people are referred to you, they're still gonna go to your website. So you need to make sure that it is up to snuff. And also that SEO piece,

that is one of those things that we put the effort in now and it will continue to pay dividends in our business forever and ever and ever. Because that content marketing, that SEO, the website, that's something we own just posting on social media. We don't own that. It could go away tomorrow and it also has a shelf life of approximately 15 seconds.

So when you create a blog post that you can use again and again and again and again for numerous, numerous years, it is something that becomes an asset to your business. So definitely don't wanna miss this episode. SEO Content Marketing, all the things, all the Google updates. What does Google think about Chat, GPT, all the things we're digging in with KP and Jesse from Ink Pot Creative.

Stay tuned. Welcome to the Hair of the Dog podcast. If you are a pet photographer ready to make more money and start living a life by your design, you've come to the right place. And now your host pet photographer, travel addict, chocolate martini connoisseur, Nicole Begley. Hey everybody. Welcome back to The Hair of the Dog podcast. I'm Nicole Begley and today I have two very special ladies on the podcast with me.

I have KP and Jessie from Inpo Creative and we are gonna be talking all about SEO's, website, website messaging, all these amazing things because our websites are important. So KP Jessie, welcome to the podcast. So excited that you're here with us. Thank you. So excited to be here. Yeah, of course, of course. Tell us a little bit first about Ink Pot Creative,

what you guys do and then we'll we'll go from there. Yeah, Of course. So Ink Pot Creative is a show at website Design Studio. We're currently based in Las Vegas. We like to move a lot in the past few years we've been in southern Vermont, Boston, Denver, now Vegas. I love it. We mainly focus on website design,

but we also totally nerd out about, you know, SEO blogging for businesses, pretty much doing everything to create a website that your clients will absolutely fall in love with, as well as finding those different avenues to get people to that website. Oh my gosh, yeah, absolutely. So many places we could take that conversation 'cause I am a huge fan of content marketing and I think that is just such an important easy way to,

to build that SEO. But I'm gonna put that on the table for a minute and I would love to know how you got involved with this industry. Kind of what, what road led you down to create this, this business? Yeah, of course. So I actually started the business back in 2020. I actually graduated in 2020 from college. Had a little bit of trouble finding a job.

Jesse was my college roommate. So we ended up like moving in during kind of covid and everything that was going on. And I basically ended up getting an internship working for a course creation agency. And that kind of like opened the door to show me like, oh my gosh, like I could totally just start my own business. And I had really been interested in getting into publishing back in college,

but I again had trouble finding a job and ended up falling in love with the world of website design because it's basically a digital layout. So it was everything that I loved about books but in a digital format and I just really fell in love with it and now I can't imagine myself doing anything else. And then Jessie ended up joining on April, 2022 because I was like at the point where I was like I need the extra help.

So Jessie kind of joined on as our developer. So she ends up doing all of the development portion of the projects while I design them. And then she also does a lot of the blogging. Oh nice. Awesome. I love that you skipped that whole like nine to five thing and you went straight to your own business so now you're like completely unemployable just like the rest of us,

right? It's just like the thought of going back to like work for someone else be like, oh, oh no. Yeah, I can't even imagine Like, wait, I'd have to ask for a day off or like to move or this or that. I'm like, Nope, Uhuh absolutely not. That's awesome. I love it. So yeah, so today we're gonna be talking about kind of websites and SEO.

You know, most of this audience is pet photographers and one of the things that I have been really hitting home a lot recently is the fact that, well it doesn't matter what kind of photography we're actually selling, but it's, we're not really selling photography, you know, we're selling the experience, we're selling artwork, we're selling like the emotions of what that photography gives our clients.

And that's such like an important thing to kind of build into our website messaging. And you know, of course design is so critical, you know, kind of what are, what are some of the things that, you know, maybe not the like the kind of hidden things that, you know, we all kind of know the basics of like no music,

we need to have decent navigation on our website. But what are some of the things that maybe people don't think about that are really important to have on their website? I would say An actual curated portfolio is one of the biggest things that we always tend to think of because people always love to pretty much post every single photo we've realized. So we really try to push any photographers that we come in contact with to really make sure it's curated.

'cause also think about yourself. If you're going to somebody's portfolio, are you gonna scroll through more than like 30 photos? No, probably not. Another one really having great social proof. Don't bother to post like the entire testimonial that a client gives you. Try to shorten it and just add the most important part of the testimonial. So pull out, you know,

like the best three to four sentences, really try to make everything super skimmable. I would say those are the two biggest ones that are front facing that people can see. And then the other one is definitely trying to focus on local SEO, which is an entire like hidden part that people aren't gonna necessarily notice, but it's one of those ways that people can find you on Google so that you can actually start to get those dream clients.

Perfect. Those are great points. What's the difference between like a local SEO and just general SS EO and also by the way, SEO for all of you guys out there that might be like S se what SEO search engine optimization. So yeah, can you dive into that a little bit more? So local SEO is finding the clients or when people search for things in their area.

So if you're looking for a pet photographer, you're most likely gonna be searching for pet photographer in you know, your town pet photographer in Las Vegas because that's where you're located. So local SEO is targeting either towns, venues, areas, locations, whatever it is in specific spots that you are either in or like doing sessions in. It doesn't necessarily have to be your town,

you can do it in other towns. We have a lot of photographers that are on the east coast and you know, they'll target different places throughout Pennsylvania or something, but it's targeting those specific locations versus just targeting, you know, pet photographer. That's super general right? And it's gonna be really hard to rank for that just because there are so many out there.

But pet photographer in Las Vegas is much more specific and that's gonna target people who are looking for a photographer in your area and are gonna be much more aligned with you know, who you are in your business and where you are. Okay, yeah, no that makes complete total sense 'cause that's really where all of our general clients are anyway. What happens if there's a photographer that maybe serves their local market,

say it's Las Vegas but they also maybe go to Phoenix regularly so they want to have a little bit of an SEO presence there too. Are there some best practices if you're trying to kind of reach two markets with one website? This is a great question and we have gotten asked this by some of our clients when we do SEO work for them, our best advice is to try to pick one location that you wanna primarily target just 'cause it's gonna be a lot easier for Google to see you as sort of like an expert in that area.

So if you do let's say split your time between Phoenix and Las Vegas, what I would recommend if it's like pretty even between the two for where you're located, use a keyword research tool like key search, which is our favorite, that one is $17 a month or Uber suggests, which is completely free. And look up key phrases for both of those locations and pick the one that is easier to rank for and has more monthly searches because that's the one that's probably going to end up getting you more organic traffic in the long run.

So that way you'll really up your chances of being found on Google. Okay, sounds good. I was thinking too, and tell me if this is a, a decent strategy or like way outta left field or not good is that, you know, if I'm based in Charlotte and that's where I say 90% of my clients are, but I go to Florida,

you know, once a year in the winter, like if I built my whole entire website around Charlotte pet photographer but maybe just had a dedicated page to whatever this other market is, is that an okay strategy to do as well? Yeah, that's 100%. Okay. Just make sure that, again, like through the most of your site you'd be using those Charlotte keywords.

Yep. But then you could have like that one extra page that is targeting all of the Florida Keywords. Okay, perfect. Awesome. And can you talk to us a little bit more about keyword search? I feel like that's one of those things people say just look for your keywords and photographers everywhere. Like eyes glaze over, they're like, what? Like,

please know. Yeah. So for keyword research, there's a couple things that we kind of suggest doing and it's, it's broken down into two different categories. I'll say you have website keywords and then you have blog keywords. Both are super helpful and like blogging is is not dead. We 100% recommend blogging, especially for photographers. It'd be a great way to get people onto your site,

but you do kind of want to target different keywords with it. So we'll start with website keywords. With website keywords, you want to start thinking about two things. You wanna start thinking about the services that you offer and then the area that you're in. So if you are, you know, if you specialize in a specific type of, you know,

pet photography, if you, you know, specialize in dog photography, look for keywords that are, you know, dog photographer in Las Vegas and there's kind of a couple different things that you wanna look for when you look for keywords. KP kind of mentioned it a little bit with you know, ones that aren't super difficult to rank for and ones that have a lot of searches.

So ideally you wanna try and find keywords that people are actually searching. A lot of the issues that we see with, you know, other photographers or our clients or anything like that is that they're writing blog posts, they're putting keywords into their website copy that they think are keywords but they're not actually keywords. And sometimes it can be like switching up one word or changing where photographer is in the sentence and it can go from zero searches to 200 searches and that can make a big difference.

So our suggestion is to go get to a keyword research tool, whether it's a free one or a paid one and kind of look for different variations. Most of them when you type in a keyword it'll give you that keyword but then it'll give you variations that are similar to it. And so you can kind of say like, okay, maybe dog photographer in Las Vegas is a keyword but Las Vegas dog photographer is a better keyword.

So just switching that, you'll see it on the side, you'll be like, okay, it's a little easier to rank for most of 'em when we say easy to rank for, most of 'em have actual scores so it'll give you like a green, a yellow or a red on a scale from zero to a hundred. And the green keywords are super easy.

Key search actually has a blue one. Blue keywords are like hidden gems. Cool. Okay. So you kind of wanna look at that and you know, pick keywords based on that, see what people are actually searching for, which ones have the search volumes and and then go from there. And then when we're looking at the difference between website keywords and blog keywords,

website keywords are gonna be those super general ones. It's gonna be dog photographer in Las Vegas. Blog keywords are going to be more specific. So you know, locations to take pictures with your dog in Las Vegas, pet friendly venues in Las Vegas. All of those kind of spec specific things, whether it's venues, locations, styling guides, how to prepare questions to ask your photographer,

all of those are great ones and those are what you're gonna wanna put on your blog. And then when it comes to looking for those keywords, the same thing applies. You wanna find ones that are relatively easy to rank for, you wanna find ones that people are actually searching for and kind of go from there and write your content based on that instead of what you necessarily think you should write.

I love it. That's a really great advice. So would you recommend then like kind of brainstorming a whole bunch of different topic ideas, then going to the keyword tool, kind of putting those in, see where those different things rank or do the keyword tools also give you options to kind of take something and brainstorm from that too? Like what kind of,

what comes first? Chicken or the egg? I would say the best thing to do first is to just sit down and jot down like as many different ways as you, you can basically explain what you do in the easiest way possible for like, I mean you could go even on like something like chat GPT and just be like I'm a pet photographer in Las Vegas.

What are different ways that I can explain my job in like an easy to understand language and it'll give you like all these different ways that you could just say pet photographer in Las Vegas. And another way to do that too is you could just ask your family and your friends just be like, what do you say I do when you explain my job to other people?

And that can also give you a really good starting point when it comes to then going into something like Uber suggest or key search and again like try to come up with I'd say between five and 10 different starting keywords. And then when you go into those keyword platforms what you'll be able to do is kind of like Jesse said, it will give you all of those other options that will kind of help you like stem your search off into like all these different directions.

Awesome. That's fantastic. Yeah, chatt PT has been like a game changer for brainstorming. It's really kind of crazy. Okay, this is, this is really, really helpful. I think that becomes a lot easier for people to look for. And here's the thing, I think a lot of us in the industry as photographers, we think we know,

like you guys said, we think we know what those keywords are. 'cause we all call ourselves pet photographers. I, oh gosh, this was a while ago, so this is not accurate information. Go check out key search or Uber suggest. But I was surprised at how many people actually search dog photography and not necessarily pet photography. Yeah. Like pet photography I feel like is an industry term and we're all so close to it.

We just assume that, you know, Jane Smith is out there searching pet photographer in Charlotte. Yeah. The more niche you can get, the better. Yeah. Especially with keywords, you're just gonna get more aligned searches that way. Yeah, I love it. I love it. Yeah, we talk about that too, how there can be like, even though we're in a fairly small niche of pet photography,

there's still studio photographers, maybe photographers that specialize in action, maybe photographers that specialize in dog sports, you know, end of life sessions for older dogs. I mean there's so many different areas to kind of go down this rabbit hole. If you serve a couple of those different markets, would you suggest like creating a couple different blog posts specific to like say my more end of life sessions and then here's like the dog sports section sessions so that you can kind of do those long tail keyword and it would pull to your site?

Yeah, definitely. The more you can kind of the, the reality is when it comes to blog posts, the more blog posts you have, the more pages you have on your website. So really you just want to make as many avenues as possible for people to find you. So using blog posts to kind of list out all of your different services and talk about them,

talk about, you know, different things that go into them, how to get ready for them, things that you need to know, anything like that can be really helpful. And I mean you can also kind of go both ways. You can put, if you have services pages on your website, you can find specific keywords for all of the different services that you do and kind of list it out there and then get super specific with you know,

basic information or things that you need to know where you can go to do it, anything like that on the blog. So you kind of can do both if you, if you want to. But realistically, the more blog posts you can get out that have quality content, not just like dumping a bunch of blog posts out there, a bunch of pictures,

the more blog posts you can get out there, the more pages you have and the easier it is for people to find you just because there's more places to find you. Yeah, I love that. And oh gosh, that content marketing, those blog posts can be so useful because we can repurpose them and use them for so many things. So you know,

in path photography the biggest objections are my dog would never behave or my dog has to stay on leash, but I want these epic like outdoor shots. So it, you know, even just creating blog posts about common objections that your clients need to know before that you can then slot that information. Well take it on social media and direct people to the blog.

Take that blog post and like link it to your welcome email newsletter if somebody signs up to an email newsletter. I mean there's just so many uses for it that you could share and share and share. And once you have it created, just keep on repurposing it and sending traffic to it and, and yeah. And then getting traffic by the courtesy of the,

the search engines are always so helpful too. Yeah, that's our favorite thing to do with blog content is like repurposing it And like that's one of the things that we do within our business we do with the clients that we write blog posts for. Like turn your blog posts into a social media carousel and then you can send it to your email newsletter. You can make a TikTok about it.

You can use it as a like outline to do a podcast. Like you can really take this one thing and put it across every single one of your platforms because also people aren't always going to look at one single thing. Everyone who follows you on Instagram isn't necessarily reading your blog. Everyone who's reading your blog isn't necessarily listening to your podcast. So while we're like,

okay we're putting the same thing out on six different platforms, the reality is there's only a small subset of your audience that's actually going to see it on all six platforms. Yes. And even if they saw it like you can repurpose like do similar social media content going back to the same most popular blog posts like every quarter. Like, I don't know about you ladies,

but sometimes I like write something and then a year later I look at it and I'm like, I don't even remember writing this. You know, so if I don't remember writing it, certainly someone in my audience doesn't remember reading it if they even happen to see it. Yeah, Definitely. Yeah, I love it. Okay, so one of the other things that I think is a great way and would love your input on it too for local SEO is like one of the best ways of marketing is,

you know, start to make relationships with other businesses, do some partner marketing. And I think one of the easiest ways to start to build those relationships is to kind of create a little best of series on your blog. So like the best pet resources in Las Vegas. And then you talk to like a doggy daycare, do a little interview of them,

put them on the blog. And so now when people are searching for that business, hopefully your page is coming up hopefully somewhere on page one. But like, is, is that a good strategy too to, to help kind of bring people potentially to your website that maybe weren't even realizing the p photography is a thing? Yes, 100%. So this is something that we recommend and we do it a lot too,

is try to write those roundup posts that, you know, even once you write that post, you can even message the people you included in that post and be like, Hey, like I just wrote this article on the best dog photographers in Las Vegas and I like mentioned you in there and you never know you might get shares from that and then you know,

other people are gonna see that content and then they might share it too. So it can really have like this ripple effect. And then again, like you were saying, when people go to then search that specific business, it's very likely that your post could then pop up and then they're gonna end up on your site. So yeah, 100%. I love it.

I love it. What are some of the different things that go into helping, you know, 'cause you start a new business and you've built your website and it's like day one you're like, huh, why am I not showing up yet? So what are, I know time is one of them, quality content is one, but can you kind of give us an overview of an ideal timeline of what people can expect kind of when they're creating a new website or a new business?

Yeah, so it is definitely going to vary and age does have a factor in it. So one of the things that kind of can affect how fast you rank is your domain authority and that's something that there are ways to grow it, but one of the basic ways that you get a higher DA is just how long you've had that domain. So the longer your domain has been up,

the higher your DA is likely going to be. But there's other things that you can do to raise your domain and kind of help rank faster. One of them, like you were saying with like writing those roundup posts and getting, you know, having the links to different businesses. If you can get kind of collaborate with those businesses who might also be writing those same posts and have them include you in their posts anytime you have links from other sites back to your site,

that's basically signaling to Google that you are a trusted business and you are an authority and they'll start to see that and rank you higher. So if you can get links back to your website, that is a great place to start. Writing blog posts is a great place to start getting content out there. The one thing that we always see kind of the issue running in with with photographers is having blog posts that are just a ton of images.

So, And just say this is Fido. Exactly. We had a great session. Exactly. So that's great. But when people are searching for blog posts and information on that, they're not necessarily looking for photos, they're looking for information. So you can have those photos in galleries, in your portfolio on your website, but when it comes to the blog posts,

you wanna actually have quality information in there. Generally when we write, we try to do about 1500 words For wow each Post. Sometimes with business stuff you can go a little bit lower and go, you know, 800 to a thousand. But the, the real key is the more content you have in there, the more keywords you can add in there without stuffing and making like every sentence have the keyword naturally fit the keywords in and the,

the more information there is for people to find. Especially when it comes to like listicles, it may sound really weird, but listicle type posts, if you have 11 and somebody else has 13 or 15, they could potentially rank higher just because they have more information. So if you go back and update that post from 11 to 17, you can kind of boot,

you may be able to boost yourself in the rankings and jump above them. So writing a lot of good quality content, having links back to your site and then making sure that you're optimizing things like your photos, which is super important, especially with photographers with how many photos you have. But you should be writing alt text for every single photo that you have on your site,

whether it's your main site or your blog. It can be super tedious. So you know, it kind of helps limiting the amount of photos that you put on your site and it can help you kind of curate it down and cool down your galleries to be a little more manageable. But alt text is, is very important and it should be put on every single one of your photos.

All right. All right. I get you. I see what you're laying down. And, and for that alt text, I've always heard it as like basically writing just like a sentence as if you were explaining what that image is to someone that couldn't see it. Exactly. Yep. Okay. So it's just explaining what's in the image. It helps with SEO but it also really helps with accessibility.

If someone's using a screen reader, that's what the screen reader will read. Okay. So you wanna make sure that it, you can include like locations in there, but be sure to explain what the location is because if someone's using a screen reader, they might not know what this specific park that you're referencing is because they've never seen the park. Gotcha.

So you wanna make sure that you explain it, but you can also include locations if you do kind of expand on It. Okay. Okay. And can we jump back for a second? For a listicle? Can you give us a little bit more? 'cause yeah, this might be the first time people are hearing of, of what that is. So a listicle is basically just,

I like to think of Buzzfeed articles as the buzz example. Like when you see, oh, you know the, I'm trying To think of one, the top 15 things that you need in your kitchen from Amazon. That gets me every time. Yeah. So that's just a listicle, it's just an article listing out a bunch of things around a certain topic.

Okay, gotcha. Excellent. So so Google likes those, huh? Yeah, Google loves those. And also really weird fact use odd numbers if you can, if you do write a listicle, people are a lot more likely to click on something that's 11 than 10. But it's just super weird 'cause people will be more likely two to click on something that's 13 than 14 because it's not number.

So Yeah, no that's, that's fair point. Like I always say too, for people doing collections, like you need three or five, like four is No, no, it's just, it feels wrong. I don't understand. Okay, awesome. Oh my gosh, so much good information. Let's talk a little bit more too. All right, so we have our SEO,

we have a plan here. We have a way to now connect with these other people in our markets. We're creating great content. Oh, I know what I wanted to ask about that content with, when you said thousand 1500 words, whew. Does Google, and this could change probably like even tomorrow, does Google know if you are pulling that stuff from chat GPT?

Like is is it getting penalized if you are not putting a human touch on it? So this is such a good question and I actually run a travel blog. So I technically have two businesses. So we run ink pot and we also have a travel blog called Volumes and Voyages. And I've played around with AI on that site because I'm like, you know what,

I'll just mess around. It's my own business. I can see what happens. And I have messed around with using AI on that site. And if you do post anything I've noticed and you don't add a personal touch to it, like it gets to the point where even if you're not getting penalized, if other people use ai, they're gonna see that content and they're gonna be like,

oh my gosh, Chachi PT wrote that. 'cause Chachi PT will spit out like the same, you know, five words that normal humans will like not usually say in their everyday life in the articles. So I would say in the long run, I think 100% it is going to decrease your rankings a little bit if you're not adding that personal touch. Our favorite way to do that is like if you are using chat GPT to help you at all,

like even just writing an introduction or something, be sure to go through, edit it, make sure everything actually sounds like you, like add your own personality in and make sure to add at least one paragraph in there that says your specific experience. So you could add like, you know, maybe in the second paragraph you're like, as a dog wedding photographer based in Las Vegas,

I have photographed, you know, 30 different dogs in the last year just to add your own Personal experience. I love it. Wait, I've actually, this has been a, a sample that quite a few of my guests come up with for some reason. Like I feel like there might actually be a market for dog weddings. 'cause a lot of people just come up and be like,

I'll be a dog wedding photographer. Vegas would be the place to do that too. So Absolutely. There you go. There's your third business. I love it. Yeah, no, I I, I have a feeling, I mean, who knows, who knows where all this AI stuff's gonna go because we're at in its infancy and it is going to change drastically quickly.

But I would imagine that, you know, Google has always been at the forefront of trying to keep their, their product is getting people what they want and good quality content. So I'm pretty sure they have developed words working right now to figure out how to teach their algorithm to make sure that it maybe doesn't chew up the stuff that the robots are creating to Ted.

A reward people that are actually sharing human things. Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Okay, let's shift gears a little bit and maybe talk about website experience. What are some best strategies or, or what, what do you recommend for, for people like user experience wise and or copy kind of whatever direction you wanna take it? Yeah, so I think one of the biggest things that is super simple and like anybody can go and change it today and make a big difference is when it comes to your buttons.

So this is the first thing we do on almost all of our clients' site is we'll look at the color palette and ideally you want to pick either the brightest color in your color palette or the color that stands out the most, anything like that. And choose that as your button color. Make every single button on your site that color. Because what it will do is it will actually train your viewers to look at that and say,

okay, every time I see, you know, bright blue, that means it's a button and I should pay attention and I should click on it. So that simple thing of just making every single button the same color and you know, making it clear that that's your action color, that's when you want your visitors to do something, kind of lead them towards the path that you want to,

whatever the goal of your website is, you wanna make sure they're all the same color. And then the other thing is just making sure you have a good user experience. You should be able to get to every page. People shouldn't have to, you know, weed through your website to find the link to your services page or it should be really clear where they can go contact page absolutely clear.

Like that needs to be something that people can get to super, super easily because if they can't find that, they're just gonna click out and go somewhere else. So making sure you kind of have a clear user journey and making sure that they can find every page that they need to find. Whether it's in your nav bar, in your footer mobile menu,

whatever it is, you wanna be able to allow your visitors to find every single page on your site. Okay. All right, sounds good. With those buttons, red, what, what do you, yes or no red buttons? So I actually recently saw, recently saw a study that said red is the number one color to use if you wanna sell.

Oh, all right. See my, one of my main colors is like this really beautiful red and it, it does stand out. I mean when you have the red call to action, I mean your eye goes straight to it. But then I've heard just so much conflicting stuff of like, oh, but red is like stop. You know, but I don't know,

you can't not, you can't look away once you see it. I know. That's how I feel about it. All right, cool. Excellent. So I'll tell everyone I have permission to use my red buttons. Thank you. So good. So good. Okay. For our website too, our copy in it and things like that, I think a lot of times people are a little bit nervous to really dive into their personality and their Yeah,

really just their unique experience, their personality and have fun with it. What do you guys recommend? We love personality. Personality at the front of every single website. That is our, like one of the biggest things that we try and encourage all of our clients to do is to put their personality in the forefront. Because in reality, when it comes to really any business,

but especially photographers, like there are a ton of photographers out there, there are a ton of photographers that are gonna take pictures of pets. The difference is the personality, how they do it. You know, you also have the style and and everything like that, but you are the value in your business. So you wanna put that at the forefront while also making sure that you're speaking to your clients.

So when we say put the personality at the front, that doesn't mean have a site that just talks about you and your personality. Like you still wanna connect with your clients, you want to kind of show the, the issue or the struggle that they're having, show how you can help them, you know, create those memories, capture, capture their pet's lives and,

and where you are in your family right now or whatever it might be. But you also wanna have them get a sense of who you are. And one of the biggest benefits to this is most of the time it will create one more aligned leads and two, it'll get people if you do, you know, if you do discovery calls, they'll get on and be like,

I feel like I already know you. Hmm. And like, I feel so connected to you and it almost feels like I'm just talking to a friend and like I'm ready to book, let's, let's get this done. So it is really important to have that personality aspect to it. And then it also makes people more comfortable when they actually get to the session because obviously it,

it's a very personal thing. It's not us, you know, we're designing websites but we're here on our computer designing it. Our clients are, you know, all over the country when you're doing photography, you are right there. You are interacting with each other for the entire duration of the session. So you wanna make sure it's someone you're comfortable with and if you feel like you know them as a person,

you're gonna be way more comfortable than if you're like, this is a total stranger just kind of invading my space right now and I don't know what to do. Yeah, a hundred percent. And I can hear, I can hear people like 90% of my community right now being like, oh, but I'm an introvert. I don't want to put my face on my website or my personality.

I just like dogs. What do you say to them? I'd say if you feel that way, we totally get it. We're introverts too. The easiest way for you that we would suggest to add some personality in is to add a fun fact section on your about page because that can very easily make some connections with people scrolling on your site. Like if you're on there and you're like,

you know, my favorite TV show is the office. Someone might see that and be like, oh my gosh, I love the office. And then they might bring that up on the call or that might even be the reason that they end up reaching out to you because if they're like, oh we have stuff in common. Yeah, I love that.

And also when it comes to, you know, your personality, you can totally be an introvert and just attract other introverts. Like sometimes if you're an introvert and you get around someone who's super extroverted, you're just like, I'm so overwhelmed right now, I don't know what's going on. So maybe you're like, no, I want a photographer that's introverted and isn't gonna make you know this super like bubbly and it's just gonna like be there and tell me what to do and be nice and calm and level.

And like we've even had that, we've had a couple clients who are like, I'm totally introverted and I want to target the introverted people who are, you know, getting married. So put that, yeah introvertedness out on your site, like people are gonna connect with that. So even if you are, it's totally fine. I know it's a struggle to like actually get it out and feel like you're,

you know, talking about yourself or anything like that. But it's totally worth it and people will connect with it. So you should 100% do it. I love it. Awesome. I agree with all of that. And I also am a big proponent of anytime we can add even just a little bit of video that allows our potential clients to immediately connect with us or immediately not,

and people were like, oh my God, but then they're not gonna like me. Like they're gonna figure it out if they don't connect you, the 5% of people that maybe you don't mesh with, like they're gonna figure it out, they're not gonna hire you anyway, so when are you rather than figure it out now before they waste your time. So,

and then in my experience, the more that I've added any video to things like the more that connection is started to be solidified with that potential client before we even talk on the phone before we do anything and it becomes such an easy conversation then because they've already kind of know what to expect energy level wise, personality level wise for me. And it doesn't have to be scary and it can be done with your phone of just like on your contact page or on your thank you page after they do a contact of like,

Hey, I'm Nicole thanks so much, here's the next step with a link to schedule your discovery call if that's what your next step is. But yeah, I love video however, with video I know that it can be a little bit more challenging on our websites because of the size and I'm sure page load time is still a a, a concern for ranking.

Do you have any best practices if people do wanna include some video on their site? So our best advice if you do wanna use video is to try not to host it locally. So for instance, if you're on WordPress, don't like drag your entire video into your media library and then like, you know, host it on your own site and post it like directly that way.

Instead like list it as unlisted on YouTube, put it on Vimeo and use their embed feature so that it's actually hosted somewhere else and that will load a lot faster and not affect your own like page load time as much. Yeah, that's huge. That's, that's really, really huge. It was that the same for, 'cause I see a lot of sites now too that have like on a header,

just a little like looping video built in. Would that be hosted elsewhere too? Or that because it's so small, would you put that on the actual website? That's a good question. So if it's something like that, if it's like a page background for a specific section, you'll actually want that to be on your own site. Okay. But the caveat is you want to make sure that you are resizing it so that it's not super huge.

So like we mostly design on show it and show it requires you to have all videos be under eight megabytes. So they end up being like very short eight to ten second little looped videos that you can upload basically. Okay. So, gotcha. And then resolution wise, what's the going, going resolution like Back in the day I think I still am doing like 2048 for my images,

but at a lower, like a nine quality, they end up being like 300 kilobytes or something. It's like my ideal trying to get my image size down to, with these higher resolution monitors, is that still okay or is there a, a certain resolution in size that you recommend? So I think based on what we've seen, like it's still, that still looks good.

Okay. Ideally it it, it will also depend on the website platform because all of them kind kind of have different suggestions. Even different like image sizes that they suggest, like I know show it suggest that you do 3,500 pixels on the long edge and WordPress you know is 22, 20 48 Or 20 something or something. Yeah, yeah. They're all a little different.

Yeah. Yeah. So they're all a little different. So our biggest kind of suggestion when it comes to that is look at your website platform. Almost every single website platform will have some sort of help doc telling you how to resize your images, what like size, what resolution, everything like that. And then once you get it on there, just test it out,

look at it and be like, Hmm, that doesn't look too great. That looks a little grainy. That looks a little blurry and you can adjust from there. And maybe it is trying to put something that's a little bigger on there if it can fit or maybe it is, you know, if it's loading too slow you can be like, okay,

let me try to crunch this a little more and see if that helps. But yeah, we would definitely suggest looking at whatever your platform is and kind of going on their best recommendations. 'cause that's obviously, you know, they're setting that for a reason and they're putting it out there for a reason. So kind of like trust the experts thing when it comes to that.

I love it. Yeah, for sure. Cool. And then one as we wrap up, are there any other kind of overarching things that we need to keep in mind in terms of rank ability, SEO with our website for instance, I know Google was penalizing anything that wasn't mobile responsive, you know, a while ago is that was a big thing,

kind of where are kind of websites headed? What do we need to keep in mind to make sure that we keep the algorithm happy? Yeah, so optimization is gonna be a huge, huge, huge one just because you know, 80% of your traffic, if you go on Google Analytics, it's probably all coming from mobile. But one of the biggest things which I know we touched on like a little tiny bit,

is actually going to be experience mentioning your experience as much as you can, which as a pet photographer, it's gonna be a lot easier because even just posting your own photos is you basically signaling to Google that you know, you're an expert, you have the experience, you know what you're doing versus using something like a stock photo. Google is gonna be able to tell that that's a stock photo because they're gonna see it on a whole bunch of other sites.

So making sure that you are mentioning your experience as much as possible is going to help you a lot with your rankings. Especially with all of the updates they've been doing the past month. A lot of big sites have been getting knocked down for using a lot of stock photos lately. Interesting. So when you're saying to kind of list your experience that also in the copy of,

you know, started my business in 2010, blah blah blah, master photographer, like kind of like your accolades working into the, the copy of the page. Yeah, so anytime you can include that and include, you know, what you do, where you are, even the like pet photographer in Charlotte, like including that in blog posts, it's super easy.

Basically we try to do it with almost all of the ones that we write at the, in the intro, if you're doing, say you're doing a a post on the best places to take outdoor pictures with your dog and in Charlotte you can be like as a Charlotte pet photographer, like just that small little addition can signal to Google that like, hey,

I'm not just some random person making a list, I am actually a pet photographer in this area. I go here all the time, these are my recommendations. So yeah, definitely trying to fit those little additions into your website copy or your blog to kind of signal that like, hey, I know what I'm talking about. This is me, I do this,

this is my experience. Can be super helpful. I love that. That's great. This has been such a great conversation with, oh my gosh, so many actionable items that I'm sure if anyone was driving, they're gonna go re-listen to this again with a notepad. Don't try to take notes while you're driving. Everyone go get a notepad, listen again on like two times speed.

But anyway, any last minute kind of suggestions for people as they kind of navigate this or how to keep up with all the changes that are always happening to make sure that their website is still functioning well? I'd say definitely know that it does take time and trust the process because you may go and do some of these edits today and then tomorrow be like,

why am I not ranking yet? So just know that, you know, it can take anywhere from like six months up to like a year and a half for you to really start to see those effects. But once you start to see those effects, you're gonna be like, okay, now I understand why I did this. Like it was so worth it.

I am now in the middle of a hike and I'm getting inquiries because of what I did. So I love it. Yeah, stay the course, be patient. Awesome. Well, where can people find you guys? Let us know how people can work with you. If they're like, man, I would love some more guidance on my website. What kind of services do you offer and where can people follow with you?

So you can find us. Our website is inpo creative.com. We are also at inpo Creative on Instagram and I think on basically every other social media platform. And then we do offer website design. We do monthly blogging for clients. We also have a blogging masterclass called Blogging for Business that will teach you how to find keywords, how to outline posts, how to write the post,

everything that you need to create blog posts that are going to rank. So you can find that at ink pot creative.com/blogging for business. But yeah, Instagram, we're always on Instagram, so if anyone has any questions, we love talking about this and helping other business owners. So if anyone has any questions, feel free to DM us and we'd love to chat.

Awesome. Yeah, you guys dmm them, let them know what was most impactful for you or what change you guys are gonna make to your website as a result of this conversation. So thanks again ladies for being here with us kp Jesse, really appreciate you taking the time to share your knowledge with our community and everybody else. I'll talk to you next week.

Thanks for listening to The Hair of the Dog podcast. This was episode number 215. If you wanna check out the show notes for access to any of the resources that we mentioned, simply go to www.hairofthedogacademy.com/ 2 1 5. Thanks for listening to this episode of Hair of the Dog Podcast. If you enjoyed this show, please take a minute to leave a review. And while you're there,

don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss our upcoming episodes. One last thing. If you are ready to dive into more resources, head over to our [email protected] of the dog academy.com. Thanks for being a part of this pet photography community.