All right, we've got some SEO myths coming up here in this episode. You are going to love this. I thought I knew quite a bit about SEO, but there were some myths here that kind of shook me to my core. Definitely. If you have a website that you want to get found, this is a must listen episode. Stay tuned. I'm Nicole begley, a zoological animal trainer turned pet and family photographer.

Back in 2010, I embarked on my own adventure in photography, transforming a bootstrapping startup into a thriving six figure business by 2012. Since then, my mission has been to empower photographers like you, sharing the knowledge and strategies that have helped me help thousands of photographers build their own profitable businesses. I believe that achieving two to $3,000 sales is your fastest route to six figure businesses, that any technically proficient photographer can consistently hit four figure sales.

And no matter if you want photography to be your full time passion or a part time pursuit, profitability is possible. If you're a portrait photographer aspiring to craft a business that aligns perfectly with the life you envision, then you're in exactly the right place. With over 350,000 downloads. Welcome to the Freedom Focus Photography podcast. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Freedom Focus Photography podcast. I'm your host, Nicole Begley, and today I have a photography SEO expert, Connor Wahlberg, joining us.

Connor, welcome to the podcast. Thanks, Nicole. It's awesome to be here. Oh, my gosh. So excited to have you. So you've been a guest experience or a guest instructor one or two times and elevate. And so Heather got to know you first, and so, yeah, I've been hearing about you for a long time, so I'm really excited to finally make this connection and have you here. But for people that maybe don't know you, can you give them just a little bit of high level background of who you are and who you help?

Yes, absolutely. And I can't believe it took us this long to connect. So it's great to be here. I started out as a professional photographer right out of high school, and I got into it because I had a friend who was turning professional for skiing, and I wasn't planning on being a pro skier, but he was like, you know, you should get a camera and take photos of me.

Okay. Yeah. I was like, well, no, cameras are, like, $500. I can't afford that. So anyway, that night I ended up buying a camera, and it was the bad camera, wrong fit, so I had to send it back and get a different one. And these were the days when shipping took, like, ten days on anything. So it was like 30 days later, I might have been working with a camera, but I got into action sports photography and I shot professionally, mostly action sports.

That was my passion. But I also did some real estate work to make the ends meet because shooting for magazines, it's all speculative work most of the time in that industry, and they don't really pay well. No. So I ended up shooting real estate as well. From that, I started a clothing company and ran that for a little while. I just kind of, after ten years as a photographer, I wanted to try something different.

And photography translated right into that business because then I could shoot videos and photos of everything for my company. But during that time, I learned SEO, and SEO is where I am now. So I started working with clients on SEO for years and years, doing their SEO for them, and I realized I don't really want to be doing the SEO for my clients. I'd rather teach them, show them the way and work with them and watch them get results.

And then I was like, who should I work with? And naturally, it just made sense to work with photographers because I was one. I get them. I understand what you're going through and trying to learn and how you're trying to make ends meet, and I know that SEO is an amazing way to do that. So now I actually run a membership where I teach photographers. SEO. Awesome. Yeah.

So for SEO in photography, there's like a small bunch of photographers that are like, yeah, I love it, I know it. And then there's the majority of photographers, they're like, I just really want to take photos and se what? How? So, yeah, we're here to help you guys get a little handle on it. Do we want to go over maybe some different myths, like how much has SEO changed?

And I've been in this business since 2010, so I feel like SEO is one of those things, like Facebook ads, there's things changing all the time. So where do we even start? There's definitely things changing all the time. And it's funny when you mention most photographers being like, se what? My mom actually still to this day, and this is after ten years of doing this, she's like, oh, my son, he does sep.

And then people are like, what's that? And she's like, oh, it's a Google thing. And that's what she knows. And I try to explain to her and she just kind of like glosses over. He does something on the Internet. So now, most of the time when people ask me what I do, I start off with Internet marketing. Help people market on the Internet. And I'm like, that doesn't sound quite as good or as specific, but it's there.

At least they get it. I love it. That's amazing. We'll teach you guys some SCP today, some sep. So, yes, and the thing about SEO is that there are all kinds of misconceptions. There's bad information on the Internet. There are. I think this is true of any industry. I've worked a lot in Facebook ads as well. Same thing. There's people selling their program and you get into it and it promises the world and you kind of try it and you're like, I, this isn't going to work or I don't like it or I don't feel good about it.

Yeah, but they're all selling their strategy. And a lot of times when people are selling their strategy, they're selling the one thing that worked for them. And it's a very specific case at a very specific time and it might not be applicable anymore with SEO, I would say over time it's constantly evolving, it's changing. Google is changing because they have to. The big reason is AI. As people are sitting down at their computers and they're realizing, hey, not only can I have AI write an article for me, I can go ahead and tell AI to write 100 articles for me and to come up with the topics for the articles and to add photos and to then send it all to me and even automate it to the point where I can just post it on the site and every day I have 100 new posts.

This is very problematic for Google. It's problematic for the Internet. They're getting inundated with new content. This new content, they had to find a way to differentiate it from good from bad. What's helpful from what isn't. The big focus with Google is helpful content. I think with SEO the focus is always think like Google, what do they want to do? Because Google needs to give us the best search results.

If they don't, we're going to go to Bing, we're going to go to, maybe back to Yahoo, something crazy like that, but we're going to jump to a different search engine. And so anytime you're thinking about what you should do on your website, what it should say it should be about, what would Google want to give people? Which at the end of the day is what do people want?

What do they need to see, what do they need to hear? And does your site comprehensively answer these questions? Does it address it? Because searches are questions. So with this change. The big change is that they call it eat, which is expertise, authority and trust. Those are the three factors that should go into your website and everything you're doing online. You want to demonstrate your expertise and authority, you want people to trust you and you need to convey this everywhere you are, even on other websites that are talking about you.

That's a way to convey this. But since AI has come to the top, now we have a new factor and it's experience. AI cannot recreate experience. It can't speak from its own experience. Like, I did this, I went and saw this thing, I felt this thing, I experienced this thing that to me is the differentiator. It's what Google says they're working on hard. And sometimes as they're doing this and changing the algorithm, it hurts really good websites that are doing well and hurts them for a few months until Google can fix it again.

But for the most part, they're trying to sort through all of this stuff. So the myth here is AI is going to crush SEO. This is something that you are going to see. If you start looking up SEO on the Internet, if you start looking at AI, they're going to say, oh, well, why would you need SEO? AI does everything. It doesn't actually do everything. It doesn't know what it's doing.

It's only doing what we're telling it to do. It's coming up with ideas based on what we're saying. AI can't replace SEO. They're two different things. SEO is how we are speaking about our business to Google and how Google is seeing our business. So is Google starting to because we talked a little bit too about before we started about blogging and how that can still be a really good SEO strategy.

But with all this AI stuff and people being able to put up like really, I mean, crappy content that just like a robot wrote, is Google starting to ding those websites or like being able to tell what's actually authentic content versus like stuff that people just put into chat and don't even bother to try to personalize? Yeah, definitely. And this is, this is a big, it's a big thing that Google did about maybe eight months ago or a year ago they went through and they said, hey, we are penalizing all the sites that are just straight up content factories.

And the funny part about this is the rumor is Google hadn't gotten the algorithm to actually be able to figure this out yet. So they manually went to websites, they have reviewers team that went and then penalized the sites and issued manual penalties. But Google was saying all the time, like our algorithm now knows. But yeah, everybody's saying they still aren't there yet. I guess that's pretty smart though, because they're going to say, because a lot of times it's like top secret, what does the algorithm look for?

We're not going to tell you, but they were like, we're penalizing this. So hopefully people be like, oh, I shouldn't do that. Yeah, yeah. Once you know it, you're like, oh, yeah, I'm not going to do that. I don't want to risk it. These would be sites obviously to raise that flag, they'd have to be putting out hundreds of pieces a day. And maybe it's, you know, it's a photographer's website and they have AI just writing all these articles all day and Google's going to penalize that.

Yeah. So this is one way. Yeah. So if you're a photographer that is using some chat to help brainstorm, to help outline, to help improve your writing, like I think that's okay if it's like an occasional article here and there, but it's not like there's a difference between just, hey, chat, give me like 20 articles to post on my photography website for SEO versus like, hey, here's my article, here's my voice.

Like, help me write this in a more friendly, casual manner. Can you help me improve this article that is still okay, right? If you're doing like the one off just to like, yes. Don't fear AI. Like, you don't need to be like, I have to avoid it at all costs. Instead, add your own experience to it, work with it. But also I always go back to just like the basis of like being a good human and creating good stuff that actually matters.

It's not that you're being a bad human if you're just pumping content out there, but you're not helping anyone, you're not doing anything to make any real difference. So when you're speaking from your experience, and there's such a big difference between knowing and doing like, AI knows, but we are out doing it. So when we're speaking from that angle, we're sharing much more valuable information with the people who are on our websites.

And so blogging is still very relevant. And because when you think about a blog, it's just content. It doesn't matter that it's called a blog or a page or whatever it is, it's just content and it's something we're sharing to answer people's questions or to help somebody else. And if we go from a place where we're truly helping people, that will be the best way forwards with SEO.

Yeah. Okay. Awesome. All right, guys, so there you go. You heard it straight from Connor. Don't be scared, but don't put up 20 articles a day of B's. Yes. Which I don't think anyone in this community is doing. Yeah. All right. What are some other. Some other good myths? Actually, let me ask you this one, too, real quick. Gosh. Back in the day, there were. I mean, websites have changed so much over the past 15 years that I've been in this industry.

Like, from the original ones where it's like you go to the site and there's music and you know, all these different things. You know, nothing was mobile responsive because nobody had phones. So are there certain things that are just, like, non negotiable you've got to have on your website or your SEO is going to suffer big time? Hmm. That's a good question because there. There definitely are certain things.

So as a photographer, I have just a very basic formula that every photographer should use on their homepage. It's like if you have a main niche, which ideally you want to have a main niche, let's say you're a pet photographer or a dog photographer specifically. Right? And then you. You want your homepage to say where you're based. So location, your niche, dog and then photographer. And that should be big and clear on your homepage.

You want your site to speak to that. And if you aren't using the right keywords, Google can kind of infer it, but by using the right keywords, you have much higher chance of ranking. That is an absolute must. Also, having good, clear linking throughout your site is a must. Like, people should be able to navigate it very cleanly. And I do think the big one is topical authority.

And what that means is that you are the. This goes back to expertise, authority and trust. You are the authority on your type of photography in your area. The way we show Google this is through all of the content on our site. So we have detailed pages about pricing. We have detailed information about what a shoot is like with us. We have all of the stuff to answer any question that a potential client would have.

Gotcha. Okay. All right. Good to know. All right, sorry. We're getting off track. What are some other myths that people might have around SEO? All right. This is the one that drives me crazy. And I talk to my members about it endlessly because everybody gets caught up on it, but I'm sure you've heard this. Page speed is everything I have. So this does not fall into the category that you just asked of things you must deal with.

Pagespeed is not everything. And there is a huge issue with this. Over the last, I don't know, five years, it's become like a craze. And this is a selling point for SEOs. People trying to do work for your site, they go in and they run a quick page speed report through Google. It's free to do. It takes like 20 seconds. And they say, oh, hey, you have a, your ranking is a d on your page speed.

That's a, you know, it's 58% or 68% or whatever. 68%. Like, we're going to fix that for you and that's going to make all the difference. This is not going to make any difference. In all honesty, if you go to your website and if other people go to your website and it loads fairly quickly, you're fine, as long as it's not taking like 30 seconds to load. If it's taking 30 seconds, then you're probably getting a page speed score of like ten.

And you're like, I need to fix this right now. But the SEO experts, they are telling you page speed is everything and that you have to be very technical to fix it. A lot of times you don't. There's not a whole lot. You have to do a lot of platforms. If you start doing research, you'll be like, I'm on squarespace, right? And everybody has told me squarespace is slow, so I need to switch from squarespace.

Well, you don't need to switch from squarespace. Stick with it. It's perfectly fine. You're not getting top ranks that you can get with WordPress, but you're getting plenty good enough that Google is not wanting to show you in search results. They still want to feature you, and they aren't going to ding you for this at all. If this is a focus for you, it should be your last focus.

Yeah, because all the other stuff is so much more important. Google and people care what's on your site. They care who's linking your site and who's talking about you. That's what's important. But this whole page speed thing has gotten out of hand. Wow. All right. That is a huge myth. I didn't know that one. Wow. All right. Okay. And yeah, I could definitely see just because humans attention spans are so ridiculous.

So if you're opening it and it's just not opening quickly, then, yeah, then that's a problem. But it's not like this has to be up in lightning speed kind of thing. Yeah. If it's just loading quickly. And another thing along the side of this is if once you take this dive and the reason I think people are so, like, hooked on this is it gives you a score.

Right? Yeah. And it's really easy to see the score and say, oh, that's my SEO score. I got a 70. I need to get it to 100. Like, it goes right back to being in school. We want to get a perfect score on everything we do. The rest of SEO, there's no score except for like first place for keyword, but that's harder to measure and get there. With page speed, I can make changes to a site and change the score within minutes.

Yeah. Okay, awesome. All right. What other, what other myths are we wrongly holding onto? Okay. Content length. Okay. This was a big one that most people think they have to write stuff that's much longer than what's there and we just have to keep filling it and spinning our gears to make more and more words. There's, there's two sides to this. The reason this approach has worked in the past and can still kind of work having that length is we hit more keywords.

So simply Google crawls our site and says, oh, I found 500 keywords because the article was 20,000 words long instead of 2000, which I only would have found 100. Yeah, that, that can kind of work, but you're probably not going to rank too high for most of those keywords and you're probably going to get visitors who leave your site. So it's more important that you have people that visit your site and they stay on the article.

Google tracks that dwell time, how long people spend, and they say, okay, I sent someone to this page. They spent, you know, ten times longer than they do with all the other listings. I'm going to bump them up to second place or first place. Well, then if that is one of the things wouldn't you want? It's probably like a balance then you want the article to be long enough to keep someone there, but not so long that it's obnoxious and they never finish it and they bounce off and leave and say, forget it.

So you want to make it helpful and useful. That's what it comes down to is make it helpful and useful. Look at what's pre existing for the term you're going after. So if you're like, you know, 20 tips to, for better pet photos and you type that into search, you're going to see all the results. Yeah. With all those results, our 1000 words, that's probably a good guideline.

That maybe around 1000 words is a good answer. Okay. That's also search intent. So if I typed in better tips for dog photos and I noticed that every article was a list, then I should probably make a list. Okay. So we want to do what's, what's already working is working for a reason. Google has favored these sites for a reason. Okay. SEO is all about figuring out that reason and then flipping it to our advantage so that we can.

It's all gaming the system in a way, right? Yeah. Do you have any hacks for finding different, like titles like this or different. Different kind of content pillar ideas for, you know, if you want to start blogging, you want to start having other articles that might come up in search. Like do you go to Google and just search pet photography and see kind of what's up underneath? Or like how, how can you start to mine ideas?

There's a few great ways to do this. One way is to start typing in any idea you have on Google and then going to those photographers sites that come up in the results, look through their content and see what they're posting. Yeah. And see if, if it's good stuff and you'll get ideas that way. That's one way to do it. Another simple way, without doing any research, is to make a list of every possible question that your clients could have, every question they've ever asked you, and just keep writing down.

Go as deep as you can on this list and then say, hey, does this one need a full article to answer it? Yep. If you, if you think it does, type in a search with that question and see what comes up. Okay. All right. Love it. Great. Yeah. And also, by the way, you guys just caveat. Goes without saying, but if you're going looking at other people's sites, do not copy what they wrote.

Just get ideas for headlines. Okay. All right. Just to be clear. No, that's good to say. We aren't, we aren't trying to rip people off. Yeah. Generally what I like to do for competitive research too is I like to go to big cities that I'm not in. Yeah. So I want to see, and especially big cities because they are the most competitive landscape, they have the most photographers in a specific niche, and I want to see who's ranking top in that city and I want to look through their content and say, oh, I could write a, you know, the ten best dog parks in Denver Post.

Yeah. They have the ten best dog parks in New York. It's doing really well. I could do one for my city. Yeah, I like. I love it. I love it. Okay, what else? What else you got? Okay, let's see. You have to dive into code. That's right. So you don't have to dive into code. This is where most people get lost. This is why most people don't start, because SEO just the name sounds like it's a bit of code or something.

Like, you hear it, you're like, oh, that sounds technical. You don't need to be spending your time in code. And if you're spending your time in code when you haven't really done a whole lot of other work or written new articles or done any promotion, then you're probably wasting your time. Okay. Yeah. Because code is the technical structure of your site. And although that matters, most sites, especially if you're using a pre built platform, they're already pretty good.

The technical structure is sound. You don't need to be messing with that. So just take it easy on yourself. Like, work on the stuff that you don't need tech skills to do. That's the stuff that's going to make the most difference. The real world stuff. Okay, great. Yeah. The content and that kind of stuff. What about images? I mean, I know we just said, I'm jumping back a minute for the page speed.

That page speed doesn't matter, but I mean, I've always been. Best practice. Again, I'm going way back to the early 2010s where you wanted to be really careful of getting web version files up there for your images and like embedding video, maybe to play from like a Vimeo or YouTube or. What are the best practices these days for images? Because as photographers, our sites are very image heavy.

Yes. And since our sites are so image heavy, this can increase load time and then pagespeed can become a problem. Yeah. So we want to make sure our images are sized appropriately. That means we're reducing the quality percent. We're going to the minimum size we can do on the page where it still looks good on like a 4k monitor or something. Okay. But that's the gist of it.

There's not a whole lot else you need to worry about. The area that I jump into on images, though, is alt text or alt tags, and this is one of my myths as well. People think it's the key to everything and that it's going to change at all. Alt text technically is for accessibility, which means that if somebody is visually impaired, the computer can read what the image is to them.

That's just a description for that. SEOs have been gaming this and it has worked over the years. It still works to some extent where if you put an image up every image on your site, you want to have alt text because Google wants sites to be accessible. Yeah, but also you can insert some keywords through your alt text. I wouldn't do it on every image, just a couple images, a page or something.

But if you have a great photo of a dog in a specific park and it's clear that it's a specific park, reference the name and location of the park in the alt text. Okay. And this is going. Yeah. Does that help? Like when you search Google and then you click images? Yes. What's on the alt text will help come up there. So that's how Google searches for those images for okay is through the alt text and or through the image file name.

I say, I was going to ask, does the file name matter? File name matters too. Like, okay, anytime you can name them. But for photographers, we're going to go do a shoot and get 500 photos and we want to post 50 of them on our site all at once. You don't need to do a unique name for every file. You could use the person in the shoot or the dog's name and the location and stuff.

One, two, three. That's fine. Okay, so that's okay for duplicate file names, but you don't want to duplicate alt tags too much. You can still do kind of a similar thing, but you don't want to just keyword stuff your alt tags. Yeah. And then what's the rule these days on duplicate content? Because that was always a big no no if you were going to post, I don't know, something here, but then maybe there was a get, like maybe you had an article on your blog, but then you were also going to guest post that same article on another blog.

That used to be a no no, at least that I heard long ago. Yeah. What are the rules on that these days? So here's the reason why that can be an issue, is Google can only rank one page for something in general. And if it sees the exact same content, it's not going to say, I'm going to rank this page and this page for it. So if you do a guest post on someone else's site with the same content, it probably has a lot less value to Google, so they're not going to carry as much weight back.

Okay. So generally if you're guest posting, you want to write stuff that's unique for the guest. Now, unique doesn't mean it needs to be all new ideas. I'm writing articles all the time for other websites about SEO, for photographers, and a lot of them are seven tips or ten tips. And it's like, a lot of the tips are the same, but I rewrite the article, I just go in and I write it and structure it and it's not the same article.

Gotcha. And you're not going to chat to EBT and saying, give me 100 versions of this article, I'm nothing. I love it. And then putting them all up on the same day. Yeah, no, don't do that. That being said, you can use chat GPT and you should absolutely, like, I know people who aren't, aren't inclined to write. A lot of people don't like to write. So go in and have chat GPT write an article for you, then go back through it and edit it and add your own details from experience and change things.

There's telltale signs that articles are written by chat GPT. They'll use very, like, obscure words or things that nobody uses in conversation. But it's like, wow, that, that sounds like I'm reading some old literature or something. Like, that's not, nobody talks. And then sometimes you notice like a word or two. I forget which one was showing up all the time. And I'm like, oh my God, I cannot handle that word again.

But it was just like, it wasn't a weird word or like out of place. It was just like, why does that keep showing up? That's not a normal word to see all the time, but. Oh, gosh. Yeah. Anyway, I had another thought around AI. Oh, we'll come back to it. Okay. All good stuff. What other things do you have? Oh, actually, I remember. Sorry, brain. This is what it's like to be inside my brain.

Welcome to it. I was going to say, one way that I really love to use AI for, for writing is if I have an idea of something, say it is. I want to write an article about how to choose a location for your dog photography session. I might say to chad, hey, I want to write an article for this. The target market to read it is this. It's going to be on my website, which is this.

Can you give me ideas for personal stories that I can add or personal, um, or I would say personal stories and or angles that I can create this article with. So then it will give me like eight different articles. Or it would, might prompt me like, is there a time where you, x, y, z. It would, like, prompt me possible stories that would get me to think, oh, oh, I do have a good story about that.

And then I can go write that story. And it's so much easier than just staring at a blank page and being like, I need to write something. So, yeah, I love using it that way. That's a great approach. Yeah. And I think the thing that most people get wrong when they start using it is they don't have a conversation. They write one prompt, they take the result, and they're like, well, this is the result.

But it's like, now you take the prompt and you say, hey, can you make this sound more conversational? Can you make it sound like it's written? Can you put it. So it's written for fifth grade reading level. Yeah. Like, all of a sudden, you do all these refinements to it, and it makes it better and better each time. Hopefully, sometimes it'll mess up and you'll be like, don't go that way.

Yeah. I do have one thread, too, where I've taken some samples of writing that I am really proud of. That's, like, really sounds like me. And I would have an analyze it of, like, hey, write. Take this rough draft that I wrote. Like, I still wrote it, but then I have the samples of, like, my finished writing, and I'm like, can you make this rough draft more like this?

And it does a pretty darn good job. It's a great idea. Yeah. All right. Okay. How many more myths do we have? Do we have some more? I always have more, but this one is about backlinks. And backlinks are when people link to your site from theirs. It's a popularity contest, in a way. So think of each backlink as somebody raising their hand and saying, I vote for you.

And Google sees that and says, okay, another vote. But people will take this to mean that they need to have as many backlinks as possible. It's not about the quantity, it's about the quality. And that's like most things in life, right? And that's the same with your articles. When you're writing articles, it's not about writing 50 blog posts a day. It's about writing one a week. That's stellar.

Yeah, yeah. But with your backlinks, you want quality links. Now, quality links are related generally to what you do or they're sidelined your industry. It's like a pet photographer might want to link from a pet shop or like a, you know, like where they're selling dog toys that sort of stuff. Yeah. So getting these, these are the right types of links, but they might not be very powerful.

Now, Google views powerful links as ones coming from sites that already have a lot of links to their site too. Okay. You can use SEO tools to find this out. They usually call it domain authority, trust authority, things like that. And it will give you a score. A lot of photographers websites are probably in the four to ten range. Out of 100, you're not going to hit 100.

So this is like page speed. This is different than pagespeed. You can't get there because 100 is Facebook, Amazon, Google, these are the sites that everybody on the Internet has linked to a billion times. You're not going to hit that. But getting that higher involves getting the right links from the right places that are considered authorities or quality by Google. So if you use a tool like Semrush Ahrefs, there's a handful of tools out there.

There's one that's really cheap. It's called keywords everywhere. It's like a dollar a month and it shows up in your search results and shows you the volume, how much people are searching for each word. It gives you all of this insight and you can look at any site and see, okay, they have a domain authority or domain rank of 34. Like, that's a pretty powerful site. That's awesome.

I'm going to do a guest post on that site and that's going to get a link to my site. Oh, I just learned something. New keywords everywhere, huh? Yes. I'm going to check that out. That's awesome. Yeah, it's a good deal. You have to buy a whole year. So it's like $22. Oh, okay, 22. Oh, my gosh. Okay. Once a year. I can manage, I can manage. I love it.

All right, awesome. What else? All right, let's see what is next here. You have to run ads to rank. So this is a common mistake. Google Ads? Yes. So people are like, hey, somebody pieced this together, the conspiracy theorists. They were sitting there and they were like, wait a minute. If Google is charging people to run ads and they want to make more money, then they're not going to feature anybody unless they're running ads.

So somebody connected those dots and then started writing all about it. It doesn't make a difference to your search performance. Google has to be unbiased with search performance. Yeah, because if they start playing favorites, these rumors, they're going to like go out of control and it's going to become very clear to everyone. Like, wait a minute. Yeah. I do notice that. It's like when everybody started talking about our phones, listening to us, and then they're like, I see all those Facebook posts.

Like, then I was recommended this product the next day and I'm like, I think it was coincidence. I don't think that anybody or any machine is sitting there listening to every word you're saying to see if you trigger a brand name. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the conspiracy is real, but we're not a conspiracy podcast here, so who knows? We'll leave that for another kind of podcast. Yeah, I think part of it might be, too, that just our reticular activating system.

We say something and then it's in our more peripheral consciousness and we're like, oh, maybe that ad was served to us yesterday and we just didn't see it. You know, now since we said it, we notice it, like where, you know, you start looking for a certain car that you're going to buy and you're like, they're everywhere now. Well, they were everywhere yesterday, too, and you had never noticed it before.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Oh, my gosh, this has been so incredibly helpful. Before we start to wrap up, what advice would you have for someone that is kind of getting their business together? That they're either starting their very first website or maybe they've had their website for a while, but maybe someone that hasn't really given any thought to SEO in the past. They're just like, I know I need a website, I create it, and then I go about my business.

What advice do you have for them? The first one would be to visit your site, pretending you're a client who has never met you, knows nothing about you or your business, and it's really hard to do. So you might want to ask a friend or maybe someone you know that's not familiar with your business, hasn't seen your site. Like, what do you, what, what's the experience? What do you learn about me?

What do you think? How does this site make you feel about me? Because that's, that's a big part of SEO is, is honestly a, we want people to understand what we do and understand us. And if they don't understand that or get that, then Google's not getting that either. So we need to kind of go in depth. We want people to become familiar with us and then this is not related to SEO, but just like, I've seen some photographers adding videos to their sites behind the scenes.

Love that. Not enough photographers are doing that. So I just wanted to throw that out there that's something that if you have the opportunity, like, which you should, there's, it's so easy to record ourselves now, to set up a camera phone while you're out shooting and like, get all these shots and then put together a little script that you read voiceover or you're talking to the camera and you're just like, they.

This. All of a sudden people know you and they become familiar with you. That's a big conversion difference right there. So we're not going to hire someone we don't trust or know. Google thinks the same way. So visit your site. Like, you don't know what you do. Then you might find out, like, oh, I don't really explain anything. Instead, I'm just talking. It doesn't even make sense. I'm saying standard stuff.

If your site's all standard stuff too, like turn around. Like just, just basic blanket statements. I was going to say turnaround time in two weeks, things like that. That's fine. You want stuff like that, good information. But if it's blanket, like, you'll know after. Yeah, you'll look at these things like, I picked up a camera when I was two. Like the same kind of story that everybody has on their about me page or on their investment page.

Like session fees this time and talent. 30 minutes, 20 images, like that kind of stuff. Or are you talking about just something else? I think that kind of stuff. Because a lot of it's just like very boilerplate. We need some of this boilerplate stuff. Like, that's important. We do need how long a session is, how much we charge, all that stuff. But your homepage shouldn't feel boilerplate. It should convey feeling and emotion.

It should speak to what your client wants, not how great you are. Yeah. It demonstrates how great you are while speaking to their wants. Yes. Yep. Yeah. And speaking to them. I know this isn't a conversation about copywriting, but I feel like it's important to mention, too that, you know, we end up writing our website from. I. I, like, I have been photographing dogs for so long and I can do this for you and da da da, but it should really be more from the perspective of the client.

So, like, how can we, how can we make it more about them and their experience? One great exercise that Kim west shared with me, she's a copywriter, also a pet photographer. Was. She had our students once go and like, basically look at their website and everywhere it said, I, like, rewrite it and make it about the client. Like, you're not allowed to have eye on your website, you know, maybe once or twice, but it's rampant.

So that's some way that you could kind of change to make that experience more emotional because, yeah, I think the SEO game at the end of the day is more eyeballs on our site. But if we don't have a site that's going to convert them to be interested, then that SEO is for not. Yeah, then we're not making any difference. What's the SEO all for? Yeah, so, and then the big part is make your site comprehensive.

Make sure it addresses all these questions. Just go through and make sure every question your client could have is addressed. And then the second thing, I would be doing these like at the same time. But make sure your google, my business is set up thoroughly. Every detail is filled out. You're updating images on occasion, you're requesting reviews from every shoot you do. Yeah. A good thing to do when you're trying to evaluate, like what's it going to take for me to rank is to look at your competitors sites and their search results and say, okay, these are the top five competitors for my specific niche that are ranking one through five and I'm ranked 6th.

What's special about each of these sites? Look at each of those sites. Don't steal from them. Just look at them and say, okay, this site has, all of these sites have 120 reviews and mine only has 15. An area you need to focus or all of these sites have a clear keyword that matches what they do right on the homepage. That's a big one. Use that homepage keyword, feature your niche and you can have other niches, but they should be on different pages on your site.

Yeah. Okay. Oh, one more quick question. SEO wise, I don't think this has gone like it had a moment. I don't know if it's as popular as it once was, but the single page website versus a more traditional page or a more traditional website with lots of pages. Do you have an opinion? I'm always torn on this because Google can rank a page for a lot of keywords.

Uh huh. But I think they like to rank each page for a set of related, singular keywords. Yeah. So, like, as long as if you're doing a multi page site, make sure they're not all competing with each other. Right. Like, I see a lot of sites where it's like every page says, like, Dallas wedding photographer. Yeah, Dallas wedding photographer. Like, that's the headline on every page. And then Google says, well, which page should I rank?

And it's going to go with your homepage because it's the strongest page on your site. But maybe you built this entire spectacular page that goes into detail on that. That should be your homepage. Yeah. Right, right. So the single page, it can, it can work just as well. And if you think about it, all your links would go to that one page. Anybody linking to your site. So it depends where people link to your site.

So your homepage is your strongest page because it gets the most backlinks. Other pages might get a few backlinks, but they're not going to be as powerful. Yeah. So the single page, I'm always torn because some websites, you know, when you search and it comes up in the, in Google and there's like the main homepage, but then it's like underneath is nested some of the individual pages from that site.

Is that something, I don't think that would happen with a single page website. Right. If you have jump links going to those sections, that can happen. Yeah. Okay. So you still have a menu up top and it has all those sections. You definitely, if you have a single page, you want a menu that goes to those different parts. Mm hmm. Yeah. Okay. Not like a landing page where it's just you want people to look at everything and scroll the entire time.

Yeah. Okay, awesome. Well, this has been really enlightening. I learned a lot of things as well, so thank you. It's been a hot minute since I dove into SEO. I know our people have loved this too, kind of. Where can they find you online? Let us know where. Yeah. Where everyone can find you and if you have any, anything you want them to check out. Yes. So my website is connorwalberg.com.

that's connorwalberg.com and I run the simple SEO membership. So in there I teach photographers everything you could need to know, but in a clear and simple way where it's bite sized videos, three to five minute videos that say, now go take this action and you'll work through the course and you'll know exactly that, what you're doing and why you're doing it. I think the why is so important.

In addition, there's a blogging course, so it'll get you so that you're actually creating content that will rank versus just, you know, making content because you heard you need it. And there's a community as well. So I'm there supporting you. I run live calls and everything there and it is a free ten day trial. Awesome. So yep, you'll find that on the website and I would love to have you in there.

Awesome. And we'll put some links down below in the show notes so you guys can have easy access to that. So go check it out. Shoot. Connor note. Let them know if you enjoyed this episode. And thanks again, Connor, for spending the time with us and everybody else. Of course, everyone else will see you next week. Have a good one, guys. Bye.