SEO Part one There are going to be three podcasts on SEO.
This episode is sponsored by Website for photographers. Website 4 photographers help photographers get more leads from their websites. You can get in touch here
info@website4photographers.co.uk
01482 765871
This episode is all about SEO Planning.
The first thing is not to do any SEO until you have done your planning. Until you know what words you want to be found for, how do you know what to do?
Lots of people love to tick boxes etc and feel they are doing SEO, but unless you are aiming towards something it is pointless.
What so you need to plan:
1. The key words / phrases you want to be found for
2. Geography – what geographic areas do you want to be discovered in?
It’s important to look at how difficult is it to be found for your keywords / phrases in different towns / areas. It’s good to look at lots of combinations. It may be it’s a lot easier to be found
as a wedding photographer in a town ten miles away, than it is in your local town. So you may be better aiming there instead of in your local town, where there is more competition.
Keywords
You need to put yourself in the minds of a potential client. What might they be searching for. This will be much more than simply portrait photographer. Google comes up with alternatives to searches. Answer The Public also gives you loads of alternative search phrases to help you find search terms people might be using. Using these tools and your brain come up with a big list of keywords and phrases that you want to be found for.
Geography
Then think about what areas you want to be found in. Think about local towns and villages, but then also counties and regions. There are quite a variety and it may be that you focus different search terms in different areas.
Keyword data
You then need to get data on these keywords and areas. Most places charge for this, but some may let you access the information for free. Google data is available if you have an active Google Ads account. Data can be from places like Moz ahref, Google keyword planner.
These give you vital information:
1. Search volume.
You can see here how many people are searching for a particular search term in a particular area per month. If the numbers are too low there is no point trying to rank for this word/ phrase as it won’t bring many visitors
2. Competitiveness
This tells you how much competition there is to rank for this word / phrase. This gives you a clue as to how much work you need to do to be found for this phrase in this area.
3. Domain score of other sites ranking
You can see the domain score of other sites ranking. You can compare this to your own domain score to see how close your site is to theirs.
You then need to look at the data for your keywords in different areas and see which are the best combinations to go for. You are looking to find keywords in certain areas with a good number of
searches that is not too competitive.
Without this work further SEO work is a waste of time.
Domain score
This is a score from 0 to 100 that every domain has. For a small business 20 is a really good score, you will never get to 80. You can get your domain score here.
Your domain score looks at how good Google thinks your website is. It uses
1. Traffic
How busy is your website? If it does not have many visitors you need to improve this if you want to improve your domain score
2. Engagement
How long are visitors staying on your website and engaging with it
3. Backlinks
How many other websites are linking to your website?
Finally here are some useful tools that are free:
Google Analytics – To see your visitor numbers to judge how effective your SEO work is
Google Search Console – Gives you search term data
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