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Optimising your content with on-page SEO techniques is one of the easiest methods to implement into your online marketing strategy. There are many different ways to optimise your on-page SEO. On–page refers to the content you see on a webpage.
In this article I’ve written up the best on-page SEO practices for professional photographers to implement onto their websites.
None of these are too time intensive or overly complex, so you should be able to get your on-page SEO on the right track within no time.
The greatest thing about SEO, is that it provides a source of organic leads. This means you don’t have to pay every time someone visits and enquires on your website.
When your website is sat at the top of Google for high value search terms, your website will get continuous traffic and visibility. This means, if your paid advertising has a slow weekend, you still have a flow of organic traffic to your site.
Make sure you take the time to learn SEO or consider outsourcing it as part of your lead generation strategy, as it can be a fountain of free leads.
If you know one thing about SEO, it’s probably that keywords are involved. Keywords are exactly what you think they are, words that are key to your industry, website and success.
As you increasingly push out content on your website, search engines like Google and Bing, will start picking up your site and ranking you where they deem appropriate for certain keywords.
Though keywords are great, SEO and content strategies tend to revolve around keyphrases. Keywords are usually one to two words whereas keyphrases are more.
Keyphrases are usually more helpful as these are search queries that people are actively searching.
Keyphrases could be questions users are searching answers for, or they could be queries such as “Small dog photographer near me”. It’s also easier to work out search intent behind keyphrases.
There are many free ways for finding keywords and phrases you may want to write content about.
You can find out keywords and phrases by just using Google.
You know when you search something and Google suggests things that you might be looking to type, well these are great indicators as to what Google thinks may be relevant. They’re also suggested because they’re either closely related to what other users have been searching or have been directly searched alongside the phrase you’re using.
Here’s an example for the keyword “dog beds”.
The “dog beds for humans” is a little disturbing but looking are these suggestions we can see what Google deems relevant to our keyword. You can put these suggestions into a keyword spreadsheet and then start writing up some content about each one.
Using this example, assuming I’m a dog bed business, I would likely create a long article about the different varieties of dog beds and link them to my products.
Another way you can use Google to find out keyphrases is the “People also ask” section.
Collect these questions into your keyword spreadsheet and answer them in relevant content later on. You could answer these in an FAQs area in your article or on individual product pages.
Using the keyword “dog bed for cars”, I can create a piece of content and make sure to answer the questions in the people also ask section.
Answer the public is a great resource for finding out the questions and phrases search engine users are asking about said key phrases. Again, collect these up and answer the questions in your content.
It’s important to note, that not all of them make sense, so be selective if you need to be.
When writing your content and answering these questions, try to make it flow, rather than directly answer them in a robotic manner. Add some personality and flare!
Answer the public also offers a paid version that goes into more detail and allows you to search unlimited times a day. I personally wouldn’t recommend paying for this as a small business.
I would recommend putting some of your budget towards an SEO platform such as Ahrefs or SEMRush. Moz.com is also a good platform.
Ahrefs is certainly more budget friendly than SEMRush, but SEMRush gives great insights into your content.
Both platforms allow you to track keywords you want to rank for as well as show you your current keywords search engines have picked you up for.
You can also see how difficult keywords are to rank for and monthly search volumes in different countries.
These tools give you a real advantage over your competitors if they’re not already using them. Having the power to see which keywords are easy to rank for AND have a high search volume is an incredible insight for your content strategy.
Images cause a lot of issues on websites – not just for you photographers. Photographs are your business and therefore you want your website to showcase your talent.
Unfortunately it’s all too common for me to find a photographer’s website that loads slowly because they’ve uploaded large images at ridiculous pixel widths.
I don’t blame you either -no one teaches you these things, apart from me, right now!
Here are some rules to follow when it comes to uploading images to your website:
Page titles are really simple. Most Content Management Systems like WordPress and Squarespace allow you to change them easily.
They should follow a format that includes what the page is about/ the product/ the service the page is going to be about, followed by your brand, followed by your location.
The location is more important if your business relies on more localised leads.
Meta descriptions aren’t a direct Google ranking factor, but they do offer a better user experience for a search engine’s users, which is why they’ll favour those with optimised ones.
Meta descriptions should entice the user to view your content, describe what they can expect from your content and include a short call-to-action such as read more, learn more or find out more. They also be no longer than 155 characters.
Heading structure is another common issue with websites. Headings may not seem important but they are. Headings help users understand the flow of your content and give search engine crawlers guidance as to what your content is about. They’re a great place to house your keywords when it’s relevant too.
Headings follow a set structure. Heading 1’s (H1) act as a page’s main headline. H2’s act as subheadings, H3’s sub-subheadings all the way down to H6.
Be sure to follow the following rules with your headings:
Our final stop in our SEO best practices guide is internal linking. This is linking your website pages to other pages within your website. This should only be done when the content is relevant to link to. Don’t just link a word or phrase for the sake of getting an internal link into your content. When you apply a link to a word or phrase, this is called Anchor text and there are best practices for this.
You need to make sure your anchor text is relevant to the page it’s linking to – Google will know if it isn’t!
Avoid using keyword heavy anchor text. Google started looking at the use of anchor text in its Penguin algorithm update years ago. Exactly matching your anchor text to keywords sounds like a good idea, but Google can view this as suspicious and a sign that your links may not have been acquired naturally.
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