Amy Rose Productions is run by the powerhouse duo of Melissa (Missy) Shanahan and Chelsea Rose. Together, they offer incredible commercial photography services, much of which can be done from their own studio. The pair came to us for both an SEO audit and a web edit, which Jemma Dilag will share with us next week.
Melissa and Chelsea wanted to get an expert’s opinion on their website to make sure it appeared as professional as possible; completing both an SEO audit and web edit did wonders for their digital presence. Let’s take a closer look.
One of the biggest changes you’ll notice is the front page. Previously, there were quite a few images — and a video — that would load when you first visited the website, all of which you can see below. This glut of information caused the site to load quite slowly, and the speed scores were lower than expected.
Imagine a potential client coming to your website only to wait 5-6 seconds for everything to load, get annoyed, and leave to find another photographer’s website. With how short our attention spans are these days, it’s important to have a well-functioning website. And since we changed the duo’s landing page, the speed has improved dramatically and it loads almost instantly.
“Fully loaded time” also includes stuff that’s in the background, but the majority of the website loaded in less than one second. The page size is also down over 500 percent, which is incredible! Not only does the speed of a website help deter users from leaving instantly, it also helps with domain authority, a key metric for determining how well your site ranks in Google.
We can see below that, along with speed, Amy Rose Production’s optimizations have really helped with usability. The pages load fast on mobile devices and tablets, to say nothing of how nice they look. Having solely the content they need on the front page — as opposed to a plethora of still and video imagery — makes visiting the site a cleaner, smoother experience.
There’s a lot to like with Missy and Chelsea’s new setup, but what I’m most excited for is their continued use of the blog. They came to me not knowing if a blog was worthwhile because of how time-consuming it can be to update, but it’s absolutely worth it to maintain a consistent blogging presence. Even if the posts only happen once a month and contain a paragraph or two, they’ll still help you out tremendously — and the reasoning is simple when you learn a little more about Google.
Google reads textual content and parses it through an interpreter of sorts, then makes judgements as to what your content is about. When it sees your images, Google hardly knows what they are; it knows the photo might be of a motorcycle, but because of the lack of consistency of image recognition, Google places far more weight on textual content as a ranking factor.
Most photography websites struggle with their SEO due to Google not understanding what it is they do; hence, I’ve recommended consistent blogging. If, every month, you explain what it is that you’ve worked on — or an industry idea or trend that you want to talk about — you can slowly but surely achieve a higher ranking for your website. Google will look at a blog post and go “oh, this blog post is a list of their favorite color settings for night shots.” And if the title is something like “Best Photography Settings for Night,” you might start to rank for that search a little higher, bringing more traffic to your site along the way.
Jemma and I recently reached out to Missy and Chelsea to get their opinion on our services. Here’s what they said:
Will and Jemma delivered comprehensive services that included expert industry knowledge, professionalism, patience, collaboration, an understanding for our goals, and timely correspondences. The experience was memorable, and we would highly recommend to ANYONE having at least one conversation about your aspirations with them.
Missy and Chelsea have done a great job at adapting their site, and I think they’ll soon see great improvements across the board. If you’re ever up in Worcester, MA and need a job done, I can’t recommend anyone else better. They are two of the nicest people you could meet, and I wish them great success.
Check back next week to see how Jemma’s web edit improved the look of Amy Rose Productions’ site.
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