Please enter your email and website or LinkedIn to receive more information about our free and paid accounts.
Please enter your email address below and we’ll send you instructions on how to change your password.
Alicia Stepp is a Dallas-based fashion and beauty photographer who has worked with both small and large editorial and commercial clients in Texas, New York, and Los Angeles. She has a website on the WordPress platform and decided to have us perform an SEO audit for her to improve the chances of it showing up in organic search.
Although WordPress is usually identified as a blogging platform, it offers a variety of design templates for a wide variety of uses. Alicia found a template that presents impressive, responsive galleries that give her images the optimal presentation. Without falling into fawning hyperbole, her website looks like what you might imagine the famous fashion magazine Vogue would look like if it wasn’t encumbered by obligations to advertisers.
However, as I have said in previous SEO audit case studies, brilliant, powerful photographs on a website do not a good SEO strategy make. Search engines crawlers feed on words, phrases, memes, meta-titles, meta-descriptions, headings, alt text, and body text. When starved of this sustenance, these crawlers cannot index a website. To put it bluntly, Alicia has been starving the crawlers and they have treated her accordingly.
An SEO audit shows a photographer how and how well the website promotes their business. It tells her how well the site functions, what kinds of keywords the site is (and is not) ranking for, and what changes need to be made to achieve the business’ goals. An SEO Implementation is a process in which we put recommendations into practice on the website.
Photographers — any website owner in fact — can find someone to perform an SEO audit anywhere. What is distinctive about the audits that we perform at Wonderful Machine is that we specialize in photography and look at many photographers’ websites. Our audits examine a website according to 12-15 different categories, resulting in a report between 17-25 pages highlighting a list of recommendations to be implemented.
One of the basic metrics revealing how well a site can rank for search engines is domain authority. Domain authority (DA), an algorithm originally produced by the SEO company Moz.com, is a number between 1-100 in which the higher the ranking is, the better the site can rank. DA for commercial photographers usually does not exceed the 40 (e.g., the New York Times has a domain authority of 96). The reason for this is that commercial photographers’ websites do not frequently have a large number of sites linking them to them. Such links, however, significantly affect domain authority.
Alicia’s site has a DA in the teens, which is low. Unfortunately, there are no quick fixes for DA. It takes time to increase as a site becomes more well-known, with other sites directing users to it. Unsurprisingly, Alicia’s site also struggled to rank in the first ten pages of results for some of her primary search terms, such as “Dallas fashion photographer” and the like.
Part of the reason for this is that we found that Alicia’s site lacked metadata that might help it appear in the results for certain searches. Although it had a meta-title that corresponded to the content and the business name, including the specialty of that specific set of images, would be more valuable. If a search engine robot crawls a person’s site and only sees the phrase “fashion photographer” on the /about page, it may not be able to conclude that this is a fashion photographer’s website.
As indicated above, metadata is one of the areas to which Alicia needed to give attention. For each of her gallery’s title pages, we recommended that they not only include the specialty pertinent to that gallery, but also the location.
In addition, since at present the galleries were located in a folder called /gallery, one improvement would be to use a distinct folder into which each of the fashion galleries would be put called /fashion and for each of the beauty galleries, a folder called /beauty. Such organizational schemas are ways that the structure of a website corroborates all of the website’s metadata.
Once Alicia was ready to move forward implementing the audit’s recommendations, we went to work.
The biggest project was creating metadata for each of the galleries. This could not be done until an SEO plugin had been installed. Plugins are functionality that WordPress allows to be added to individual sites. Perhaps one of the reasons why WordPress is so popular, nay ubiquitous, these days is because of its adaptability.
We began with the Yoast plugin because it is far and away from the most commonly used plugin for WordPress. With all plugins, the question is one of cooperation. The question is if the plugin will gum up the works of other plugins and affect the speed of the site. In this case, I felt RankMath had a slightly smaller footprint and so opted for that. What’s more, RankMath has some functionality with schemas (structured data) that I have been working with.
The main project, however, with Alicia’s site was finally writing the meta-titles and meta-descriptions. Because Alicia’s site has so many galleries, each had to be written to be somewhat unique, emphasizing her photographic specialty, client, and agency names, when possible, as well as the name of the model or location, used.
When writing metadata, commercial photographers need to focus on the language and concern of the people who hire them: photo editors, art buyers, producers, etc. Photographers need to think about their own concerns secondarily. One of the issues that I discovered when performing the Kevin Titus SEO Audit was that the content on his blogs was excellent and appealing to shutterbugs and gadget geeks like himself but didn’t necessarily speak to the concerns of clients.
The last thing I did for Alicia was to provide her with a protocol for renaming all the images on her site. We designed a protocol for her to implement and she will be doing this for any new images she adds moving forward. She isn’t prioritizing making changes retroactively at the moment but it may be a good idea to revisit this for popular sets of clients or important parts of her portfolio.
Do want more quality traffic? Let’s improve your website’s SEO. Reach out!