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Scott Suchman is a food, portrait, and travel photographer located in the Washington D.C. area, and he recently reached out to Wonderful Machine for an SEO Audit. Scott has worked for a range of clients but he works most frequently for editorial clients. To widen the possibilities of projects, Scott wanted to maximize his site’s web presence through an audit. We were happy to oblige.
Scott’s site is hosted by Format, which is one of the many CMSs catering to photographers that is not Squarespace or Photofolio. We’re so used to seeing Photofolio and Squarespace used for photographer websites that we often forget there are other options out there!
In this humble SEO consultant’s judgment Format is in league with Squarespace and Photofolio. And Scott has taken advantage of its many great features. Most importantly, Scott’s work looks great on this site. If you consult his two food galleries — his métier, if you will — you’ll see his hallmark style shining forth in the first of those, as well as elsewhere.
An SEO audit examines how well a website is promoting a business’ goals. It tells the site owner 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. In short, it’s not unlike a physical, the yearly appointment you have with the doctor just to check in and see how everything’s doing. These days no business owner can go without a website, and before long a site audit will just be part of what has to be done every so often.
Now finding someone to perform an SEO audit isn’t difficult. Just go to a coffee shop and say the word “metadata” audibly and see who pays attention. What is distinctive about the audits that we perform at Wonderful Machine is that we specialize in photography and consistently look at many photographers’ websites. Our audits examine a website according to 12-15 different categories, resulting in a report between 17-25 pages and capped with a list of recommendations for implementation.
In what follows I’m just going to touch on three features of Scott’s audit: his site’s domain authority, its metadata, and his file resolution practices.
One of the first metrics considered when we audit a website is the domain authority (DA), which is a number on a scale of 1-100. The domain authority of a website measures how well it should rank in search engine results: the higher the number, the better it should rank. One primary factor affecting domain authority is the number of external links to a site. For example, nytimes.com has literally millions of incoming external links, and its domain authority is in the upper 90s.
For precisely the reason I’ve just explained, commercial and editorial photographers’ websites are generally ill-disposed to achieve a high domain authority. Commercial and editorial photographers primarily use their websites as online portfolios, sharing links to them with potential clients. In my experience, I’ve almost never seen a photographer’s DA higher than 40. Even Evi Abeler, SEO celebrity of New York food photographers, only had a DA of 29.
Scott Suchman’s DA is 27, which is a perfectly strong value for a food photographer. What’s more, Suchman is primarily an editorial food photographer, so his site benefits from lots of publications linking to it. Evi Abeler, by contrast, is primarily a commercial food photographer and so doesn’t have the benefit of having many of her clients linking to her website.
This last point is worth some attention. Commercial photographers more frequently suffer from the fact that their clients have no obligation to provide credits to the photographers who produce fabulous, powerful images of their products.
On this, I’ve consulted Wonderful Machine’s producers, notably Craig Oppenheimer and Bryan Sheffield of our popular Pricing & Negotiating series. Here’s what Craig had to say when I asked if adding a link to the photographer’s site could be specified in a contract, or if you could request a specific image filename (because image filenames so frequently serve as the alt text for search engines):
Unlike editorial assignments, it’s rare for a photographer to be given credit on a commercial assignment. It would especially be a stretch for the client to link the work to a photographer’s website. While I suppose a photographer could try to work that requirement into an agreement for editorial projects where the images are used online, it would be very rare for a magazine to agree to that unfortunately, and they would most definitely dismiss a request for the use of a specific filename.
Of course, the world of commercial and editorial photography is both diverse and continually changing…
Like most photographers, Scott had not populated fields of metadata as effectively as he might in order to develop more effective search links to his site. His website has four main galleries as well as a collection of smaller galleries under the heading “Stories,” quite appropriate to a commercial photographer.
There are two different types of metadata each gallery — for that matter, each page — should have. First, it needs to have a meta-title, which is the text that becomes a blue link in the search engine results (SERPS, to the initiated). This text also appears in the tab above the browser’s address bar.
Second, each page should have a unique meta description. In the SERPs, the meta description is usually drawn from the one that you, the site owner, put in. But not always. Sometimes Google thinks that your description isn’t accurate and will choose another piece of text instead. For example, the first sentence of the article.
According to Google, a meta description is not a ranking factor. Yet, if you read the Moz.com article on meta descriptions, (notably written like a good Hegelian, both admitting and denying the principle of non-contradiction), you will see that doesn’t mean you should ignore it.
The web standard for image file resolution is 72 ppi, which is, as many of you know, a really low file resolution. From an SEO perspective, it’s awesome because it means that the image’s file size will be smaller. However, as lovers of photography, we’re showcasing images and lower file sizes also means they don’t look as good as they could.
Scott Suchman, when it comes to the file resolution of the images on his website, is a maverick. For Scott, when you’re loading images onto your site, it’s the wild west, and the only rule is that there are no rules. Almost none of his images are less than 150 ppi. But he also has them as large as 300. He even has some at 200!
From an SEO perspective that is a no-no. A strict, by-the-book SEO (think of Joe Friday in Dragnet) wants to optimize everything and this begins with making everything the smallest file size possible. This means at the very least always using 72 ppi. Because, as the SEO Joe Friday might say, even if you’re using 72 consistently, that doesn’t mean you can’t have dimensions of 2000 x 2000.
Luckily, for Scott and certain other photographers hosting their sites on one or two specific CMSs, the image file size doesn’t really matter that much. That is, certain CMSs have expertly figured out how to crunch image sizes in order to make them look great — even if the image is 1 MB! — and load quickly. Format is one of those CMSs. So SEO Joe Friday is right, but it doesn’t matter.
Check in next month when we reveal the results of Scott’s corresponding SEO Implementation!
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