Home » SEO & Analytics » More Than Words: SEO and Photography (or Photographers?)

More Than Words: SEO and Photography (or Photographers?)

Posted by: Allen Murabayashi Posted date: March 13, 2009 | 4 Comments

Photography business guru John Harrington recently published a piece entitled “Just Words” in which he describes how he chose to sell himself as “John Harrington Photography” instead of “John Harrington – Photographer.”

Hearing advice from consultant Elyse Weisberg convinced him that “photography” conveyed a sense about a business, while “photographer” spoke about a single individual. He decided that he wanted to portray himself as a business, and in retrospect, he argues that this simple change along with using pronouns like “we” when he describes his business has made it seem more significant and given him more leverage.

In light of all the discussions around search engine optimization, I was curious to see if the choice of keywords was more than just perceptual. So I headed over to Google Adwords Keyword Tool to run a keyword test.

The Keyword Tool shows search volume for any keyword you enter based on searches that people are executing from around the world through Google. This is incredibly powerful information becasue it means that you can use SEO to tweak copy on your website to gain better position in search results.

Approximate Avg Search Volume:
photographer: 1,500,000
photography: 20,400,000

So there’s over 1300% more searches on “photography” than “photographer.”

Seem a bit to broad and generalized?

Appoximate Avg Search Volume:
portrait photographer: 22,000
portrait photography: 60,500

For every type of photography, the word “photography” outpaces “photographer.”

Let’s think about this from a money and revenue perspective.

SEO is fantastic because it’s a very low/no cost way to drive unsolicited traffic to your website. Going back to the marketing funnel concept, the more people that enter the funnel, the more absolute conversion you will get.

If you were optimized on “portrait photographer” and were on the first page of search results, that is great, but it’s only 1/3rd as great as if you were in the top spots for “portrait photography.” We know that conversion percentages rarely change, so it’s always important to drive more people into the top of a funnel (i.e. to your website) than to try to tweak your conversion percentages.

(Would I rather have more people walk into my Gap store, or would I rather increase the number of people that buy after trying on a shirt? In most cases, it’s better to increase the foot traffic into the store.)

In the case of words, here is a great example of where perception meets reality on more than one front.

About the author

Allen Murabayashi
Allen is CEO and co-founder of PhotoShelter. He is a regular contributor to the PhotoShelter blog, and he flosses daily.

4 Comments

cat_heron 3-13-2009

Great, informative follow-up to Harrington’s item (which I shared with my shooter yesterday). Very interesting stuff.

John Harrington 3-13-2009

Allen — Thanks for your comments. Interestingly enough, while my BUSINESS is branded as such, my SEO is targeted to “washington dc photographer”, and Google interprets that to include “photography”, so I am: #1 – Washington DC Photographer #1 – Washington DC Photographers #2 – Washington DC Photography (note – I sometimes fluctuate a bit on “photography”). Google Adwords’ Keyword tool shows 2,400 average volume for searches of “Washington DC Photographer”, 3,600 for “washington dc photography”, and, yes, 1,600 for “washington dc photographers”. Fortunately for me, I have the top positions and have garnered a great deal of revenue from those positions because of my visibility alone (oh, and a few decent photos on my website too). SEO is an integral and critical component of any photographers business, and I don’t spend a great deal of time on it because I differentiate “photo business” from “photo marketing”, but I have written a fair amount on it over the 2 years I have been putting out Photo Business News, but it’s not the central focus. You have done a great deal to bring these issues to the fore for photographers. I did a rare thing, and give an SEO presentation at PhotoPlus in the liveBooks booth last October. And, in January, I did that same talk as well as and e-mail marketing “real world” presentation of the efforts and results of my marketing campaigns in Boston, which was very well received. Giving marketing talks with real world evidence of successes, less-than-successes, and the dollar-quantifiable results is something that photographers really need right now, but is not being done. Maybe PS should do another roadshow, to more cities than last time around, and really bring in some sunshine to how to do this – just be sure to skip DC!

Chris Rakoczy 3-14-2009

John, I was at that Boston show – drove from Hartford, CT just for it – and it was well worth the travel! Excellent presentation, saturated with immediately useful stuff that I have begun to incorporate into my own blog posts and in-development website revision. Thanks again! -Chris R

laptop622 11-11-2009

I have the top positions and have garnered a great deal of revenue from those positions because of my visibility alone (oh, and a few decent photos on my website too). SEO is an integral and critical component of any photographers business, and I don’t spend a great deal of time on it because I differentiate “photo business” from “photo marketing”, but I have written a fair amount on it over the 2 years I have been putting out Photo Business News, http://www.laptopbatteryclub.com/

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