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

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

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.