SEO for Photographers - WHY YOUR "WHY" IS IMPORTANT TO SEO
How many times have you sat down to write copy for your website, a blog post, or even an Instagram caption and didn’t know where to begin?
Have you been asked the question, “ who is your ideal client” and your answer was “anyone who will pay me.
It may be that you are drawing blanks because you have yet to define 2 key things:
What is your why?
Who is your ideal client?
Good SEO is just good customer service
You need to figure out why you do what you do and who you serve in order to present your message effectively.
Why do you do the style of photography that you do?
And who do you do it for?
What are your ideal clients biggest frustrations and pain points?
How can you help answer their questions and solve their problems before they ask them?
You may be asking, how do these things relate to SEO? As it turns out, the things google is looking for are the same things that your future ideal client wants to know as well. So if you think about it, Good SEO is just good customer service. If you can create useful content for your ideal client, you will also be creating useful content for SEO.
Let’s start with what is your why
I like to look at this in two ways. What is your internal why? And what is your external why?
Your internal why is why do you do this work...for you. What drives you. These can be things like you want to make a sustainable income to help support your family, or you want to have a fulfilling job.
Your external why is how you are serving your ideal client. Examples are you want to make women feel beautiful, or you want to show families their connection in an authentic way. Look for the things that make you unique and set you apart from your competition.
Whatever your whys are, take some time and write these down.
Next, identify who your ideal client is.
This is an exercise that can be done a few different ways. You can write down all of the traits of an imaginary person, you can think of someone you know, or make a composite of a few different people you know. Either way, once you have this person in mind, it will be very useful when you know who you are speaking to, on your homepage, in blog posts, and on social media posts.
Now put this together, and how can you communicate your message.
Trust me, we are not all born copy-writers but simply put, it is always best to communicate your message in your voice. Practice this out loud (I do this while I’m driving alone). Speak into a voice memo and talk about your business, you can go back and edit later.
Once you communicate this message effectively on your website, you are practicing good SEO.
See how simple this is? It’s not all super geeky and technical like you thought. Sure there’s some of that, and I’ll be getting to that in later lessons. But if we can all start from an authentic place, a pure place, we won’t have to game the system, participate in pods or worry about algorithms.