wedding photography marketing 2

As a follow-up to the wedding photography marketing post we will detail some of the ways in which city photography deal with the need and requirements. You may want to read the wedding photography marketing post first.      

There is a lot of myths and wasted time when it comes to SEO and how much time you spend developing your websites, and paying for advertising;  it quite often is throwing good money after bad if you are not hitting the right place at the right time in the right way. This blog post will go into the details of wedding photography marketing from the stand point of online marketing with your website and how it will comes across, we talk about meta tags and word weights as well as colours and sounds which make a big difference.. There are also other post links at the bottom of the page that you may find helpful and may not be about wedding website marketing.      

      

I will talk about google bot when I refer to search engines and it is the most sort after rank, I will talk about how City photography websites  works well with Bing, and yahoo as well., this is just the forewarning so you don’t get lost when reading about bots and engines.
I have chosen to talk about websites as I have been in the web world for over ten years, won awards and met with challenges that have been set like get a number one page for X product in 48 hours which I have done.  I have not really looked at site design in terms of out right performance for some time until 2009 when I launched a project which of course became www.city-photography.co.uk and  I have found myself going around in a little circle to find out that I was right.. I seem to think the same way as a web search bot which is handy as it gives me a little step in the right direction and I have used this knowledge to control the levels of work that I have to do within the companies that I own.      

You will have to forgive me for the weak post that doesnt have a lot of information within it, as I would assume that you will want to go into every detail, But I spent a year researching and developing and at a cost of other work (wages) so if you would like a service from me, then either have a city site or pop over to my business website.   I dont want to give away the secrets on how the city photography website   rank all over websites and the details of exactly how to do it.. but I will give away some common knowledge so you may learn something here.      

Your wrong website.      

Many photography website are a miss match of information and have a personality disorder, you may have started as a wedding photographer that now do event photography or  you may have been an event photographer thats gone into wedding photography;  but what you may still  be doing is  flog a dead horse in a few ways.      

Site purpose.
This may sound a little silly but you will find that the websites of many photographers  is  right on the money and about photography this and that, but thats far from the truth and is an old practice to resolve.  You should have ONE website for ONE area of photography. SIMPLE.
You should NOT link the sites together because this is still your work and what you do as the websites will be seen as the same thing.. So all you turkey shooters with your turkey websites, when you put up a new website about wedding photography, do expect to find that for every search for turkey wedding photography your website pops up.      

You should have one area of your photography contained by its self and very much solo. not  causing what I will call a key chain across the websites.       

I recently came across a photographer who we linked and reviewed on our Boudoir photography blogs link page.we had a bit of a disagreement and he took it very personal, but we had an understanding and boy didnt we have a lot of traffic over that.
One of the things I picked up on that he didnt see was that his Boudoir photography website pages all ended with  a wedding photography link wrote  spanning the bottom of each of the pages.      

So lets look at this from two perspectives:
If you go to a boudoir photography websites, you expect to read about boudoir photography and anything else you dont want to know about, why? whats the need for it? If you were looking for a wedding photographer, you would want a wedding photography site and not a boudoir photography site..
A bot looks at the site in much the same way, its about two things, and it may link off to other websites so its getting a little confused and the site isnt quite about boudoir there is other stuff here as well.. so lets mark the site down for that…      

Page cramming.      

Do not cram information on your pages. Creamphotos.co.uk is a prime example of a spammy website with lots of key words as they spam there way up the marker board using a old ways of getting a page rank for their £50.00 per hour wedding photography from all sorts of photographers. ;P  But in some ways they have got somethings right but for anyone looking at the Creamphotos websites or other random posts that like to their websites  they are gateway pages spread all over the internet linking to each other and then their website.      

Why does this work? Well as you know search bots (in particular Bing) look for related websites and the amount of links going to and from the websites, when a website links to another  website its recommending the site.
Bings search information goes into more detail about page and site ranking so pop over to the bing website  to find out about how links in and out of your website affect your rank and other sites.  If you remember from the wedding photography marketing post before, I talked about the wedding directories, this works on the same principle on in bound and out bound links.      

Bing website ranking is completely automated. The Bing ranking algorithm analyzes factors such as webpage content, the number and quality of websites that link to your webpages, and the relevance of your website’s content to keywords and the other websites that it is linked to and from make a difference. The algorithm is complex and is never human-mediated but it is dumb, as it was designed by a person that set it some goals and rules when it came to ranking the websites..      

This video goes into saying about the links to your website and how they work, though this is a sales video from another company, I just though you would like to hear it from someone elses mouth as well.      

      

Now I know that you want to check this out on your current website and I know that you wont want to go to the website services in the video, so here is another way of checking out your website and see how well it is marketed across the web in terms of link backs.      

      

The second part of the bot relates to the way you design your webpage content has the greatest impact on your webpage description for the bot and how its show in the results.
As the web bot software scans websites and  it  crawls your website and analyses the content on the indexed web pages and generates keywords to associate with each of the web pages of the website. It uses a process called page keyword weight and different bots look at this differently as too little  will not find you on the search results, or very far down the results pages with  too many and the Bot will regard your website as spam, that  is why cramming pages and gateway pages work with some engines and not others.      

 The bot  extracts webpage content that is most relevant to the keywords when it makes up  and constructs the website description that appears in search results.  This is generally based on a few basic parts, Title, keyword weight and the content around these words.      

If you have a google analytics account you can view what your sites keywords are as the bots see the pages, and You may be surprised like I was  with the actual results;  many of my older websites they have little relevance to what the website is about. and while some of the newer website are targeted the do have some odd words attached to them.
Now you should remember that google  analytics is DIFFERENT TO  GOOGLE WEBMASTER TOOLS.  If you do want a lot of information about how your sites performing then use Google Analytics if you arent too bothered or use some weird form of website where you dont have full control over the pages and content (in a design format) then its going to be no good for you as you need to be able to get at the code of your site. Much the same problem is going to be caused with flash websites. 
 The web page content is typically sentence segments that contain keywords or information in the description tag if you look at the google site it will tell you that they disregard the meta tags for keyword and description.      

      

 So to make a summarise of the above, you need to have a website with the right content the right words and the right amount of them, you dont want too little information and you dont want to much, keep on the subject matter right the way though, so right about wedding photographer and market your website for the right stuff.
It is important for the links coming in and out of your website be relavant and numerous..      

City photography..and wedding photography marketing..      

We have a limited number of websites running at the moment and many of them are test sites running different types of content, this is mainly to see how the websites perform with the search engines and the viewers of the websites.      

We have now developed enough of the website and their contents to know what works and what doesnt. The city photography website are linked to each other in the local areas so that they can feed each other and in the main trial areas they all have different content on the websites. This give the clients some benefit to locating information that is more local to them. The other thing is that for photographers with a City photography website it is important that they can display their images locally to their clients.. but thats just common sense and business logic.      

The problem with wedding clients is when it comes to marketing to the clients and hitting the nail on the head its NOT so easy.
One example of this is the  slide show on the websites, we used the same show on two different sites and had two different results.
So that you can see a real word stat of this problem, on one site 6% of people left and on another website 55% of people left the site.
Both were wedding photography websites and thus the proof is there that the site design really makes a difference to the market that you reach and appeal to NO MATTER WHAT YOUR PHOTOGRAPHY IS LIKE.      

Interestingly I did hear/read about some clients that talked about the wedding photographers website that they had viewed and what I came off thinking after listening/reading about what they had discussed was that a Wedding photographer website, Not its content, not its pictures but the layout and design of the website reflected the personality.. so you may say that the website portrays the value, feeling and personality of the photographer.      

If you have studies psychology and marketing  like I have you will see some information about  colours and how they affect people and the choices that they make, and this applies to wedding photography and  your wedding website.       

Over a period of a few years one of my award winning wedding photography website was used as a test bed to find out and  test people who visited the site based on  the way of sales and how that related to  sounds.  it was quite easy to see the differences based on music alone and as I made  changes to the music on the website I could see the effect on  how many clients I would have.
What many people do not think about is the way in which they are groomed by big companies and the television adverts they watch, this then is refelcted out to all of their lives. there is lots of articles about this and Im not going into this now But here is a start if you must.
One example with sound is how you feel when certain memories are invoked by sounds or music like the first time you missed someone, your first love song etc.., and this still applies to weddings and websites. if your website matches colours and sounds to effect a person they will like your site better regardless of the picture quality and what is said, this is particularly consistent with females due to the way their decision making functions. (no offence girls)      

What we did with city photograph was to pull all things together when considering the websites design flow and function and put them into a package that works for clients and we can see the results for ourselves with the sales that have been made.  With the highly monitored websites and data we get from the site and its visitors we know how to do it and we use a range of tools that are not generally available and why a photographer would want to know  or have the ability to translate them in to something tangible is and will be beyond most.      

Summery….      

So website music and colours is going to have an impact on how many sales you make no matter what your photography skills are, prices are and how nice you are. Your website is no longer your shop front but who you are and people will decide on if they like you or not based on how your website looks and sounds.      

Website design .. to formal to informal…      

One of the things that I have come to know about website is how to kill off clients in a flash, yes I have made mistakes and learnt by them. I would even post up some of the websites designs that I have had over the years and show you what works and what doesn’t work based on the client flow for certain websites. AND I’m not going to embarrass myself by doing that…      

let me paint a picture in your mind…
I had a website that I made using a very basic programme, It was hard-coded and shall we say brite colours and wasnt uniform and didnt stand up to the normal formats that websites have become to form, you know menu on the top or left..
It was basic with a few pictures, but it worked… within a month I had 16 wedding bookings!! I hated the site, but it did me proud and I later developed the website again into the award-winning wedding photography website.      

Not related to wedding photography or marketing another one of my websites had a commercial feel to is, very cooperate after being a semi basic website, but once it went to corporate style work dried up within days.      

You maybe wondering why this happened, but its pretty simple logic and I will apply this to wedding photography marketing; Certain photography is personal and needs a personal touch. People like to deal with faces and tangible people and if they don’t see this they move on, wedding photography is personal and it is also costly and we all know that no one like spending money over the internet as it could be a con, like wish if they think corporate they think that it could be any photographer, they will get lost and it’s not personal to how they like or see their wedding photographer being. Also the brits like to deal and help the small business and not a larger business.      

City Photography markets wedding photographers

   

Summery…      

Your website has to match your client expectations  in the design, it has to be professional but not corporate and it has to be personal. you need to strike a raptor with the client and also present yourself well on all levels. People want to know who they are dealing with.
Some of the most common things that  came across  from clients over the years  about photographers websites were..      

• There was no contact information of there website so I didnt know where they were.
• There was no prices on the website and I couldnt be bothered to ask them.
• They didnt have a lot of information.

How to use a City Photography site to your benefit.      

City Photography website are targeted websites, they are only about photography and are structured to give the information within the right sections of the websites.
The site uses a balance of media  thats text images and video as well as other types of shows to show off the work and convey the message. The message is we are local photographer, see our work and then book us for your photography requirements.      

Each of the sites are local, and benefit the photographer that will link back to their own websites.. hence the about page and with some websites the links pages as well as the side banners The Cheltenham photography  website is a prime example of how the website works.      

The photographer member of City Photography  adds their  own content of images or they send them over to us to make into what they need for the site, be that a slide show, gallery or video.. we charge a hourly rate for this, and most photographers should know how to do this themselves.
The photographer then submits their content for the websites to us where we work at editing the content so that it works with the page keyword weight.       

Then we come up with the packages and prices and there you go.. its one optimised websites. (there are a few other things that have to be done, but nothing to big and  free)      

The photographer benefits in two ways, one they can have a different website selling their services and displaying their work, They also have a ranked site linking to their own, its up to the clients if they purchase of the city photography website or the photographers by following the links.      

Summery…      

Working together we create  a website  with a high rank, you provide us with some content and we do the rest. its quick and easy and it only costs around the same as a dirctory listing but gives you more..      

If you would like to join City Photography, we do ask for professional photographer that are more full time and meet a good standard. this give clients peace of mind and you dont put my name in the fire.
There is price information and  joining information here.      

Please feel free to make any comments.      

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Links for further reading.. Links open in a new window      

Here is a post that deals with wedding fairs and converting viewers to clients…      

Here is a post about Dealing with Wedding photography clients (from point of a photographer)      

A link to a friends blog.. and his wedding posts      

A link to our wedding photography blog