Be Excellent To Each Other

My wife has started a new photography business but when we google 'baby photographers in -our_location-' she doesn't appear in the results. How do we make that happen?

Have you added it to Google as a business listing? (It’s free to do so, here: https://business.google.com/create)

Yes, it's added there and if you search for the business name it comes up, but not if you look for business of that sort in this area.

Has she added loads of SEO bobbins to her site? How long has her site been live?

Links from her businesseseses social media accounts help rankings too, if she has any.

I’m sure more SEO savvy beexers will help more than me.

She doesn't know much about SEO and neither do I! Site has been live for just over a week.

That's not very long - these things do take a little time.

SEO is a dark art, though, and it's something you can't do without. Either one of you had to learn, or you need to hire someone that already has.

Yeah, a week isn't long really. It's worth getting the site added to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools as a starting point and if your site has sitemaps, providing the URLs to Google/Bing for them to spider regularly.

SEO doesn't seem to be as much of a dark art as it used to be - if your site has good content (which includes the words you want to be found for) and is quick to load, that will help a lot.

In my experience, website traffic is miniscule in comparison to social media profile these days. What's your Instagram and Facebook profile like?

Instagram and Facebook are setup and building a following but a different photographer at the other side of the county announced they’re stopping due to health reasons so we wanted to make sure that if someone Google’s for a photographer in this county, they find her page.

I strongly disagree (as someone who ranks very highly for competitive keywords/phrases related to my profession)

First question sdg - has the site actually got the words "baby photographer in XYZ" on it a few times?

Was the site professionally done or have you put it together yourselves? I'd be happy to give some pointers if you can share the URL (privately if neccessary)

I find it can vary a lot depending on the site and industry. I do the bare minimum of social media for ConsoleMAD (I just post links on Facebook/Twitter back to news posts on the site and the occasional Instagram photo) as I'm rather old-fashioned and would rather focus just on a website, mailing list and contact form. However, lots of people seem to prefer to get in touch with me via the social media platforms than the site itself. I've had a couple of instances too where they've not even known the website exists - they found me via social media and asked if I have a certain game and I've had to point them to that game on the site. I have put a lot of time into getting ranked for the phrases I target, so it's probably a case of the SEO and social stuff complementing each other.

For the day job website, where it's more dry corporate stuff, very little interaction comes from our social media channels.

Exactly.

This is the interesting thing. For an industry such as website design I'd expect 99% of traffic to be via a website, for the beauty industry 99% of our traffic is via instagram (so much so that we had a contact on or web chat yesterday, and neither of us could remember how to login or what the password was, it's been so long since we used it).

Photography probably sits somewhere inbetween. My prediction is Instagram is where the majority of the traffic would come from (word of mouth, visual social medium, demographic of the customer base) but probably in the 70/30 range if I was to guess.

Basically, i'm telling all you luddites to get with the times, boomers!

I'll make her some pamphlets at mates rates and also draw a baby getting photographed by a monster or a robot or a robot monster on the cover for free.

I'm getting there - my MySpace page should be ready in the next couple of years. Then I'll look into that Google+ that I've been hearing about.

Instagram seems to be mainly industry networking. When someone has a baby, I think recommendations or seeing photos shared on Facebook are the first port of call and then googling for a baby photographer in the area is next.