If a potential client is looking at several different web pages in Google search, what can you do to insure they will click on yours?

The 2 levers you can control on Google are your website’s Title and Meta Description. Get these right, and people will click on your website. Get them wrong, and no matter how good a photographer you are, potential clients won’t pay attention to you online.

Fortunately, more than 50% of your competitors either don’t have a Meta Description or have one that is too long. Your first step to winning clients is to get in the game and follow some basic rules:

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Sooner or later, you or someone you know will have their website “hacked.” This means that an unknown programmer will gain access to your website, and either a.) put their marketing content or links to Malware on it, b.) use your website as a starting point to attack other websites (the DDoS attack you may have read about recently) or c.) redirect your visitors to a different website.

Regardless of the type of hack, in every case when Google discovers your website is hacked it will:

1. 1. Remove your website from Google searches.
2. 2. Warn visitors not to visit your website.

Both of these options are bad for business. (more…)

With the new Facebook page styles, tabs along the top of the page have been replaced by applications (called apps now, but some old timers still call them tabs). These are little programs you can install on your own Facebook page(s). The default apps are “friends” and “photos”, but you can have many different apps. For example:

• Link to your Website, Twitter, LinkedIn or Pinterest
• Coupons, Sweepstakes, Photo Contests or Polls

To show you how to set up an app, I decided to install one that links directly to the www.jdlab.com website. If I were a studio, I’d have an app that links to a wedding page, a seniors page, testimonials, etc. but once you see how easy it is to do one, you can do them all.

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When Google first started to list businesses on its website, it didn’t take long to discover that a “trick” to getting on the front page was to have a website name with keywords in it, i.e. that matched what people were searching for. A few years ago, a smart wedding photographer in Detroit would have named her website something like detroitweddingphotography.com. or detroitphotography.com. Today, both of these website names are for sale! Google figured out the trick, and no longer ranks websites higher because a keyword is in a website name. Instead, branding your studio name is more important. The word “photography” in your website name doesn’t matter much anymore.

Then some smart national marketers figured out that they could build a website that was a collection of links to lots of other pages, get their website on the first page of Google, and sell space on it. Except for specialty sites like theknot.com or weddingwire.com most “list” websites like Yellowpages.com or Manta.com are only on the front page when Google can’t find enough popular local photographers to fill it.

A year ago, one of the best ways to get on the front page was to get your studio on all the “review” sites like Yelp.com, AngiesList.com, or even Facebook.com These are still VERY important – and your studio should be on all of them – but as consumers begin to trust Google+ reviews over time, Google will push these other review sites off the first page. It’s already happening.

So what is working today? (more…)

Here’s a little experiment: Go to this website, and look at the square image ads about half way down the page. Chances are that if you’ve searched for any product or service on Google in the last 30 days, an ad for them will show up here. This website hosts Google ads because it makes a small commission each time a user clicks on one of them.

If you’re a wedding photographer, wouldn’t you like this to be your ad? It can be, using 2 features of Google Adwords: Google Display Ads, and Remarketing.

Here’s how it works. Instead of creating a text ad to show up on Google search pages, in the Adwords manager you can create a Display (image) ad. You can create your own, or use the step-by-step tool with templates provided. You can use Display Ads in one of 2 ways:

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Google Adwords are a quick way to pay your way onto the front page of Google (read how Google Adwords work here). According to Google, more than 20% of searches on Google are related to location, and people often act quickly on local searches. Research shows that using smartphones, 88% of people who search for local information take action within a day.

To help you organize your local Google ads – and to keep you on budget – you can Target customers by zip code. Plus, you can get feedback on the performance of your local campaigns by viewing campaign performance statistics at the postal code level.

But here’s the cool part: you can customize your ads automatically to include the city clients are searching for.

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44% of cell phone users in the US have a smart phone, and for many of them, it is the only computer they use every day. That’s why it is important for your website to be able to display your images and services in a professional way on a 2×3″ screen.

If making your website “mobile friendly” sounds complicated, it doesn’t have to be. For example, you could try Dudamobile.com.

DudaMobile makes websites mobile. It converts your old website into a mobile friendly site with just a few clicks. DudaMobile hosts over 1.4 million mobile websites, and users are creating over 100,00 new mobile sites per month.

Dudamobile offers mobile features geared toward small businesses including one-click site conversion, auto sync between the regular site and mobile site, click-to-call widget, mobile maps and links to Google Analytics.

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Several weeks ago you may have read an article here titled, “What I’ve Learned from My Website That You Can’t See on Yours“. If that wasn’t enough to get you started with Google Analytics, I’ve got another surprise: I can secretly watch people visiting my web site.

The feature is called Real-Time, and it is included free with Google Analytics. See an example for JD by clicking the image on the right.

Real-Time lets you watch all your visitors as they view your web site. You can see:

• How they found you (Google, Bing, Yahoo, direct, etc.)
• Keywords they typed to find you
• Where they came from (on a map)
• What page they landed on
• How long they read that page
• What other pages they viewed

The only thing you CANNOT see in Real-Time is the identity of the viewer. But that’s okay, because the above information is all you need to help you discover the strengths and weaknesses of your web site.

Why should you care? (more…)

Stick a pin in a map where your studio is located, draw a circle around it, and chances are 80% of your clients live inside that circle.  It makes sense: most people prefer to shop close to home. This (and mobile phones) is why Google search results are influenced by where your studio – and your customers – are located. The fancy term for this is localization.

To see how localization works, type “wedding photographer” in Google (or click here). Over on the far left you’ll see where Google thinks you’re located. Click the “change location” link, enter a new zip code or city at least 100 miles away, and you’ll see a different list of websites on the 1st page of Google. This is because Google assumes you are searching for wedding photographers near you.

In order to take advantage of localization, you just need to let Google know where your studio is located. Then when people in your area search for photography, you’ll come up higher on the first page.

Here are 3 ways to localize your website for Google:

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If you’ve got a website and aren’t using Google Analytics, you’re missing out.

For those of you who haven’t heard of it, Google Analytics keeps track of how many visitors you had, which pages they looked at, and how long they stuck around. It is free to use on any website you control.

For example, I can look at our JD website page by page, and it will show me which buttons or hotlinks  customers click the most. See the example on the right (click to enlarge). Red regions are clicked the most, then orange, then green with blue sections clicked the least. Non-colored sections aren’t clicked at all.

Here’s what it means:

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