EP 72: Blogging for SEO: How to Blog Photography Sessions That Actually Book Clients

72: Blogging for SEO: How to Blog Photography Sessions That Actually Book Clients

Melissa:
All of these blog posts should be things that you would be happy to send to a new inquiry or out to your email list that it would be helpful for anybody like that.

Alison:
Picture this, two military spouses, cameras in hand, businesses in boxes, moving across the country again. I’m Allison, six-figure family photographer based in Hawaii, married to the Marine Corps, business mentor to photographers craving more clients, more income, and more freedom. Oh, and professional PCS survivor. We’ve been each other’s voice of reason through 27 combined years of photography entrepreneurship and nine business relocations that would make anyone’s head spin. Countless Marco Polo videos later, we realized we’ve got some stories to tell and some wisdom to share.

Melissa:
I’m Melissa, newborn photographer by day, SEO wizard by night, and fellow expert in the art of rebuilding your business from scratch. Now we’re taking those real, raw conversations public because every photographer needs a friend who gets it. Ready to keep it moving? Let’s go!

Alison:
Today, we are talking about how to blog your photo sessions. Y’all, this is gonna be so meaty, so meaty. I’m really pumped for this one. But before we dive in, I want you to take a hot minute, leave us some stars. Whatever app you’re in, Spotify, Amazon, I don’t know if they’re, well, Apple. Why did I say Amazon? I don’t know what other ones are out there, but whatever you’re in, leave us some stars, leave us a review. If you don’t mind, we want to get some feedback from you guys. What do you need more of? What do you have questions about? So leave those in a review or DM us at the link in the show notes.

Melissa:
We are both on Instagram. We’re going to talk about how to blog your photo sessions, but I’m going to start with how to not blog your photo sessions. Now, this is something we’ve all been doing for decades for some of us, like forever. And I’m going to I’m going to tell you to stop doing it. And I still see this every day. Stop throwing just like a vomit of photos into a blog post, adding three sentences about the family that you photographed, throwing your main keyword into the title and then hitting publish. No, not all of that. All of those things are wrong. So do not if you find yourself doing any one of those things, stop right now.

Alison:
Just so you mean the blog title, the J family, some sort of curly separator. Yep.

Melissa:
Austin, Texas family photographer is no bueno. Yes, no, not a Boston, Texas family photographer is your homepage or your portfolio page keyword. Do not plaster it all over your blog posts. Okay, now the next question, and I’ve had this too, where people are like, all right, Melissa, you told me not what not to do. What am I supposed to do? You wanna remember Google’s whole thing, they had a whole update about this last year, is they want you to provide helpful content to your audience. The session share that I just described is not really helpful to anybody. That’s not- Not interesting either. It’s not interesting to future clients. And yes, past clients are gonna look at it and be like, oh, I see those photos or whatever. But future clients aren’t necessarily going to care. So you’ve gotta figure out how can you make them care? So what can you blog instead? FAQ styles. So what I want you to do now is next time you have a session and you love the session, for starters, look at the reasons why do you love the session? Do you love the session because of the location that the session was in? Was it the time of day? Was it the time of year? Exactly, what they wear. So this is my famous example from this, is every year the Jones family gets a photo session with you. By year two or three, you don’t know what else to write about it. You’re like, the kids got bigger. Like that’s boring. But let’s say you’re looking at those photos and you’re like, you know what? Mama Jones was styling this session. Like she killed it with what the kids were wearing, coordinating everybody. So instead of writing a post about the Jones family, I encourage you to reach out to Mama Jones and say, hey, I just want you to know you guys look fabulous for your session. I would love to ask you some questions about how you figured out what to wear, how you coordinated everything. Where did you shop? Where did your outfits come from? Because I don’t know about you, but I get emails all the time from people who see something in a photo on my blog, a lot of times for nursery posts, and they ask me, what’s that pink color? Do you know where they got that picture from?

Alison:
I hear it all the time. Especially if they’re using a resource you provide to style them. If you’re providing style and select and they used it and it helped them, like you need to scream that from the rooftops.

Melissa:
That’s a great idea for what to wear. If you use a service, if you provide a wardrobe, like you can talk about that. Now you can still say, hey, we had this awesome session with the Jones family and I just loved like how wonderful Mama Jones styled the whole family. So we’re gonna talk about how you guys can style your family to look as good as they did. I’ve gotten some tips and advice from Mama Jones or whatever you got tips and advice yourself you can give to them.

Alison:
Hey, yes, I’m talking to you. How are you feeling about this move? It’s a lot to process, but I’ve got something for you. I want you to grab my pre-move checklist to make things a little easier. Even if you’re not sure where you’re going yet, it’s not too early to start, but you could be losing time on that SEO juice if you dilly dally. So head over to alisonbell.co, that’s Alison with one L, B-E-L-L.co to get your pre-move checklist. You got this.

Melissa:
But I’m telling you, if you blog that session as a more of a what-to-wear post, and you use Mama Jones as the example of being fabulous, let me tell you, she’s gonna share that post with everybody, because she’s like, look, my photographer thinks I’m an awesome stylist. Like, go check this out. So you’re getting the juice from her from sharing it with everybody. And then you’re also getting that where, you know, for future clients and stuff like that, they come across it that are interesting. So that’s my big thing is you’ve got to make it helpful for other clients.

Alison:
You have to remember, Google is going to help people and websites who help their end goal. So Melissa already touched on it. Google exists to provide good content and good search results. You gotta think about how you use Google. When it provides you trash that doesn’t make sense for what you’re looking for, it’s frustrating. So Google is going to show your work if what you’re providing people is actually helpful. So that’s the end all be all. How could we help Google show our work? And so another way we can use some of these blog posts is for not only current clients, but also new inquiries. I have a whole workflow where every single one of my emails is linking to something on my blog that I’ve written, every single one of them. So things like how to ruin your session. It’s like a funny take on what not to do for your photo session. I use that in one of my email followups, like, Hey, reaching back out, like wanting to share some funny things about how to ruin your session. I hope it makes you laugh. If you’re ready to book hit reply with let’s do this. That that’s how I did it. What to wear on the beach. What else did I do? Most recently was why my client should be choosing a sunrise session. Why should they be photo ready at 6 a.m. with their whole family?

SPEAKER_00:
You need a blog post with a lot of details. It takes a little convincing. People don’t think about their jet lag.

Alison:
They’re like, oh, we actually could do that. I’m like, yes, you could. And honestly, the crowds, like we don’t want to be navigating crowds here. But like where to find matching aloha wear for families. What am I going to do if it rains? What’s my policy on that? I have a whole approach to how I even run my schedule in the beginning from the start. And it’s all because of the rain. Like I take full responsibility for how I fill my schedule.

Melissa:
You can tie that in too with like just even just a session share. Let’s say you have to reschedule a session. And like you had to reschedule from rain, then you have this gorgeous session on a sunny day. And you say, what do we do if it rains? And then you say, hey, we actually had to reschedule this session because of rain. Here’s my rain policy. Here’s how it works. This is why we do it. This is what we look for. And you can cover all that. So you’re still sharing the client’s photos, but you’re sharing a much more helpful topic than just Yeah.

Alison:
And when somebody is asking, current client, new lead, what have you, link them back to your blog post. Like, oh, here’s my thing. Here’s the end of it. Answer the question. Read more about it here. Use this. Like we don’t just write and spend all this time for nothing.

Melissa:
All of these blog posts should be things that you would be happy to send to a new inquiry or out to your email list that it would be helpful for anybody like that. If I get an email from my photographer and it’s just, hey, go check out the Jones family’s photos. I’m like, OK, I don’t care. I don’t know the Jones family. I don’t care about their family photos. But if they say something along the lines of you’ll never believe like how amazing this mom coordinated these outfits. I’m going to go check that out because maybe I’m trying to figure out how to coordinate our family photo outfits. Or I just want to check it out because I’m like, OK, let’s see how stylish she really is. What tips can I get? I’m way more likely to click on that than just a session share. And here’s the thing too. So then we talk about, okay, what about SEO? You can still target keywords in these posts, but you also don’t have to. Like this does not have to be a, let me see how I can jam my keyword in here. You definitely do not want to target your main keyword. So I don’t want to see you putting your homepage keyword, your portfolio page, keywords you’ve used in other blog posts. I don’t want to see you putting those in there. But you could still go generic. It could be a what to wear fall family photos. For Allison’s why clients choose a sunrise session, it might be sunrise session might be the actual key.

Alison:
So it was morning photo shoot and it gets a couple hundred search volume. And it was like morning family photo shoot or something like that. And so that’s my target keyword I’m ranking for not yet. I optimized for it. So hopefully I’ll rank because that’s the goal. But on the same point, I did one for where to find matching aloha wear for family. And I think the key, the target keyword is getting it, whatever it was, is getting over 500 searches. a month. That’s hilarious. That’s so funny. That gets more searches than like people searching for photographers. Like, it’s crazy. It’s close. It’s close to what I did is I created a resource like my favorite brands that are on island that are actually making some of them are actually still manufactured in Hawaii. I’m not trying to support things that are overseas and cheap and like quality genuinely Hawaiian owned or Hawaiian made on island resources. And I really hope that that takes off. I hope I like become like one of the top 10 on that one.

Melissa:
That would be great. So then you can also target locations like a certain beach, a certain park, something like that. Again, don’t keep reusing the same thing over and over again. And then the other thing I’ve been telling people too is you can target smaller cities. So even if the cities around you don’t get any traffic volume, according to your keyword research, you can still target those cities. We’re near Charlottesville, but there’s little towns like Scottsville is a little town near here. I could say why I love being a Scottsville family photographer or a Scottsville newborn photographer. And even though it doesn’t get much traffic volume, if any, it still is establishing to Google that I’m local, that I work in all the different cities around here. It’s seeing those words on my blog, that kind of thing. When it comes to SEO, yes, I do want you to SEO these. If you are just putting photos up on there and you’re just putting a couple of words, then I wouldn’t, if you’re like, this is how I wanna share it, there’s no point in SEOing it. You’re not gonna have enough content because Google’s gonna look at it and say, you’re not sharing anything helpful. This doesn’t provide any content to our viewers, so we’re not going to show you in search results for anything. The other big thing is, you guys, this one is like one that I’m starting to notice more and more. Don’t forget to sell yourself in these posts.

Alison:
So big. I didn’t do this for so long. Yeah, I mean, 18 months ago.

Melissa:
Yeah, it’s one of those. I think we forget. Yes, we’re providing helpful content. But I’m also doing that with a purpose. Yes, I’m trying to get some ranking on Google. Yes, I’m trying to get some fresh eyes on my work and stuff. But you have to ask for the sale doesn’t like Donald Miller talk about that, too. You’ve really got to you’ve got to ask for the sale. And so easy to ask for the sale, make it super easy. So yeah, I would say in these posts too, for starters, you’re going to be showing your work, your photos and stuff like that. Every other photo or something, put like a call to action. Are you looking for a family photographer? Click here and make it a button, like buttons, links, something big that they can click on and takes them to your portfolio page, maybe takes it to your contact page, mix them up. Maybe there’s three buttons in there. One goes to portfolio, one goes to contact, one goes to another blog post, or you can do all of them.

Alison:
Yeah, you’re like, I do all of this. Yeah, I do all of this. And every single one of my blog posts, I introduced myself, who is this person writing this article? And why should I trust you? And why should I care? And it says, Hey, I’m Allison family photographer. And it’s a tiny little two or one sentence, little bio called for my bio page with a button to reach out, contact me. And oh, hey, I’m a family photographer, and it links back to my family page. So I’m creating that internal web, which it likes. But every single one of my blog posts, I introduced myself in the middle of the content.

Melissa:
Hey fellow photographers, Melissa Arlena here. Does SEO feel super overwhelming to you? I get it. But guess what? SEO doesn’t have to be complicated. I’ve spent 15 years in photography and 10 years in IT before that, cracking the SEO code so that you don’t have to. Whether you’re eager to learn or you just want somebody to take care of it for you, I’ve got your back. With my SEO coaching and done for you services, you’ll get noticed online, attract more of your ideal clients, and keep doing what you love most, photography. Ready to boost your website’s visibility without the headache? Visit pictureperfectrankings.com and let’s make SEO simple and effective for you. Let’s get your calendar booked. Yeah, and also on my page, I want to know who I am. And I know for Allison too, she’ll send them to her email list. That’s another big one, guys. Send people over to your email list, but do not put a button that says, join my email list. Nope. You got to give them something, that lead magnet. They need to have a reason. Now, if you have mini sessions are coming up, if you have something like that’s what it needs to be. That’s the incentive. Join my VIP list so that you get to know firsthand when I release Santa sessions or something like that. But you’ve got to have some kind of lead magnet. I’ve had ones before of, Hey, you’re reading an article on doulas in South Florida. You might be interested in my best birth bros. And it’s, it is a big graphic.

Alison:
Y’all can go look at our stuff too. It’s a big graphic with a little click here, download free guide. And then just a very simple inline form for my email provider that says get the guide. Name, email, that’s all you got to do. Again, in the middle of the content. So I have both my introduction of who I am, contact me, reach out what I do, why people should care. Hey, mom of a four boy circus over here, bring me your crazy, what to wear when it’s pertinent to family photos, and then links to internal pages. And I do all this with super simple, reasonable blocks is what they call these called Google. So right at one time. And then you save the whole pattern, you save all the blocks, you highlight them all, and you save the pattern as a reusable block or pattern or whatever they’re calling it. And this is in WordPress, guys. Yes, sorry. Sorry, WordPress. That’s all I’ve ever used, so I don’t know.

Melissa:
Yeah, this is in WordPress. And here’s the deal. This is in WordPress if you’re using Gutenberg blocks. If you guys are still using Classic on WordPress… Stop! You’re going to learn Gutenberg like we’re at a point now to Gutenberg. You got to figure out Gutenberg.

Alison:
Your website might break soon.

Melissa:
Yeah, you’ve got to you got to move over. It’s it’s very easy to do. It is, especially like Allison says, with these reusable blocks. And then like for her and I, reusable blocks are fabulous because then you can go back into them if you move. And you can just change the info and it updates all your blog posts.

Alison:
So let’s say I have dozens and dozens, probably 50 blog posts on my site, right? Some of them are archives. A lot of them are live. But when I moved from Virginia Beach in my introduction, Hey, Virginia Beach photographer. And I was like, Oh, I have to change all of these. No, you change it one time. One time people And it changes them all, whether it’s published or archived. So you definitely with this repeat content, you need to get on it. And I have I use reusable blocks for everything for, hey, see more of this. I use them for latest posts. I use them for all kinds of stuff, all kinds of stuff. So you really need to be putting all these things in and sell yourself. Introduce yourself. Tell them what you’re about. Don’t assume that people know when they land on your page who you are or what you do.

Melissa:
Yeah, and really all of this stuff is going to help you get to you want to have a 600 word minimum. So those three sentences, like I said, they’re not cutting it. You want to have at least 600 words. It shows Google. Google has a limit of if it doesn’t have enough text on the page, it’s considered thin content because they’re assuming if you don’t have a lot to say about this topic, then you must not be an authority. you’re not reliable. Yeah. Yeah. So all of this stuff can help you build up to that so that you can have enough content on here. And that’s the beauty about FAQ posts and stuff like that. It’s so much easier to write about some of these topics that we’ve covered, then to try and come up with more flowery things to say about this family session that you just did. I remember my grandmother used to tell me all the time, she’s Melissa, I don’t know how you write the same thing over and over again for all these weddings and make it sound different. And I was like, it doesn’t sound different. But you’re the only one reading it every week. Like for Everybody else comes in once or twice. You get the email and legit read that thing every week. Oh, yay, grandma. And we’ve covered how you can use some of these like Allison was talking about using them in her email sequence. You can use it just for answering questions for clients. So like, I actually had a client who booked and On her questionnaire, she mentioned that their baby, they’re expected to have a cleft lip, cleft palate baby. And I was like, boom, I’ve got blog posts for you because A, I’m a mom of a kid who was born with a cleft lip. So I have personal posts on that topic. And then I have a client post on that. And so I immediately was able to go grab those posts and share them with her so that she could be prepared and stuff. How did you grab them? Did you use a search bar?

Alison:
Yeah. We talked about this in a previous episode. If you don’t have a search bar, this is not going to be useful or easy for you. Get a search bar.

Melissa:
I will say, I think for this one, actually, I think I started off, I typed in like Melissa Arlena Cleft, just into Google. And then I was like, wait, it found one of the posts, but I’m looking for a different one. And so then I had to go and do the search because I was like, I don’t remember what I called it. But I think I use Cleft Baby Photo Shoot or something. in that post. And so that was a session share was I actually talked in that blog post about this kind of stuff. Like Allison’s talked about so email workflow after booking to linking back to stuff, getting them prepared. So like the presale concept.

Alison:
So I do this when once a client books, I am really particular with moms and what they wear when because of when but also because of small children. The email is called I see London, I see France. And it’s about and it takes them back it highlights one portion of my what to wear blog about undergarments and making sure we’re secure and not showing anything, and so I highlight that one little part in the email, but I link back to my what to wear guide which they’ve seen and i’ve linked to multiple times by the time they booked. But it’s such a robust. article that nobody’s going to say I don’t even read the whole thing that I take parts of it out, I break it up and I say hey for more go back.

Melissa:
To them in small bits and you can do that with your social media to like these posts too. Because they’re interesting and because they’re helpful that you have so much more to share like on social media, you can take one of these posts and pull out three or four instagram posts grab some photos. grab it. Yeah, and you can send it out like a what to wear post. I always go back to this because everyone should have one and you could have one for every season depending on where you live. Or location. Yeah, or locations. But you want to you could have a section on what dad should wear, what mom should wear, what the kids should wear, what a baby should wear, the color palette, the style.

Alison:
With the girls, with the boys.

Melissa:
Yeah, and then you could have you could have a social media post for each one of those and have it set to go out once a week for the next five or six weeks, all linking back to that post.

Alison:
And then each one of those social media posts can be reformatted to be a list of what not to do, a biggest mistake or a biggest myth. And that can, that could be the same general idea or concept. And you’ve reformatted it four times. You get in your Planoly or whatever you’re using to schedule out your post and you just take that same stuff, put a new photo or image with it. You put one out a month and you do that for however many times with this one blog post. You’re talking 12 weeks of content done. That’s amazing. Yeah. It’s so nice to be able to do that. Yeah. Another way I use my blog post is with a client dashboard. So it’s a private page that I link to all my clients once they’ve booked. It’s really basic, but it just says, here’s all the links to what to wear, engineer your timeline, sunrise sessions, newborn or family. Like it’s just a database. It’s just a homepage where they can go find all the things that would be helpful to them.

Melissa:
So why do we wanna do all of this? We wanna get found. You wanna get found on Google. You wanna get more links to your website. And here’s the thing too, some of these posts that you might write, you could find that other people will link to your post because it’s a good post. So you could end up with backlinks from other people who have found it and then linked out. I’ve noticed that recently that I’ve got a lot of backlinks that are coming from posts that I wrote, that somebody is sourcing me as their person and they’re writing it out.

Alison:
That is why my Virginia Beach restaurants, family friendly restaurants in Virginia Beach has taken off so much because right before I left, somebody did the same thing and I was like the resource for it. They linked from me about it and it’s just taken off. It’s amazing. Yeah. And those clicks. And also guys, you want to be the authority for your people. So once you’ve gotten an inquiry, a lead, a booking, like don’t send them to somebody else’s resource. You have the authority. Even if somebody else has already written this article, like we were talking before, what to wear for beach photos. My shoot style here in Hawaii with turquoise water, bright blue skies and green palm trees is completely different than it probably could be either in Maine on the East Coast or even in the Pacific Northwest where it’s cold and brown and dark water. That’s different. And you can, then on top of that, you put your different shoot style where maybe you are dark and moody and really amber. you’re not going to give those clients that shoot style and that location the same advice as I’m giving people in Hawaii with my bright and vibrant, fun style.

Melissa:
Yeah, and I would say, yeah, definitely, because Allison’s very vibrant. So she’s encouraging her clients to wear, not really wear pastels. You want them to like pop on the water versus there’s a lot of colors. Yeah, very neutral and stuff like that.

Alison:
And so even jewel tone, I tell my people no jewel tones.

Melissa:
That’s gonna, they’re gonna be, they’re gonna be different because you’re different in what your style looks like and stuff.

Alison:
Absolutely. So be an authority. Like you already more than you realize, you can share more than you realize. And so be that authority and don’t be afraid to step into it and own it. Melissa has a whole like freebie on this, like to get your ideas running, blog post topics, and even you even have something else like where and how to share it once you’ve written it, which is also really important. So make sure you get into the show notes and get those freebies.

Melissa:
Yeah, and honestly, if you guys still are struggling with, I don’t know what to write, I have a whole thing called the blogging club and you can come join us over there. I give you outlines every month and I walk you through each section like I’ve broken down here for different blog topics. So that way, I’m like holding your hand of you’re going to write this next, but you’re writing it for your client and everything. So go check that out. We’ll have the links in the show notes, but we’ve got the blogging club and then yeah, we have the blog post topics freebie that will also get you started. Awesome. Until next time, keep blogging.