065: Kyle Goldie – SEO, Keyword Research & Converting Those Leads!

June, 20 2022

“Take ego out of your business. I was very egocentric with things that I was doing. I was controlling everything. I felt like I had to edit my own photos. I felt like I had to write my own blog posts. Actually – when I outsourced, they did it better than I could have!”

KYLE GOLDIE

Hey everyone! It’s Sally here, from Studio Ninja. Today’s episode is all about Kyle Goldie!

Check out some of the biggest points from Kyle’s interview below:

What are the common mistakes that you see photographers making with their SEO?

Yeah. It’s a good question. That one topic I could talk to eight hours about. But the biggest thing that I see a photographer specifically making mistakes with their SEO is that they think of their SEO like the end all be all answer of getting more clients, making more money, simplifying their life. But SEO does not exist in a vacuum because if we’re really compartmentalising what happens inside of your business, SEO, the goal of it is not to get a booking. The goal of your SEO is just to get targeted ideal traffic coming to the website and it’s the same thing with Facebook ads. It’s the same thing with Google ads. It’s the same thing with any traffic source. That’s the one goal of it. It’s just to get the traffic.

A lot of photographers I’ve seen are doing one of two things as the biggest mistakes. Number one, going after the wrong keywords because they’re thinking, “Oh, I think I should go after this keyword because I live in this area and this is my job title, so I’m going to go for that without even doing the research to begin with. If they live in a smaller area, well, most often in tiny little towns, there’s no one Googling for you in that little tiny town. We then have to identify, well, what are they Googling for?

Problem number two is, they forget about the conversion element of traffic. They think, “Oh, my SEO is dialed in. I did everything that this person told me to go do, but it’s still not working. Oh my gosh.” But at that point we got to look at your website, the content, the quality, the messaging, the personal brand, the framework of the design, everything. If that’s not dialed in, it’s going to feel like SEO, or ads are not working, even though those are doing their job properly.

What is Keyword Research & how can photographers implement it?

For this, I would say, start with a tool to do your SEO keyword research, the agency grade tools out there are things like Ahrefs, Semrush, et cetera. But for a lot of photographers, they don’t want to spend that type of money on a SEO tool. I typically recommend photographers to start with a keyword tool called Keywords Everywhere. At the moment, it’s only $10 for a whole year, which includes 100,000 search credits.

For most photographers, you’re never going to have to spend more than 10 bucks a year on a keyword research tool. Beyond that, yes, you’ll have to start with a keyword that’s transactional. Again, area plus job title. Let’s just use London as an example here. If we use London as an example, it would be something like, and you mentioned wedding photographers earlier, so London wedding photographer, London wedding photographers, London wedding photography, London, UK wedding photographer, and then photographers and then photography, etc. We have to look up all that type of data and then we also have to look up all the different variants on all this, all the different surrounding area, as well as what I call brand awareness keywords. That’s another big thing a lot of photographers are missing out on regarding their keyword research. They’re looking up their transactional stuff, their area plus job title. Then they’re like, “Well, that’s it. Thank you.”

Then they’ll look at the next city or something, but they forget all about brand awareness keywords. Brand awareness keywords for a wedding photographer, just as an example here would be for wedding venues because if people are looking up the research for their engagement and the very first thing that they do primarily is looking up a wedding venue to do their research to lock in their date. If we can get in front of a lot of those keywords, you can get in front of a lot of people, even before they’re looking for a photographer. If we do a lot of that and a photographer, if they’re doing it right anyway, could make ideally a lot of money, but also when they’re dialing in the website, the content, the messaging, the framework.

They have to get in the mindset of their ideal clients and identify the keywords that they uniquely are using and then look at the data through the Keywords Everywhere tool, just to make sure that, that’s actually the thing they’re Googling for.

Because everybody in the world is wanting faster results, right. There’s a whole bunch of myths about SEO we can talk about briefly too, if you wanted to. But the first step for most people to get faster results is optimizing their website, because most people have people that know of them already. They have some sort of an audience, even if it’s not the number of people that they want right now. Well, if we convert to them better right now, before even the SEO stuff is kicking in, then great, you’re going to get faster results. You’re going to make more money. Your sales process is going to be simplified because we’re putting your best foot forward first. Once that is dialed in, then we do your SEO keyword research, and then we do what’s called on-page SEO, as well as your content marketing through the different pages and blog posts, et cetera. Then if we have to, then we look at your off-page SEO for backlinks and building up that side essentially of the website.

If you could add one final piece of advice, something that’s made a difference in your personal life or your business life, what would that piece of advice be?

Take ego out of your business. By that, I say with my own experience, I was very egocentric with things that I was doing. I was controlling everything. I felt like I had to edit my own photos. I felt like I had to write my own blog posts. I felt like I had to design my own website. Over the years looking back on things, I’m like, “Well, that blog post was written terribly,” or, “That design was awful.”

All these things, take ego out, make more data-driven decisions in your business and just do your due diligence to make sure that your return on investment is going to be there because if you’re outsourcing anything, make sure it’s a money-making activity because you’re then leveraging other people’s time, saving yourself time, but still making the money you want to go make.

Thank you!

Thanks again to you all for joining us and a huge thanks to Kyle for joining us on the show!

If you have any suggestions, comments or questions about this episode, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post, and if you liked the episode, please share it using the social media buttons you see at the bottom of the post!

That’s it for me this week, I hope you all enjoyed this episode.

See you soon,

Sally