Why Photographers Should Care About SEO

Meredith's Husband 0:26

If you are a photographer, this is going to be a really valuable episode. If you're not a photographer, I think it's also going to be a valuable episode. But if you are a photographer, listen up. This is going to be really good advice. In fact, I think this is such good advice, I'm a little hesitant to share it because I know at least one of Meredith's competitors here in Brooklyn listens to this podcast, and I don't really want to share this advice with that person. I'm sort of hoping that that person doesn't hear this episode. Of course, I've now guaranteed that if they listen to the beginning, they're certainly going to listen to the rest of it. So I guess I've sort of shot myself in the foot. But anyway, you should hear this. If you're a photographer, you're listening to a podcast giving tips about SEO. This is really important. And this comes from a question that I got recently that was part of a QA after a presentation that I gave. And the question was basically, is a photo credit from a website still valuable if it's not linked? Because for years I've said, as a photographer, you're in a really good position. You can give photography to businesses that they can use on their website, because photography, you know, especially good photography, is not an easy thing to do. If you can supply that and then exchange, don't ask for any money, but get

The Photo Credit Without Link Question

Meredith's Husband 1:39

a photo credit and have it also linked to your website. That's really valuable for SEO. Because as I was talking about this uh last week, links are so, so important in SEO, especially Google. That's how Google differentiated themselves. That's how they took over the industry, uh, is they really built their algorithm on links. Links are just so important for SEO. So that's why I have always given that advice. Now the question, what about if I can get as a photographer a photo credit from a website, but it won't be linked? Because I know it's difficult. A lot of businesses have a policy, they will not link to a weather another website like that. Okay. They might provide a photo credit, but then asking them to link it, I know that's a big ask. And it's kind of rare that companies will do that. A lot of times individuals might do that, smaller companies, but bigger companies usually will have some sort of policy that they just don't do that. And so it's hard to do. The advice I've always given, it's actually it's difficult, I know. Now the question is, what happens if you can't get that link? And this is something that is changing right now, at this moment. And this started to become evident a couple years ago when there was a leak. There was a leak in Google, and part of their algorithm was leaked. Now, in SEO, the Google algorithm is has always been like the holy grail. Like as SEOs, we know a lot of what helps improve rankings. But the Google algorithm has always been kept very secret, and there are details in there that we just don't know. And

What The Google Leak Revealed

Meredith's Husband 3:14

Google keeps it secret for a reason. And so a lot of the things that we know about SEO, we've learned as SEOs just through trial and error. You know, Google gives some advice, but usually the advice from Google is pretty vague, and a lot of the details we're kind of left to figure out on our own. So the leak, it was very big news that there was there was a leak. And I will tell you, most of the information that came out was not surprising. It was kind of stuff we had already known. There were a few surprises, though. And one of them, in fact, perhaps even the I would say the biggest surprise was about unlinked mentions. So an unlinked mention is exactly that, when you might get something like a photo credit on somebody's website, but they don't link it. They mention your business, that's a mention, but it's unlinked. There's no link to your website. And what this leak kind of revealed is that those mentions are actually really valuable. Maybe not quite as valuable as a linked mention, but inside the industry, we had for years thought that an unlinked mention was just like, in terms of SEO value, like a small fraction of a link in terms of how important it is. It certainly seems like that's not the case. An unlinked mention is still probably not as valuable as a link, but it's a whole lot closer than we thought. Now, I can't give you like a specific number, like it's worth 83% of a link. Google doesn't do things quite like that, but it was quite evident in looking at that at the leaked data. And I can't read that myself, I can't go through the leaked algorithm and figure these things out myself. That's done by much more technical SEOs and then kind of translated for the rest of us. But it was very evident that unlinked mentions are pretty valuable. Now, this becomes doubly important now, and I say this is this is something that is changing at the moment because as AI becomes more and more involved in search, one thing that AI cannot do is follow links. Like it doesn't uh it doesn't engage with a website the way you and I do. Like it goes to a website and it doesn't click on all the links and then visit all the linked pages. It can't do things

Why AI Struggles With Links

Meredith's Husband 5:32

like click on a play button, or it can't do things like click on a drop-down menu to see what's inside. The only way that AI bots can follow links is if they go to Google, they have API access to Google, so they can follow any links from Google. They also have access to follow links on stuff that they're pre-trained on. So that would be uh websites like Reddit and things like that, like big uh databases and big directories. But the only other way that AI can go and visit a webpage is if you supply it with a URL and say, hey, go visit this page and tell me what's on it. So AI doesn't follow links like that. And I can give you an example of this. I don't remember how many months ago, but as a sort of test this, I asked AI, hey, please go to my website and tell me how many blog articles are on it. Okay. And I said specifically, don't go to Google, because it can go to Google and use a special command to figure out exactly how many blogs. And it can go to Google and look at my site map, and it can tell me pretty exactly that way. So I said, just go to my website, here's the homepage, and tell me how many blogs are on this website. Now it came back and it said, well, there's at least 12. And I thought, well, fucking no shit, there's at least 12. There's like, there's almost 200. And I said, How did you come up with the number 12? There's many more blogs than that. And it said, well, one of the blogs had 12. I had a very lengthy or a blog that was split into 12 different parts. And it they were literally called, you know, part one of 12, 2 of 12. And they said, so I saw that and I said, Well, there's at least 12 there. So that demonstrates how bad SE, uh, SEO, how bad AI is at following links. Okay, just it just doesn't do it well. Might that change in the future? I, you know, maybe, perhaps I don't know. But for right now, what that means is links have a little less importance, okay, especially with AI. Google has always relied on them heavily, but I'll tell you something else. The technology, the architecture that has made AI possible in the way that we are using it now, that was created by Google in 2016. It was a new method, it was a new way for AI to go out and just consume information. It was something that Google invented. It wasn't something that Google could protect. It wasn't something they could, you know, put a copyright on or a trademark. They couldn't protect, they couldn't block other people from doing it. So these other models, these other AI models like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, of course, uh, Perplexity, they are also transformers. That's what the T stands for in ChatGPT. It's a transformer. So my point in telling you this really exciting story is that the leak that came out of Google that said mentions are getting going to be more important, Google had already started working AI into their search like years ago. And I think that this shift towards the importance of mentions kind of reflects that. Again, because AI is not great at following links, but can easily and does take note of mentions. Like you've probably experienced this if you say, hey, um, I here's a I want you to find reviews of this product and it will go and it will use Google and it will find reviews, like tons and tons of reviews that it would take you or I, well, who knows how long to figure out. And it it finds all mentions. Okay, it's really good at doing that. And the takeaway for you should be that a mention on a website, even if there's no link, is really pretty valuable and probably going to become even more valuable. So you don't need to worry. If you supply photography to a local business or something and they don't want to link to your website, that's fine. If they just give you a mention, that's all you need to really get. Maybe not 100% of the

Mentions Matter More Than Before

Meredith's Husband 9:24

value that you would get from a link, but pretty close. It's going to be really good for SEO for your SEO. It's going to be really good to help your visibility in AI searches. The one caveat is that you need to make sure it's relevant. So one thing, when I've talked about links in the past, you need to make sure that the links are relevant because we've SEOs have come up with all sorts of schemes to build links artificially. And one thing that's important that Google has done, and this makes sense, it makes it harder to sort of fake artificial links, is that links need

Authentic Mentions And Relevance

Meredith's Husband 9:58

to be relevant. So for Meredith, for example, she's a children's photographer in Brooklyn. A link from a website about, say, fly fishing in Montana is not relevant. Okay, there's no overlap. There's no overlap in the subject. It's not about photography, there's no overlap in the geography. So that link wouldn't be worth much. A link from, say, a children's toy store in Brooklyn, all of a sudden, a whole lot more relevant. It overlaps geography, it overlaps with the subject, children. That would have a whole lot more value for SEO. Same thing with mentions. And the way that Google actually describes this is it calls it authentic mentions versus inauthentic mentions. An inauthentic mention would be a mention from some website or blog or social media, anything out there online that is not really related to what you're doing. That would be sort of an inauthentic mention. It wouldn't happen like authentically. Duh. So one thing you should focus on now is getting authentic mentions. So if you can supply photography to a business in your in your neighborhood, especially if it overlaps with your subject, or if it overlaps with your subject and isn't even focused on your neighborhood, as long as there is some sort of authenticity, that's going to be really valuable. And like I said, you don't necessarily need to be a photographer. This is still going to apply. Mentions are going to be valuable. But as a photographer, you're in a really good position to supply something that you can certainly ask for a credit. You just want to make sure that it mentions your business name accurately. So you would want to make sure that something like, you know, thanks to Meredith Center Photography for supplying the images. Something like that, not, hey, thanks to Meredith. Okay. It needs to be specific because I know a lot of photographers out there, the name of your business is going to

How To Ask For The Right Credit

Meredith's Husband 11:49

be your name plus photography. There is often somebody else out there with the same name doing photography somewhere else. So you need to be specific. It needs to be obvious that it's your business that the mention is about. Okay. I hope this helps.