Meredith's Husband: 0:42

Hey, this is Meredith husband. I've got some SEO advice for you, but I'm gonna keep it really simple so that you can understand it. So make sense. And most importantly, so you can actually use

Meredith: 0:57

Hi,

Meredith's Husband: 0:58

hey, hi. Hey,

Meredith: 1:01

how are you? I'm okay. Thank you. How are you doing?

Meredith's Husband: 1:05

Pretty good. God Friday.

Meredith: 1:07

Oh my gosh. What's your week? Um, I have no I was busy, busy. Everything is so so, so, so busy now. It's kind of that crunch time when everybody needs everything and everyone's booking and I'm gonna I just made an appointment to get my booster to be extra careful. Yeah,

Meredith's Husband: 1:31

I didn't know. You can? Why are you special?

Meredith: 1:38

Well, because I'm in such close contact with so many kids.

Meredith's Husband: 1:41

Okay. Can I argue that I'm in indirect contact with so many kids? Because of Yes,

Meredith: 1:46

yes. Yes. Yes, you could.

Meredith's Husband: 1:49

My Week was good to is busy. I noticed. Things have all of a sudden picked up quite a lot since COVID was, you know, created quite a lull in the business world. And all sudden, there's like a rush of people. You're starting things. So it was a busy week.

Meredith: 2:06

Nice. Nice. It does seem like there is a somewhat of an emergence coming back or

Meredith's Husband: 2:11

kind of like awakening or something. Yeah.

Meredith: 2:14

Renee song.

Meredith's Husband: 2:18

So ah, this week I wanted to give some advice about how to start a the what I think is the easiest way to start an effective blog for SEO. Oh, okay. Cool. easiest, easiest way. All right. Okay. Excellent. I'll get to that in a second. But you Yeah, you had an email come in yesterday, yesterday, the day before? Can you just tell us a little bit about don't say where it's from, because I'm gonna. I might, I might beg on them a little bit. On anybody by name, but tell us that go through the content of what this? You got this out of the blue, right.

Meredith: 2:57

Yeah, I got this out of the blue. It says attention. Meredith Zinner photography, you're one of the top 11 It says Hi, Meredith. Congratulation. This year, we responded to consumer nominations for family photographers in Brooklyn, and murders in her photography was nominated and past our selection process to ensure we've accurately defined your business to your future clients who will be needing your services. Can you please check the details? If there are any revisions needed? Your online profile is this company.com/ny/brooklyn/family portraits, post your expertise badge and get to more listings be promoted to 20,000 daily site visitors without spending a single dime, increase your site traffic through Google's organic search. Allow your webmaster to follow the instructions below. This helps us differentiate active providers on our website and know who to redirect our inbound customers asking for recommendations and know who to prioritize for our 2022 listing your 2021 award preview.

Meredith's Husband: 4:10

Okay, that sounds that sounds pretty good, right? Yeah, it sounds pretty sounds impressive. It's too bad. It's a pile of horseshit. It is yes, it is such a scam. i This this type of stuff makes me furious. As a professional in this industry. And they'll get in why is that? So, so legitimate. So this sounds? This sounds awesome. It sounds like wow, to be good. But you you've won an award, blah, blah, blah, all this good stuff. They know. Yeah, well, the criteria for winning these awards and getting these badges is that you have a website and you fall into one of the categories that they have on their own website, and what they're doing. You remember in one of the previous episodes, I mentioned, white hat, SEO and Blackhat. SEO, yes, this is a this is a pretty good example of Blackhat. SEO, because they're reaching out to you. And they say you're going to get all this stuff and they're going to send all these new customers and stuff to you. And what they do is they then ask you to put this badge on your website. Yeah, saying I'm one of the top 11 I'm a winner. It's, you know, it's some sort of validation. Yeah. Social proof. Yeah, it looks as they say, What they don't tell you is that in that badge, there is a link back to their website. So what's happening is you're taking the value the authority Whatever authority you have built up on your website, right? It's either a little or it's a lot, or it's none. And you're sending it to them, you're linking to them. You are improving their SEO at the it's literally at the expense of your own SEO.

Meredith: 5:48

No way. Yes. How can they do this?

Meredith's Husband: 5:52

Oh, this is a common thing. This is how

Meredith: 5:55

I've received there were a couple of these. They're like, improving listing. And,

Meredith's Husband: 5:59

and this is a very common way to launch a new site. And then what they're gonna do is they're going to, then once they build up traffic, they're going to turn around and they're, they'll charge people for feature listings. Charge advertisers, and they will build up their traffic by scamming your SEO, cheat your way, steal your link juice. Yeah. So this is when I'm sure you've heard you've heard or seen the Yelp badges. Yeah. If you want to put if you if you have good Yelp reviews, and you want to put your Yelp, you know, rating on your website. Yeah, yeah, screenshot take a screenshot of the reviews. Don't don't use other website badges, because inside that badge is a link to their site. And then also, guess what happens if your client or potential client follows that? Guess what? All your competitors are right there next to you next to your name. You know, that's not what you want to do. Right? How's you know, the website house? Hulu? zz.com. Yeah, yeah, they also they got busted for doing this, because they did the same thing. And then also in that batch, they stuffed dozens of keywords. They were Yeah, it was really unethical. Like all its keywords, keywords that help their own ranking. So Oh, my. Yeah. Not even necessarily related to your website, you're promoting house for god knows what you do. And you don't see it. You don't even know why. I think they have stopped that. But they Yeah, that when that when that kind of became well known. There was a lot of it was a big, it's a big topic in the SEO world. That's such a big company was doing such a low level tactic like that.

Meredith: 7:44

Now, I wonder if, for example, the PPA which is a photographer, professional photographers Association, if you have a badge from them, if they do the same, or other people do the same?

Meredith's Husband: 7:56

Probably Probably. That would be a little bit different. Right? Right. Right would be that. So there are times when a badge like this is legitimate, for example, in my industry, you can you can be you can have a google verification, you can be kind of licensed by Google No, not licensed. That's a that's a poor choice of words. But you can get a, you know, you can take an exam that Google provides, you pass that exam, and then you get a badge, you get a logo. And you can put that logo on your site and says you're a Google partner. And then if somebody clicks on that, they will go to your own profile on Google. And they can see all that all the tests that you have passed on Google. Now that's different. That's not you know, you might think that it sounds similar. You're getting a badge with a link back to gray. Right? Obviously, Google is not trying to Google is not trying to build their own SEO, getting a link from your website, they can do it.

Meredith: 8:55

Right. And can we can we at some point, maybe perhaps not in this episode? Can we just go over how people think that Google is evil? And Facebook is great. Yeah. Can we do that at some point? Let's

Meredith's Husband: 9:09

we could do a specific we can

Meredith: 9:11

do that. Because you know, Google's the devil Facebook's okay.

Meredith's Husband: 9:16

Yeah, man. Got a lot of stories. Yeah, on that one.

Meredith: 9:22

upcoming episode,

Meredith's Husband: 9:24

right. We'll talk about that one soon. So anyway, those are those bad news. So when you get these emails, yeah, don't don't fall for this. Don't do it.

Meredith: 9:35

Oh, interesting. All right. Thank you. Yeah. Cuz I whenever I get any kind of email, like this, I just always send to you and something like, bullshit question mark. Yeah, spam question mark. Am I this awesome

Meredith's Husband: 9:51

question. These sort of things. Just, this drives me nuts that people do this. So I really don't like it. Anyway, let's move on. So let's an easy way to start blogging. So I've talked in the past about blogging, why it's important for SEO, why you should think about blogging as a resource rather than articles. Because I bet, I bet I know you have done this in the past. I imagine most photographers have done this like they want to blog. They tend to have a session with a family or a client. They create a blog post a bunch of images, they put a few sentences at the top, you know, check my latest epic, you know, session. We love that issue. That's yeah, but that does nothing for SEO? To be honest. It used now years ago, it was it was different. But in 2021, there's no reason to do that. That's not helping your SEO. Okay, what would help the SEO? So like I've said in the past, you want to think about creating resources. So recently, you want to you want to solve a problem for somebody? Yeah. So the first step, you got to figure out what what that problem is. So a very, very, very easy way to get started doing this is just go to Google, I'm actually going to do this on screen. So I couldn't be very, very precise. There's no, there's no video. There's no accompanying video here. But so let's let's do this for you. Let's say, Fine. Oh, yeah. Just starting. Yeah. Yeah, you need to create a new resource blog post? Yes, I do. So go to Google. And you are me right now? No, you don't have to the person listening? Everyone who's listening, you can too, if you want, I guess, okay. I won't know the difference. So go to Google type in children's photography, okay, do it do a search, you'll get some ads, you'll get some some listings in the local pack with the map, you'll get a bunch of organic listings, what we're looking for is those is a set of questions. You know, sometimes you do a Google search. And like, there will just be some questions that people ask, when I do a search for children's photography, no questions appear, they don't always right. So if that's the case, whatever you've typed in, whether it's children's photography, wedding photography, lifestyle, photography, what it is, whatever that is, after that, start to type a question. And I usually just start by typing in W H, you know, start to type the word what?

Meredith: 12:58

When Google wants to know your location, does that mean anything? Should you allow it? Should you walk it?

Meredith's Husband: 13:05

I allow that because that because that's gonna give me local results? Okay, I don't I don't typically let other websites do that, unless it's unless I want to see some sort of result or content specific to my actual location. So children's photography, you'll see the first listings, will will be ads, then you'll have a local pack, then you'll have some organic listings. Now what we're looking for is the set of questions. And it'll say like, you know, common questions people also ask Featured Snippets, something like that. In this case, I just typed in children's photography, there are no, there are no questions. So what I like to do after children's photography, I just start to type in a question. Usually, I begin with the word what or how. So no matter what you're doing with if it's wedding photography, children's photography, family photography, whatever question once you start typing the word what you'll see some questions pop up. Yeah, yeah, the questions I see here are, what to do, what to know what to wear. And what

Meredith: 14:02

is that last one after what to wear?

Meredith's Husband: 14:04

What is oh, okay, just what is what is children's photography? What is? I don't know, evidently, people search for them. So I'm going to choose one here, I'm going to say what to wear. Okay. And the reason I'm choosing this is because I'm looking for something that you can write something that you can create, that's going to answer a specific question for your potential customers. Right. So now we have now we see a section up near the top, there's one listing and then after that, it says people also ask, Oh, or I'm sorry, it doesn't say people. Yeah, it does say people also asked, okay, so it says people also asked, and I'm gonna say, so these questions are, what should kids wear for a photoshoot? What should a toddler dress for in a photo? Shoot? What should you not wear to a family photo shoot? These are questions that you probably I know that you do this personally, you provide to people before a session, you tell them, give them the guide what to wear, what not to wear. So this is kind of general information. I want to drill down a little bit past this and get to a very specific question that you can answer very easily. Okay, so I'm going to pick one of these. Let's try what should kids wear for a photoshoot that's going to open up some more questions down beneath and these questions are going to become more specific. So now we look. Yeah, now we look at these and these questions are. Again, how should a toddler dress for a photoshoot? What should you not wear for a family photoshoot? What is the dress code for a photographer, which isn't really gonna help? I don't think your clients are looking for that. Maybe they maybe they had a photographer show up in like jean shorts and a tank top and we're like, hey, what's the dress code for?

Meredith: 15:56

Or just naked?

Meredith's Husband: 16:00

The next question, What should I wear for an outdoor photo shoot? And finally, what should kids wear to the park which doesn't seem to be photography related? So out of these, I'm just going to take a stab and say this this question here What should I wear for an outdoor photoshoot? I bet you could answer that pretty easily. Right? Yeah. Yeah, preferably?

Meredith: 16:22

Well, you know, what's interesting is, is that there are different photographers do think different things like there are definitely the white shirt and jeans family by the beach, the khaki, khaki pants, white shirt kind of thing. There's the neutral layers thing. I mean, I love everyone,

Meredith's Husband: 16:42

you see what you see, you see what you're doing? You see what you're doing? You're already answering this question. You're starting your own blog right now. So what you want to do so you know, so this is not something that you might remember I said, you blog for two different reasons. One to get links. And to to get direct traffic from people answering specific questions, this obviously falls into the second category. So what I like to do, when I'm creating blog posts, when I'm creating resource blogs on my own, I find questions like this, sometimes I use Google, sometimes I use other actually, I usually use other tools. But Google is the most accessible and free way to do this. I then answer this question. And what I do is I just record it, I just do what you just did, I started I start speaking the answer. And I recorded it really. Now if you want if you can speak into camera and do this on your phone, great, super, take a little selfie style video and do it that way. That's great. If you don't want to do that, you don't have to do that. But just record your voice, you can do that on your computer, on your phone. However you if you have a mic connected to your computer, super, the audio quality does not need to be perfect. So you don't need this is just going to be for you. Oh, so record the answer. Whether it's a minute or 20 minutes, just record your answer, then you will have you have a file, you have an mp3 file, somehow, what you can do is send that to a transcription website, there are a few of them off, I'll put some in the in the resource section. Some are free, some are paid. So it depends. Some of them are automatic, some of them are machine generated, those are going to be either cheap, or very free. I'm sorry. Be very, very free. They will be let me try that one again, they will be free or very cheap the machine. You can also thank you. You can also you can try it you can go to Google Google Docs, Google Docs has a really good typing. You know, I think it's called voice to type feature where you can actually if you if you do that, you don't even need to record it. You just open up a Google document and just start speaking and it will transcribe just right there on the page in front of you. It's actually pretty cool. And it's that's totally free. Now, when you do that, when you do the machine really, really free. Yeah, it's really free. It's very free. It's the most, it's the most free of all the free ones. So when you do the machine generated went there, obviously they're not going to be perfect. Right? They're not going to pick up everything. They're not going to break your paragraphs up where you want them. Yeah. So you'll have to you'll have to do that later. Yeah. That's totally doable. This is a whole lot easier than sitting down at a blank page for me. And I think for a lot of people, I mean, think about your thing, your industry, no matter what you do. I'm sure you could sit down and talk about it for five Some ask somebody. I mean, if me like I started whole podcast, because I can't stop talking about it. Like it's easy for you. Hopefully you enjoy what you do. And you like talk. Yeah. So so so do this, send it to a cheap or very free transcription service. And have it done with him. She Daniel need to edit it. Yeah, you can also send it there also services like rev.com. And again, I'll put these in the in the resources where you can send your audio file,

Meredith: 20:27

you can put your own V as in a victorious vampire, or evie.com

Meredith's Husband: 20:33

or Evie.

Meredith: 20:34

Okay. Really elephant.

Meredith's Husband: 20:38

I have no idea what it stands for. Yeah, I had no idea. But they will do it manually. And it's pretty cheap. It's like $1.25 a minute I think and it's, they just outsource it. They have transcription professionals all over the world. You'll get it turned around within a day. And if it's a 10 minute video, it's 10 bucks. It comes back perfect. It comes back absolutely perfect. So you don't have to worry about it. Now. If you're doing a lot of content this way, then that could get expensive. So you might want a better option. You're still going to need to edit it though if you do that cheaper option. And, and then I would go through and I would, I would do things, you'll probably find yourself breaking up into paragraphs changing, changing the line breaks, add some headings, because this is going to become a blog post. So you want to put a main title, you want to put some subtitles, break it up that way, and just make it readable.

Meredith: 21:35

Yeah. And those you we still just want to remain true with those not like, using any key words or quote or

Meredith's Husband: 21:45

not really, you're, you're just trying to answer the question that the answer the specific question that that you found on Google? And when you and when you answer that, you're going to be using enough language in your blog that it's going Google is going to relate those keywords the days of like, like a strong keyword focusing Google or over, it's more of a conversational. So Google knows that if you're talking about photography, in your you know, you also mentioned images and kids and

Meredith: 22:18

portraits. Family. Yeah, it's

Meredith's Husband: 22:20

gonna it's gonna it's going to add all this

Meredith: 22:22

together, photography photographers. Funny.

Meredith's Husband: 22:26

Yeah, don't worry about keywords at all. Okay,

Meredith: 22:28

can I also ask when you said take a little video of yourself is that again for the same reason, or is that for all?

Meredith's Husband: 22:37

I'll get to that in just a second. But when you put the only thing, the only place that you really want to worry about keywords is when you go back and add a heading, and add some subheadings to your text. That's where you want to put your keywords. Those are your your Those are called your h1, h2 h3 h4 headings, those you want to put your so in that, let's say you're answering this question, the question we're answering what should I wear for an outdoor photo? Shoot? I want to make the title of that the first heading? What should what should you wear for an outdoor photo shoot? Or what should I wear for an outdoor photo shoot and put it in? You say what should I wear for an outdoor photo? Shoot? put parentheses around it. That's the title of your blog. Because you want to appear for this exact search.

Meredith: 23:19

Wait, put your type put parentheses around it.

Meredith's Husband: 23:22

I'm sorry, quotation marks, quotation marks. Okay. Yes, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Because that it because because you either want to make this, you're going to either write, what should I wear for an outdoor photoshoot? And that's going to be your writing. But you're not saying this. So you are quoting this question you are asked? That's a question that the potential client will be asking. If you are if you are writing this, from your perspective, you would write what should you wear for an outdoor photoshoot? But you want to you want to align yourself with the with the reader with you. You want to align yourself with a user not you don't want to give them your opinion. You want to answer their question, even though Hey, guess what? Same thing?

Meredith: 24:05

Hey, guess what? Same.

Meredith's Husband: 24:06

So. So now you have a blog post, and then a blog post, you have a blog post, it's probably if you you know, if you talk I don't know what the you know what the calculation is to figure out the number of words, but it's probably going to be a decently long blog post. You talk for 10 minutes, it's probably 1000 words. I don't I don't know. But it's, this is a really easy way to come up with a blog, that's going to be a resource like I, like I talked about now, to answer your question about the video. Yeah. So the next, the next thing you can do with this is use if you did a video, or you like your recording, you can start to break that up and use it on social media. So if you're talking into camera, take a segment of it, put it on Instagram or YouTube or or you know, wherever you use social media, break it up. Now you have a this you might be able to this is not, I would say Cornerstone content. But this is what Cornerstone content is like a big piece of content, maybe not big, but an important piece of your content on your website, that you're going to have other pieces of content that kind of branch off. Got it. So so this, this might not be that important. But this is a piece of content. So now you take this content and you repurpose it, you chop it up, you put some here, there, wherever, like I said, wherever you're doing social media, right? The start to get more eyeballs.

Meredith: 25:33

You sprinkle the seeds in a garden.

Meredith's Husband: 25:35

That's, I was just gonna say. And if and let's say you remember I said you can do this recording and don't worry about the quality, it's just going to be for you. Yeah. Now if you want to redo it, redo it because you now have a lot of times what will happen as far as a first draft? Yes. And a lot of times what you're doing what I do, I very often end up redoing the recording, because now I've looked at I've looked at the words on the page and I say oh, you know what, I should say this before I say this other thing? Because I have I would have a tendency to just right Campbell when I make the first video, so now you can go back and just redo that recording. And you can just you can it's now easy to redo like two or three times. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then and then if you want, then you can take the audio and put the audio, you can cut up the audio and just put that on, on social media somehow. So that that's like that is about the easiest way I know of to start blogging in a way that is creating a resource that has some real SEO value, because now you're gonna if you start to rank for questions like this, so you know, we just answered the question, What should I wear for an outdoor photoshoot? So people looking for that answer might be in your area, they probably will not be. So you have so so this person is probably not going to hire you. But if you start to rank for this question, you're building up your authority and Google. And it starts to make your it starts to make rankings higher for everything else. Awesome. So now you're building authority. Awesome.

Meredith: 27:19

Thank you. That's a good point. And this podcast was very, very

Meredith's Husband: 27:27

free. It was very free. The next one is going to be even freer. Wow. Oh,

Meredith: 27:35

I can't wait two days. I hope you all do too. Thank you guys for listening. Thank you, everybody. Spread the word.

Meredith's Husband: 27:43

See. I hope that helped. I hope that helped your website. I hope that helped your business. I hope that helped give you a little bit of confidence that SEO is not this convoluted, cryptic, crazy thing that nobody can understand. If you did like it and you found it helpful. Please share it with a couple of your colleagues. Tell them what you like or more importantly, tell me what you liked. Let me know interview. leave a review on Apple. Tell me what parts you like. And I'll try to do more of those parts. And again, thanks for listening.