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Analytics

Lesson 22 from: The Photographer's Guide to SEO and Online Marketing

Lawrence Chan

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Lesson Info

22. Analytics

Lesson Info

Analytics

The next thing I want to make sure in terms of other up other considerations in terms of application for seo would be google plus and even though it's a social networking itself we're not sure of its ramifications we're not using it or its implications for using it because it was influencing search results and it wasn't right now so how it works and we're not really sure I'm not really sure to be honest but it does show up in search result when it comes to go authorship as I mentioned me see if I can okay, we just talked about google authorship really quickly go to plus that google dot com forward slash authorship verify your website and your profile so that your photo can come up sometimes when you go on google and then you search for a key term and then you see a photo of a person and then it talks about the description of the person alright just google anything I'm sure you're gonna find some around the mines otherwise go back in the slides and re watching the rebroadcast and you ev...

en see my name like by lawrence chan one thousand three thirty three circles or whatever so make sure you're in it this is a form of social proof because imagine if you're talking to someone with a million circles obviously this person probably has something worthwhile to say so that in itself is a mental shortcut we rely heavily on mental shortcuts so get these people into your circle is even though if you may not use google plus is much next question is I mean next topic is how to handle large posts this is a really powerful topic if you want teo do so when it comes to optimization let's just imagine going back teo wedding photography now a lot of times you your bridegroom or a couple or whatever the case might get ready in one very fancy hotel and then get married in one very fancy church or venue or beech or resort and have certainly and a third very fancy place too. So if you have mandarin in the morning ritz carlton and afternoon and the pier you know at night what do you d'oh which one do you want the mice for? So this is one part where you can put you know um hoi and walter is wedding part one oi and walter's wedding part to remember this catchy title can be overwritten with seo plug in so this is how you spit posts up so you can optimize for mandarin writs and appear all at the same time or new you know beach wedding um bonfire and barbecue whatever you want to dio split them up don't try teo bunch them all into one the next thing is to reinforce internally betty point to the south earlier if you have remember at the end of the post it's also helpful to give a call to action where do you want todo? You can also do so in the beginning where you can go check out your home well there's engagement falls in the very beginning this sends a traffic back if you want to see other weddings at ritz carlton or if you want to see other boudoir for those using, you know news or lingerie click here and a whole list of them would come up if you want to see other cordis, click here and all the koreas would come up just reinforce internally because that pay drank sends it back now this was a very big concern for a lot people should you change owed posts right now there are three sections to this and I'll have to re slides should you change old posts title perma link and meta descriptions and how we had affected so in short um if you change the title and met a description good do so it's not going to really affect it if anything it's only going to help you when it comes to perm alike now that's a whole different story let's go into google right here, huh? Mitt time is this going to the world press right here if we were to go to this site or to this post what happens if I changed this portrait's to something else it becomes so this one so works that's a bad example erase okay so imagine if you want to change that word to another word how would that affect your your search engine optimization? It really depends on how your where prices set up some servers allow you to I have three oh one redirects or for one redirects which means that even if you change the post you are l let's just change brother port it's too um bridal preparation okay, since this is part one okay? We'll update it really depends on which server you're hosting it on if you were to refresh it now you know it's how it changes it all making redirects so even if I was still forces through it was still go back to preparation automatically this is called a redirect and we're press already adds it into its database into its into its database to redirect to this new post there is no there's nothing bad for this because all of your pay drink would also be redirected based on three or one redirects it tells google all of whatever was here is now here so please ignore this old think that's fine you can actually research three oh one redirect if you want it's uh it's an interesting concept but the only problem with changing your girls does that lets just imagine that you had fifty or hundred likes or five thousand likes on this or five hundred tweets all of that would be notified it would go back to zero so if you're really concerned about social presence and social media social proof that maybe you don't want to do it and that's when you you know you actually write a whole new post and sick oh remembering old times or something as a catchy title and then write a whole new post on alexis hotel we know wedding memories and then it's like oh, these are some of my highlights this is a toy walter and they're waiting for those linked to their this is of jamie and john linked to that alexis hotel way that way you don't lose the five thousand likes you have on there because it's a powerful social proof but you still get to maximize in terms of of parma links and let's go back to here lacking content that's the question yes, what about broken links like if you put that post somewhere else put it on pinterest or something like that, you know I mean if you put if you put the old link on on something else and then you wouldn't be able to find that again if you change the name or you change the thermal ink, you wouldn't people find it on pinterest it's gonna be really hard while you can if you really looked you know thoroughly, meticulously but it doesn't really matter anymore because even if it goes to the old think it's going to be redirected to the new one anyway so it won't make a difference okay great so the question of lacking content I really hope by now you have dry spells I don't know what to do in between follow shoots because I have like four months before my next one I really hope if you want to go to google instant you're not gonna have an issue you can constant repurpose old content and it's not like you you block every single photo from your weddings for your photo shoots or boudoir or pet or portrait you shoot thousands of photos and you post twenty remember minimum two but you post twenty thirty whatever the case you could repurpose you have dry spells take some of the content right about but make sure to personalize it user stories he's caused action things of that sort bounce rate very important bounce rate means that someone googles you they go on like oh this is in wales in before and leave so this happened to me once because I optimized for a wedding in santa monica which is a beach in california but apparently there's of monica's wedding I don't know who monica was but it was a very big popular term at the time maybe it's a celebrity apparently you too you know maybe okay that would make sense monica and chandler's wedding okay so I got a massive spike and search results from monica's wedding for my sonika monica post and then I just had a I mean it was literally just went up and then for one day and then they realize that that was not what they were looking for and it dropped the next day which means they removed me from the search for monica's wedding so don't optimize fora say aruba wedding and then it's not even the roomba it's like a desert that would lead people to it's like oh, this isn't more that once they leave they balance out which would lead teo google removing you from that search term so make sure that the content is relevant don't just create content for the sake of her as I mentioned earlier quality always have quality now when you're trying to optimize for other locations as you've never been to you can do so but make sure if you want teo it's up to you disclose that you have never been there but you'd like to shoot there but here are some cool phyllis from you know an equally cool area and have the call to action and then go from there and to me that's nothing wrong with that because I can there's a question about the legality of optimizing for places I've never been to I mean technically can I could write about cats but I don't own the cat right now is that illegal? No. So there's nothing wrong about talking about cats and I could talk about alexis hotel all I want you even having not been there so you don't want to trick people because ultimately lead to bounce rates, which will lead to the removal of your search. Paige I mean removal your page from search results. So next thing is what's not to dio the very first thing is keyword stuffing we mentioned that earlier, basically putting lots of the keywords in every section b a title permal ink content tags um met a description you don't want to repeat if you've noticed I never repeat the key words you know, in the same section, I did repeat the key words in the title perma link content and met a description, but I never really five times it just in the middle description, so don't stuff it with keywords. Linc farms is something else you want to avoid link farms where you have a page with one hundred links on there, so if you're trying to elevate each other and write about eachother and have links to each other, don't just say, okay guys, let's put a word, dr guerra google doc and put everybody's things and we just tag ourselves in it that doesn't work remember generate content it's very valuable and very important to have content you can talk about these photographers think I met them online and creative life these are some of the sites and do about five at a time that's it and then you guys could just pick five random ones and then just post on facebook you guys I did my share please linked to me so far or just do it you know organically and get through a publisher's forums um advertisement I mean I gave a whole list of them and everything you don't want to do is cloaking cloaking is when you add keywords into the background that's the same color of the background so you're sort of hiding the key words for your mat for instance you have a white background, your websites and under your posts or under the slide show you have all white texts or super light gray text to point worth nine invisible or the fun is to point size so you're the goal was to hide the text but you can stuff it with a lot of keywords like you know, italy, rome, france all that london you don't want to do that as well it has to be visible because google is not that dumb it will find out so cloaking don't do that next thing is a duplication of text when you have multiple websites it's difficult to constant creates new content aboutthe same thing so you don't want to say oh, since I wrote about alexis hotel here now I'm just going to copy and paste the same content, upload the same photos to my other sites and tried optimize all for alexis hotel dooper place duplication of content can negatively affect you google will know because it has hey scan and grasp and database of everything out there so if you're going to write about alexis hotel again using different use, different photos use different text yes, it takes time to write all over again but it will pay off in the future so don't duplicate those are the main things there are some more things out there but I would say these are the core of things you do you should do just do whatever I said mentioned earlier and you should be golden but one other thing I want to point out is here with some other places where if it offers haven't really tapped into is using youtube, youtube or a meal now vim you used to show a lot on google search results but not as much now it's mostly youtube remember google can alter the algorithm at any moment they want, so if you look at this photo, the title description tags same things as any search as the ceo optimization earlier title how many characters sixty including spaces description one sixty including spaces, same thing tags everything separate comma justice will justice how you would have tags in there were precise the reward press site and if we were to look at video exact same thing tile description tags and the photo that you use for the video is actually searchable too so make sure that it's usually linked to the title itself so it will show up that way the next two things I want to talk about our measurement you want to make sure that whatever effort that you're applying that you're able to measure the result of it so the very first one is go analytics now I used to praise analytics but in recent months I am pulling back I am a little hesitant to use and alex because there's some really, really cool features still now had they not changed you know how it works I was a full on demo but now I'm not just going there click on the links find out what each one does its not it's pretty self explanatory and then you can find out about gender um which computer people using which may or may not be very useful and then ultimately the ones that you should be very concerned about you're easier inbound traffic so social sites so social media we um we recommend me the wreck site zarek external sites which means that publishers or your friend's sight linking to you the traffic from their organic search which means that whatever organic keywords that google is driving to you and last the fourth one is directing traffic which is where people just punch it in loaded from a bookmark or click on your email about you and your email footer and now when every cent on email it's pasted there click that's considered direct link or direct inbound traffic so once you understand these four types that's how the pie of google analytics is broken down but from there you want to understand which key words are working in which you were the nut and that's the part where google has really change things where it changed to prentiss is not provided it doesn't tell you any more the whole goal of google is teo make you advertise to add words so then you can understand which keywords who we're working for you so then you can link it to your campaign in google analytics then you can mother which keyword they're working on which ones are not but that is in my opinion not very fair because how can you admit it's paid campaign versus organic campaigning and that's different so that's why I'm not doing a full on devil just go on there about ten links and then you can try it out there's one cool feature that I would definitely say test it it's called a real time data on there and you can see how many people are on your site at that very moment and from which state or country, if you're outside of the u s that one's really cool? If you're trying to do a campaign let's, just say, you're doing an e mail blast, and you want to see how many people will book you for a winter family session? Email blast no to your five hundred or thousands or twenty, you can see how many people actually click through right there and there, and see how many people were on the sites and interacting, and you can see where they are, what page is there on? And you can not to set up analytics on there, where you can see inbound, click through rate, where it breaks down all the links on the site, it tells you where they clicked through. So if I'm starting on one page, I can click here and I'll go to my about paige, it would say, like, sixty percent click to your bell page or ten percent clicked your contact page, but this one is a very valuable one. Make sure to install it. Google web master tools so it's, good without calm ford stash what masters ford stash tools since this course is really about the marketing of it, I'm not going to go into the details of how of how to install it, because that's ah there's a whole youtube videos on that site that show you shows you from google, how to install google analytics, and with massive chul's it's pretty simple and pretty direct and straightforward. They're about six things on there. It is the most important when you want to know, or most important ones are broken links. You don't want to have broken links on your site. Check on their google web master tools will tell you which broke unless you have a second one is to tell you, or to find out inbound links because you want to know who it is, linking to you and that's one way you can do so you khun down with the whole excel spreadsheet, and I'll tell you every single link has there's linking to recite even some pages. Another one is, um, the main search, the main queried keywords so it's not exactly as as accurate as google analytics back then, but it's better than now, because we don't have, you know, google and alex anymore. Google, where master tools at these gives you a snippet of what keywords are being searched for your sights.

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Ratings and Reviews

Daniel
 

Lawrence has done a great job in trying to simplify SEO and marketing in such a short course. He's obviously a clever and well clued up guy, and he comes across well if a little nervous and bumbling at times. The course itself felt quite fragmented over the first day. At times I almost felt like we were going through a business studies book, but in a disjointed way not knowing what direction we'd go next. Having said that the course is worth watching as there are a few nuggets of gold in there and it's a great general overview of both marketing and SEO which is an incredibly deep topic. There were a few questionable area for me over both days, but I've studied SEO reasonably well, for example he told a viewer to keep her old site and not move to a new domain as she'd lose all page rank. In actual fact the lady could quite easily move from one domain to another, and using a 301 permanent redirect she could transfer between 90-99% of her old pages link juice (ranking power). I understand going through deeper areas like this might have put fear in some people, but I think a few areas could have been better presented or explained. Would I recommend this course, yes I would. Although I saw faults in it, the amount of information on offer is pretty extensive and will help most photographers who run their own websites. SEO can go so much further than has been explained here, but for most small businesses this will be a great starting block to getting your business out there and ranking higher than you ever did before! Note to all: Anyone using wordpress please make sure you get it hosted on a decent host. After hosting my wordpress site on bluehost, and getting incredibly slow load times, I researched extensively to find out that the host plays a really important part in this area and going cheap isn't a great option. If your pages load slow you run the risk of losing a lot of potential customers and hits, so do yourself a favour and pay a little more for a decent host.

a Creativelive Student
 

I have been looking for a course like this to learn more about Online Marketing and SEO and randomly came across this course playing live. I usually decide within the first 5 minutes whether I want to continue learning, and Lawrence Chan definitely had me hooked. I wanted to continue watching his engaging presentation and listen to what he had to say. His quirky and nervous disposition was handled well as he broke into a smile or laughter from time to time, which made him funny yet relatable. Like everyone else, I was impressed by his thorough knowledge of Online Marketing and liked the examples he gave as he progressed with the course. Hopefully Lawrence Chan can be featured in Creative Live again!

Corrie W
 

Brilliant ! Great content, well organized, practicable, understandable. I felt like I had a good handle on SEO and really thought I’d be getting a refresher. I am amazed at the new things I learned. Great resource that I’ll go back to often. Well done!

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