Corey Potter is an expert when it comes to SEO and helps teach SEO for Photographers. Corey has a refreshing take on SEO which is to stop blogging just to blog and start blogging with intention. In this interview, we talk about how you can blog less and grow your website traffic.

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In This Episode You'll Learn:

• The importance of blogging and SEO is fr photographers

• What most photographers get wrong about blogging

• How to brainstorm ideas to blog about and then narrow them down to pick a winner

• What is a featured snippet and how you can utilize them to gain tons of website traffic

• How many images you should be putting in each blog post

• How to promote your blog post once its been published

• The difference between a page and a post

• How to get google to tell you what people search for

• 2 of the best paid tools and several free tools to use to get started

• The one blog family photographers need to write today

• How to follow up with content you have previously published

Resources:

• SEO for Photographers Fuel Your Photos website

• Fuel your photos FB group

• GTMetrix

Did you enjoy this episode? Check out more recent interviews with other great guests!

Full Episode Transcription:

Disclaimer: The transcript was transcribed electronically by Temi.com and may contain errors that do not reflect accurately what the speaker said. Because of this, please do not quote this automated transcript.

Raymond: 00:00:00 Today's guest is Corey Potter, who if you've been listening for a long time, this is his third time returning. So in two more times you get a jacket, congratulate jumps. Yeah. So back in episode 48, Corey came on and then again in one 32 Corey is a wedding photographer turned SEO expert for photographers. So today we're going to be talking about a lot, but specifically creating content and even potentially 10 Xing your website's traffic, which is always great stuff. So Corey, welcome back to the podcast.

Corey Potter: 00:00:33 Thanks for having me again. I'm, I'm really interested to hear about this jacket. I'm going to get into more, more. Yeah,

Raymond: 00:00:38 Yeah. You know what you would there's, we got, we got you. You, you've been on here three times. Mark Silber has been on three times as well. So now it's a race. It's a race to see who gets the jacket first and then I'll have to come up with something real special for that. That's funny. But before we start talking about SEO, before we start talking about creating content, for those who are new listeners to the podcast, there's always new listeners. Why don't you let them know how you kind of got, how you went from photographer to SEO expert where you are today?

Corey Potter: 00:01:11 Yeah, well, basically it came down to having kids and we were photographers. My wife and I worked together as wedding photographers. We were doing about 40 weddings a year at, at our peak. And we did that for about three years in a row. And then we started having kids. We have three now and they're all about less than 20 months apart. And so it just became one of those things where Ashley had less time to help with the business and I didn't really want to be doing 40 weddings basically by myself. And I had some experience in website development and search engine optimization before we started doing wedding photography, which is one of the reasons we grew pretty quickly as photographers and made that business work so well. And so I was like, you know, there's a lot of bad information in the photography space about search engine optimization.

Corey Potter: 00:01:59 There's a lot of stuff that's misleading or confusing. So I basically wanted to create a safe space where people could get answers that were tested or proven or at least, you know, filtered through an expert who's not going to try to sugarcoat it or trick them into buying something or whatever. And so that's when I created Julia photos and it has grown since then. I think we're up to about 17,000 people in the Facebook group. And it's just, yeah, it's been really fun to be able to talk about all things websites, online marketing and especially SDO. And yeah, I really hope it's a place where people can just feel comfortable asking questions, but also be sure that they're getting a a reliable answer or at least answered that says, I'm not sure, but here's what you could think about. That's kind of what I aim for.

Raymond: 00:02:47 Yeah. That's always so important that, that, that, I don't know. You know, there's so many times where as photographers it's like we're kinda, we kind of start off like with a camera and then we think, we always think just to that next step. It's not 10 steps ahead. It's always just that next step. And then it's always that next step that is so scary that you don't know what you don't know. And there's always so many questions and knowing that you don't know this really went in a different direction than where I was hoping to. But yeah, I mean just, I can attest to the few feel your photos group is a, it's packed full of people always asking great questions, things that I wouldn't have thought of. And it's really cool to see what you've done with the place to be that that figure of authority when it comes to building websites and helping photographers because the two are kind of all over the place. You know, it just cause you're going to the camera doesn't mean that you're always like a technologically savvy and there's just so many different website platforms that you can, and I know that we've talked about this before, the difference between WordPress and SEO and obviously how WordPress is far superior to anything else available on the end.

Corey Potter: 00:03:55 Maybe, maybe things are changing and not, not far superior, but yeah, there's, there's a lot of benefits to WordPress, especially for content creation, which is what we're going to be talking about.

Raymond: 00:04:05 Well, nice segue. That's what I was trying to get to this entire time. Sorry, I thought you were going to continue talking there. So I had a sip of water. So let's talk about them. The whole content creation thing, because creating content is not only what we do as photographers, but according to you, it's one of the best ways to get found as a photographer as well. Is that right?

Corey Potter: 00:04:29 Yeah. I feel like these days, if you really want to have a shot at getting lots of organic traffic, just people constantly coming to you as a photographer to hire you for your services and you want to be found through Google and even through other organic traffic methods, likely social media and things where people are just finding you, you really need to have some sort of strategy to become an authority because if you're just another photographer, unfortunately there's just too many photographers out there right now for you to be average and expect for people to be finding you and looking for you as the option, the best choice. So to me, I think that content creation is a great, a great way to kind of have a strategy for how you're going to set yourself up as an authority. You're going to be looking for topics that resonate with your target market so that you can catch them at different points of their journey to booking a photographer.

Corey Potter: 00:05:30 And whenever you do that, you become trusted. You they start to see you as someone who really knows what you're talking about. Someone they want to spend money on, spend time with and so that makes it really easy for them to make a decision to contact you or hire you. So that's why, you know, sure. It's great if you want to rank for things like Indianapolis wedding photographer, that's a great thing to rank for. But I mean on a lot of our sites we're seeing 10 times traffic, maybe more than that from other long tail terms. When I say long tail, it's talking about whenever you look at any graph of search, you're going to see that a few terms make up what's called the head. Basically if you're, if you're looking, I can't really do it on camera so you'll be able to see it.

Corey Potter: 00:06:15 But basically there's, there's a, yeah, a graph where a small percentage of terms get the majority of search and you've got people who go to Google and type in Facebook or something like that for weather, you know, hotels like these things are getting huge amounts of search. Whereas once you get farther and farther down into like more specific things, this is called the long tail. But there's millions and millions of different searches that only get a handful of searches per month. And so that's what's the long tail. So as we get into that more specific type of query, then we have an opportunity to really demonstrate a authority on a specific topic that someone might be interested in, especially our target audience.

Raymond: 00:06:58 So you mentioned that something that was, that I, that I kind of picked up then that I thought was interesting, which was, you know, which was creating content for our ideal customer and figuring out where it is that they are on their journey and then figuring out how it is that we can help them. So this all comes down to just brainstorming ideas, right? I know that the majority of photographers just blog, you know, Sam and Sarah's engagement session or whatever, or, or Mark and Jane's wedding, and then that's it. So it's just these sessions that they had. So does that really help our ideal client wherever they're at in their journey, or should we be thinking of other topics? Yeah, I think this is

Corey Potter: 00:07:40 A really timely topic right now because it is, it's tricky for years now people, especially in the wedding photography space, you've had people teaching to target a wedding venue. If you, if you blog a wedding, then you, you target the venue name and your title and make sure you get the keywords, like use the venue and write a little bit about the venue in that blog post. But mostly people are posting the wedding and then telling the story of the couple and hoping that it ranks for the venue. And the thing is that strategy can even still work today. Especially in a couple of scenarios. One is if that venue that you're trying to rank for doesn't have much competition. So if it's either a brand new venue or just one that not very many people have blogged about, you could still rank because you would be one of the only pieces of content that is really targeting that venue.

Corey Potter: 00:08:32 And when I say venue again, this can apply to any other thing as well. It doesn't have to be wedding photography, but you know, we'll just for now we'll stick with that example. The other situation is if you are a significant authority already, like let's say that you have been featured on all of the major wedding blogs you've been, you know, maybe you had something go viral, it's been on Buzzfeed and board Panda and Huffington posts and all these different places that's going to lend you significant authority. Like that's those links from all these high authority websites. Send signals to Google that say you can trust this site because all of these other sites that we know are trustworthy, trust the site enough to link to them. Because of that you have high authority and then by lit J just putting a venue name and a title, you may be able to rank higher than all these other people who are doing that because you're kind of swinging your authority.

Corey Potter: 00:09:22 And that's like a force multiplier when it comes to her ranking. And so those situations, maybe you still want to just use the strategy of, Hey, I just photographed a wedding where a session, I'm gonna blog it and I'm gonna try to rank for this venue or this park where you know, this location, this other city near me or whatever, and it could potentially still work. But the truth is in most cases they're going to be 1520 even 50 other photographers who have already blogged something very similar to that and yours. If you just do that same strategy, it's probably not enough to stand out. And so that's why we really need to be looking into what are other topics where we can not just try to rank for a a term by kind of being lazy and throwing up some photos from a session and like trying to add keywords.

Corey Potter: 00:10:12 Like people come to me all the time, they're like, where do I put my keywords? Can I just like put them in the meta keywords field and the title and then like use it five times in the post, then I'm good. I'm like, that's not, that's not what search is all about these days. Now you need to actually cover the topic that the keyword represents. So if I search for a wedding venue, so let's say I searched for laced house weddings, lace houses, a venue here in my city. If I search for that, what do I want to know? I probably want to know the capacity, how many guests can fit there. I wanna know about parking and I want to know about where my guests can stay nearby. I want to know about the caterers that you can use or what other restrictions there might be.

Corey Potter: 00:10:52 Where can I set up my ceremony? Where can I, what does the reception look like at this venue? I want to know all of those things. And so something that's going to rank well in 2020 and beyond is going to cover all of those different intents that someone has when they searched for lace house weddings. And so if your posts can do that, you have a really great shot, especially if no one else is doing that. If someone else is doing that, you need to look at their posts and say, where are the holes? How can I make this better? What can I do that's different? And so those are the things that you need to be thinking about when it comes to those kinds of regular blog posts, strategies that people have been doing for a long time. It's basically, how can I flip this now to, instead of just tacking on something to a session, how can I come up with a topic that I'm going to really truly cover in depth?

Raymond: 00:11:40 Okay. So I mean that, that's great when it comes to thinking about things like a venue or, you know, a park. And it's funny that you said, you know, there may be 15 or 20 other photographers who are writing the same blog about that same location. I think on my website I have like 15 blogs trying to rank for the exact same place because I go there very often to shoot engagement sessions. So I'm probably just shooting myself in the foot there. But that's cannibalization, by the way. Keyword cannibalization. Yeah. Posts.

Corey Potter: 00:12:09 Yeah, they're, they're eating each other, they're trying, they're competing for the same keyword. And so it confuses Google. They're like, wait, okay, we're probably only gonna show one result from this domain for that keyword. We're not sure which one you want us to show because you're basically telling us you want us to show all of these. So at some point, like the algorithm may be just like picking, like they're just like, I'm gonna pick this one. I'll try it, see what works. It's not really random, but essentially it works out to be random if you're not really controlling what they want, what you want them to see.

Raymond: 00:12:37 Okay. So let's talk about that for a moment because oftentimes I do go to the same locations and I'll shoot engagement sessions at the same spots or the same wedding venues. What should I be doing in those situations? Should I just be creating one huge blog of all the photos that I took at that one location with, with helpful information?

Corey Potter: 00:12:55 Yeah, pretty much. So. Essentially what I had described a second ago about the venue where you cover all of those questions that people would typically want to know. Let's take it to the example of an engagement session. So here in Columbia we have there's, I guess one of the features of Columbia club is kind of a Borg city. I hate to say that, but it's this capital. So like there's a lot of government and stuff like that here. But we have some three rivers that, well, two rivers that run together and make another river it right in the center of downtown. And so that's kind of a, a central theme. And a lot of people want to do photos there. So if I were constantly doing, you know, river sessions, there's, there's basically two or three locations at the river, I would basically create some sort of guide to engagement sessions on the rivers in Columbia.

Corey Potter: 00:13:43 I would come up with a better way of saying that, but some, something along those lines. And basically that post is going to show you your, all the options. If you want to do photos by the river. Here's some locations that we can like, here's where we would park. This is what this would look like. And I would show like two or three sessions that I've done in that spot and then I would move to the next spot. And I would say, you know, Columbia riverfront park, Casey, what are moving river walk? And I would, I would basically put these and then I would take all the different sessions that I've done and pick two or three of the best photos, kind of put that underneath that, that subheading. So you're creating one resource that you can then add to as you do more and more sessions at that location.

Corey Potter: 00:14:18 Maybe later you do a session there in, in July and you realize that it's 110 degrees and the mosquitoes are terrible. And it's like, you know, if you're going to do July, make sure you do sunrise or like, and you show an example of sunrise at that location because now you've got more experience. Everything that you do, every insight that you gained by going to that location. Again, come back and add it to that post, it makes it an even more valuable resource. Same thing with wedding venues. You're going to create one post for a wedding venue or one page. It doesn't matter if it's a page or a post and then every time that you go back to that venue you're going to gain some new insights that you might want to add back into that post. You're also going to get some new photos that you might want to add back into that post or page. And so as you do that, you can create supporting pages that are separate for a different topic. We won't get into all that cause it gets kind of complicated.

Raymond: 00:15:06 The main thing that you literally teach like day long classes on this stuff. So in this hour, I appreciate that.

Corey Potter: 00:15:12 Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, that, I mean that's the main, the main strategy is come up with one page that you want to rank for a particular topic and then you reinforce that as you move forward.

Raymond: 00:15:22 Okay. Okay. So that's cool. I think that we got, not that we haven't covered when it comes to location-based topics, but there's, there's so much more out there that can help our, you know, our ideal clients. So where should we or where would we be getting inspiration for the types of posts that would be helpful for, for our clients?

Corey Potter: 00:15:47 Yeah. So there's a couple of things. First of all, I will tell you, you should trust your intuition more than you think you probably should as a photographer. You have worked with clients hopefully, or worked with people who are you know, similar to the new people that you want to attract and you already have questions that, you know they're going to ask. People have already asked you questions, look back through your emails, look back through, you know, think back through the consultations you've had, what have been the common concerns hesitations, big questions you want to, again, use your intuition there and make sure that, like, that's a good place for you to start with. Thinking about topics outside of that, there's a lot of different sources. But what I like to think about is the 80 20 rule, there's going to be, you know, 20% of topics that are going to drive 80% of the traffic.

Corey Potter: 00:16:38 And so I want to try to pick winners and there's a couple of blades you can, you can predict what topics are going to be winners. And so the first thing I would probably do is some competitive analysis. Maybe that's the second thing. Let me go to the first thing being an easiest thing. Okay? Okay. The easiest thing is I'm going to take some of these topics that I've brainstormed intuitively and I'm going to go to Google and I'm going to start typing them in. And as I do that, I'm going to look for features on that SERP surface search engine, result page. So call them SERP features. So if I say that in the future, that's what I'm talking about. Basically in this case we're probably looking for people also ask or searches related to. And those two in particular are going to be really helpful in thinking about what is it really that people want to know about this topic.

Corey Potter: 00:17:25 Google's already determined that from previous searches or from things that they know about this topic. So that's a really good place to start. Second is competitive analysis and to be honest, the way I do this, I use paid tools, so I'm going to be using SEMrush or H refs. Both of those tools are excellent for doing this kind of thing. However, you can use free tools. One of them is Uber. Now Uber suggest just recently, like two weeks ago, moved to a, a freemium model. So now you can still get some results for free. And then I think it's $10 a month to get the premium. Whereas something like SEMrush or Atrius is like $100 per month minimum. So it's still a good tool. Uber suggest it's not going to have as great data as the others, but it's still a great place to start.

Corey Potter: 00:18:12 Basically what you would do is you'll take a competitor, either in your market or in another market. It doesn't really matter. Someone who does something similar to what you do, drop their URL into one of these tools and it's going to have a place for you to look at top pages. And when you look at top pages, you're going to see what pages on their site are currently driving traffic for them. And that's how you know it's a proven topic. It's working, it's getting them. In a lot of cases, you'll see it's getting 50% of their traffic comes from one post and you can say, okay, let me look at that post. And you look at it and you say, is this the best possible piece of content for this topic? Could it be better? Could I improve it? If not, if they've already got like the best thing and it's researched so well, maybe you don't want to mess with it. I mean, unless they're in another market and you could do something different in your market, then go for it. But then you'll often very often find that people are getting hundreds and hundreds of clicks per month on sub par content, like just some bad content.

Corey Potter: 00:19:13 So yeah, basically you can just come in and write something even a little bit better and have a really good chance of ranking. I've come across those quite a few times. Do you have any suggestions on what like where we could get started if somebody is listening right now, maybe they've been shooting for a while and looking to book maybe a few more family sessions or weddings. Like what is a topic that a typically some people are searching for but it just doesn't have a lot of content being written for it? So family sessions and weddings. One of the best topics that I've come across consistently, almost every market is locations, locations to do a family session, locations to do an engagement session. Weddings would basically be venues. If you can cover any of those, you'll be surprised. Like, even if someone has already taken my advice or someone else's advice or whatever and done something like this, you'd be surprised how many of them are like, like right now in Columbia, I have a post ranking on page one for Columbia wedding venues.

Corey Potter: 00:20:12 It's just seven wedding venues. There's at least 30 or more venues in Columbia. You could come in and double or triple the amount of venues that I have written and then make it even more comprehensive, better text about each one, better contact information, why each one you could probably outrank me in a matter of months, maybe one or two months you'd start outbreaking my post. That's how easy it would be. And you'll, you'll find that to be the case across the board right now on my wedding photography site that I still keep up as kind of like mostly experimental things I have places to do, engage from in Columbia and wedding venues in Columbia. Those are my top two posts that drive 70% or more of the traffic. So those are the, those location type posts are where I would start. Like, if I just had to give you a specific thing outside of that though, a fresh specific tip for families is to think about not even photos, photo related topics, but I want you to think about like things to do with your family in your city and basically thinking about what other sites would talk about that.

Corey Potter: 00:21:16 So in my city I might go to, there's a couple of different options. One's like a moms blog that talks about like things to do with kids. And then there's another one that is like our tourism site that tells you like the things to do with the family or as a couple or whatever. I would go to those sites and I would run those through something like Uber suggest or SEMrush and I would say, what are the top posts? So like I'd done, I've done that several times. And once, one of the things that always surprises me is like splash pads. Like that's a huge thing. So like playgrounds in Columbia. Swimming pools, like things like this are, you know, people want to know where are those things I can take my kids to. Another one was like free kids.

Corey Potter: 00:21:58 Our kids eat free restaurants in Columbia so there's just a list of like all the different days that different restaurants did different deals. That thing gets so much traffic. It's not on my site, it's on someone else's site. But that's a topic I would copy because think about it if their family and they have kids and they're searching for things to do as a family, then likely if you had a piece of content that showed them that I even whenever I do those I'll also kind of like weave in. Maybe not though like restaurant with like splash pads. I'll be like want to do a photo session at splash pad or something like that. And then I'll put that as one of the subjects or subtopics of that that post. And it's a great way to kind of segue into Hey, by the way also hire me.

Raymond: 00:22:39 Yeah, that's, that was going to be my next question cause I'm sure that a lot of people were thinking like, okay, wait, I'm a photographer. Why am I writing articles about playgrounds or places to eat in my city? But you know, I mean that totally makes sense. And on top of that, I don't know if I'm totally wrong here, you can, you can tell me, but you know, we have the ability to pixel people through Facebook exactly. That you can then even retarget to them that that they can do some sort of shoot or something with you.

Corey Potter: 00:23:06 Exactly where I was going to go with that next is you have that you've captured them once. So not only do you have brand awareness with them, but also you have the ability to catch, catch them with a Facebook pixel. You know, retarget that way. Again, it's just one of those things where they, if they saw you here and you like gave them some really good advice and then next year they want a family session and they happen to see your name again. Is such a better chance of them trusting you and wanting to hire you because you've already given them something in the past.

Raymond: 00:23:34 Yeah, absolutely. Oh that was cool. That was cool. I I don't shoot family sessions obviously, but a part of me just wants to write that blog just to see how it would would work out cause that's just a great idea. That's a great idea. So,

Corey Potter: 00:23:47 So let me get, let me give you another really quick example. So in my blogging course, I wanted to like do an example of exactly how to use my process. And I'm like, so to teach this, I'm actually gonna just do it on a post just to see if it works. Right. And so I went through, I was pretending I was a maternity photographer and I went through the brainstorming process, like the same stuff I'm talking about right now. Intuitive ideas went through competitive sites and there's a few other methods that I use for brainstorming, but I came up with like 20 topics or something like that and then I narrowed them down and I ended up writing date night ideas for pregnant couples. Ah, okay. So you know, if I'm a returning the photographer, it's a great, you've got to think like that's a something they might be thinking about. Let me see. Yeah, I have that. I think I have it pulled up on my screen right now. I have I don't, I don't have it pulled up. I think there was 230 clicks since I published that in January. It's now March, beginning of March two months. It's had 230 clicks, which is really good for a brand new post and trending up.

Raymond: 00:24:57 No ever. They're the only people who are going to click on that are going to be, you know, pregnant women, like the people who it is that you're searching for.

Corey Potter: 00:25:05 And not only that, but they're likely to be, if they're looking for like dating their partner, then they're probably the kind of client that I'm looking for who values memories and connections. And I put like two of the different items. One was like one of the date night ideas is do a maternity session. Right. And there was another one in there that was something related to photography. I can't remember what it was, but I mean that's the idea is like now that's, I imagine in six months that'll probably be getting 500 clicks a month at least from that one post.

Raymond: 00:25:37 So at that point, so I love that idea. That is such a cool idea because once again, it's kind of outside of the box. How did you, how did you narrow down that that was going to be the idea that you were going to to use? I know that you talked about paid tools, but what if, what if we don't have access to paid tools? What, what would, what would, what would, what would I do? What would I do in that situation?

Corey Potter: 00:26:00 Yeah, it's tricky. It's so hard not to use paid tools for this kind of thing. It's one of those things like if you're really serious about a content strategy, I would recommend at least paying for some sort of tool for at least some period of time, even as one month. And you just say, I'm going to create my strategy in this month for the next six months. It's worth $100 to me to go subscribe to some rest for a month. I would probably do that. But if I didn't have that, here's, here's kind of the process that I went through to narrow it down. First of all, some of the topics that I came up with were very local, locally based and those could be really good. So I would say in general, you want to build local relevance on your site and you want to cover other local entities.

Corey Potter: 00:26:40 So for example, one of the topics that really high on my list was prenatal massage in Dallas was the example I was using there. Apparently there were like 400 people a month searching for that. And that seems like a great place to connect with my target audience. And so there were probably three or four that were like that. I think one was something about yoga for pregnant women and their two or three others that were similar to that. I love those because whenever I do a, an article about a prenatal massage and I can cover let's say three or four different places that offer that each of those a massage, I don't know what you call these people. Oh, let's say they're a misuses, misuse, whatever. Each of these people is an entity probably on the knowledge graph. So they probably have a Google my business setup.

Corey Potter: 00:27:30 They, it Googled, knows that they're associated with that city. And so as I cover these different entities in my city, my site becomes more tied to the city. And so it builds local relevance. That's one way that it builds local relevance. So those kinds of topics, I love if I can find them. I didn't choose those in my case because in my example, I was doing Dallas maternity photographer and my site is in Columbia. And I wanted to like publish something for real that I could like track on my own site. So it didn't make sense to do the Dallas stuff in Columbia. But outside of that, I looked at two other things, or at least one other thing that's relevant here. So the other thing is can I possibly rank for this? And so I had a couple of topics that were well, one was like a birth plan checklist and I looked at the, I did that search on Google.

Corey Potter: 00:28:22 This is, here's the thing, pro tip for you, Google searches, that's the best tool you can use for SEO. Like go do the searches and remember to do them from desktop and from mobile and look for clues like Google is gonna tell you what they're looking for by just showing you these results, right? They're going to show you, here's the stuff we think should rank create something better than this. Or they're going to say, here's the stuff we have to rank, but you know, there's something missing. Fill that hole. So that's where intuition comes into it. But just doing these Google searches, looking at the people also ask related searches, SERP features, all these things. That's huge clue. All right, so back to can I rank in this case for a birth plan checklist, I was up against parents.com and Oh you know like every site, every site you could think of that has to do with like birth or parenting or babies had some sort of checklist or something.

Corey Potter: 00:29:17 And I'm like all these to have domain authorities in the eighties and nineties it's another words extremely hard to rank against these it can be done, can be done depending on the content. You could even be a little guy or girl and come in and you know, rank against these big companies. But in my case, I knew that would be a longterm play on this particular topic. And if I to do that, I probably needed to be thinking, okay, in 12 months, how would I rank against these people? What, what do I need to do to start that ball rolling? And I didn't want to do that for an example for my course. So I was like, I would probably do that in real life. I'd probably say, okay, I'm going to publish this at six months, so I'm gonna start working on this a little bit every month. And then when it republished it, I think it's gonna take 12 months. And so I just know that some topics there, huge opportunity. I mean I think that had 20,000 searches a month or something like that.

Raymond: 00:30:08 Oh my gosh, I'm actually surprised that it's that low. I would assume that it would be closer to like

Corey Potter: 00:30:13 A million, just tiny. It was between 20 and 50 it's per, it was relatively low, but it was still, it's very specific and it's something where if you could rank for it, it's a big opportunity to get traffic, but it's not something that's gonna happen quickly. So I like to target those smaller topics. The one that I landed on there with, you know, date night ideas, it was, that's still relatively high search volume, not super high. It was, you know, in the couple of thousand range or something like that. And the T, the ones that already existed, there was only maybe two or three pieces of content that really nailed it as I was like, well even if I can be four or five if I can on the first page, that's still a win. And interestingly enough, I ended up within a couple of weeks making it onto page one for some of the main keywords that are related to that topic, but I was in like position seven eight and nine bottom of page one but I had taken so much time to like really craft a really strong title and meta description that I was still getting 8% click through rates on like bottom of the first page.

Corey Potter: 00:31:15 Wow, that's impressive. It's actually really high for pop bottom of the first page you expect like maybe max one to 3% in position seven through nine or seven through 10 so anyway, getting 8% click through. That's kind of like the same thing as ranking in position three but from position eight. So sometimes if you take the time to like really be intentional, if you really start to get inside the mind of that target audience and you think, what do they really, really want to know and how can I make this extremely compelling to that exact person? If you do a better job of that than someone else who's already ranking often, you can still get the clicks.

Raymond: 00:31:50 So then, okay, perfect. Let's get, let's go a little bit deeper into that. There's obviously, you know, you spend that time, you kind of use your intuition to figure out, to get into the mind and figuring out what it is that they're trying to to learn and what it is that they want. But for the overall structure of a blog post, you know, is there a basic blog structure that we need to create that will help Google like our information more than anybody else? Cause I'm sure that it's not like a, a reference document, you know, they don't want like a 20 page word document. I don't know, maybe they do.

Corey Potter: 00:32:25 Am I wrong to do sometimes? I mean, sometimes I do. If you think about it, if you see a Wikipedia article ranking for the term that you're trying to rank for, they probably want that 20 page reference document. Sure, sure. If you don't see a Wikipedia article, then probably not necessarily. As far as formatting goes, I think that it is really important to start to really understand headings as a way to indication structure, right? So if you've ever taken any high school or college classes about writing, you probably learn about outlines and how to use them. You know, you have your main topic and then your, you might have subtopics depending on the kind of paper you're writing, but yeah, the idea here is headings can show structure and we want to make it easy for a search engine or a visitor to just skim and be able to understand the content on the page.

Corey Potter: 00:33:26 And so what we typically want to do is use what's called an [inaudible], or it's a heading one tag to indicate the main topic of the page. All right. So if your topic is, you know, date night ideas for pregnant couples, my H one might be literally date night ideas for pregnant couples. That's, that represents the topic that's going to be on this page. But then I'm going to have you know, multiple subheadings that are going to break that down even further. And that's going to be based on the research that you've done to see, like what do people want to know, what are common entities that I find on other websites ranking for this? What are things that are being bolded as you know very closely related when you do that Google search. So then I'll like know these things. So like in my example, I think some of my [inaudible] were romantic date night ideas and then I had like fun date night ideas and nothing.

Corey Potter: 00:34:16 I had one that was like date night ideas for third trimester and then I had one that was, you know I don't remember, but I had several others that were kind of, those are age two to their subtopics there, their topics in and of themselves that don't necessarily need to be a separate post because they're related to this topic very strongly. And then I had H threes underneath that that were the actual idea. So under romantic date idea might have, you know, you know, go on a walk and go to a movie, I don't know, something, whatever. But, but those were also very intentional. Right. So I looked at other other websites that had these kinds of lists. And I said, if all of the lists say actually miniature golf was like on almost every single one of these lists, which I was kind of surprised by, I just can't imagine that being like a pregnant thing I would really want to do anyway.

Raymond: 00:35:05 No, I think you're right. I think it just simply, it's like, you know, you're like swinging and I would think the same thing, but I think it's just that, you know, when you think of like, well what is there to do outside, walk around the city or whatever. That's just kind of what comes up. Anyway, so I saw that real quick. Did you put it on your blog? I don't think I did that one, but like everything else that I felt like, yeah,

Corey Potter: 00:35:26 Nick was on every single list. Right? And so I put that one on my blog. And so that would be an age three, like go on a picnic if that's under the H to romantic date night I guess, or outside Datanize whichever one it fits under. And so as you look back at this, Google is able to really clearly understand which of these ideas fits under which category. And it just all, all that makes sense. The topics relate to each other in a logical way. There's actually, here's another pro tip for you. There's a Chrome extension if you're using Google Chrome or any chromium browser. So brave or there are several others. I think it may be on Firefox as well, but the Chrome extension is called headings map. Headings map. Yep. And it's, I know this podcast so I can't like show you what it looks like.

Corey Potter: 00:36:09 But the idea is if you click it on any page, it's going to show you your headings in hierarchial structure order. So it's going to show you like here's Rachel and here's the issues nested under that. Here's the age threes nested under that age too. And if you get that right. Okay. So I don't want to, I talked about this for five minutes now. I don't want to like overemphasize headings to the point where people think headings are the thing that makes Google rank you. It's not quite like that. It's more that headings help you organize content logically and logically organized content ranks well. Okay. And so whether or not they had a heading tags on them, if they were all just like bolded at the same size font, but it was still easy to skim and like things are next to the things that they're related to Google. Probably still gonna figure that out just fine. But headings are what's you're supposed to use if you, if you can't. And that, that being said, I guess that like, it's a good way to talk about featured snippets, which is kind of a huge opportunity in current SEO. And then in the 2020 landscape right now, Google is trying to answer questions faster. And so you'll often do a search and you'll find that it's just a question and answer at the very top in a snippet.

Raymond: 00:37:25 Yeah. In fact, it's funny that you mentioned this because I was going to ask this exact question because to a follow up to our interview that we did last year, you mentioned writing a location-based, you know, engagement session blog. And that's what I did. I wrote a blog called the 24 best places to take engagement photos in Indianapolis. And within just a day or two, whenever somebody would type that in, you know, where to take engagement photos in Indianapolis, my results would come up. But not my blog, not the blog link, but, but a list of, you know, the canal, you know, Coxall garden, all these places. And because of that, I mean, as you said, the amount of traffic that came to my Mo, my website was insane. So my followup question to you today was going to be, I guess after you describe more about what the featured snippets are, but how do I do more of those?

Corey Potter: 00:38:15 Yeah, for sure. So this will all answer it all at the same time. Basically the best, again, the best tool is to search Google and start understanding where you're going to see featured snippets and what kinds of features to put, you're going to see there's more than one type of feature snippet. There's also what's technically called the search gallery. If you Google search, like Google search gallery, they're going to show you a whole bunch of different SERP features that are not featured snippets. Featured snippets are algorithmic. They're, they're, they're generated algorithmically. So that means there's no schema markup you can add. There's no very specific thing that triggers it. It's like Google is going to try to figure it out and put the best thing they think their their algorithm is just smart enough to understand how to generate these and which type to generate and they're going to do their best, which means there's not a great way to like definitely predict how you're going to get it with some of the other search gallery features.

Corey Potter: 00:39:13 And it's like you use the schema markup. If we see it, we'll try to use it. It's not like that with feature snippets. So featured snippets are typically going to be working with one of a few kinds. One is a question and answer. And so that's whenever Google believes that the query can be answered simply with a paragraph or a sentence. And so if they find a site or a page on the web that, that has almost the exact query as a question and then a sentence or a paragraph, I think you have about 200 characters or so. I think I'm saying that the top of my head, it might be wrong, but it's a short answer. If you have an answer right after that question and it seems that it adequately answers the question, you'll likely get a featured snippet. That's a question answer.

Corey Potter: 00:39:56 And one of the great things to do is look and see where are these already appearing and how can I put something on my page that's very relevant for this topic that also would allow me to grab that featured snippet because sometimes your page is more relevant than the one that has the feature snippet, but you just didn't put that question and answer like they did. So maybe copy what they're doing or something very similar. You'll also see a lot of what you just described, the location or entity based featured snippets. Now these can appear in a couple of different forms. Sometimes you'll see them where the entities show up as little boxes across the top where they'll like have each of the places that you mentioned in your article. That's whenever places within your blog post match up with entities on the knowledge graph.

Corey Potter: 00:40:39 Knowledge graph is just school's way of mapping entities to locations and other entities. And so when they already have information about these entities, they'll sometimes drop in like the official photo from that location that they use and on the knowledge graph and then they'll just kind of make up a set of those. So what I do is I look for scenarios where there's already a entity based featured snippet and I make sure that if I read a post, I'm including those entities that Google already know something about and formatting in a similar way to the way that the person who already gained that snippet if they don't have one yet, then often just making a list of locations. So here's a really good tip. The other types that you'll typically see are either ordered or unordered lists ordered, meaning they have numbered as a numbered list and unordered just mean like old tid lists.

Corey Potter: 00:41:25 And you'll see those show up as featured snippets. And the best way to get those, again using headings properly, but also including lists in your posts. So if you, sometimes you'll be able to say at the very top of your posts, you can either use a table of contents or you could just say TLDR, like if you want to know the top locations here, they are one through 10 and you just put a number to list one through 10 of the top locations kind of at the beginning of your post. Again, ideally table of contents, those link to cause then it would make sense. Yeah. But anyway, Google will often pick up that list and use it as a featured snippet. So those are, those are a few ways. Basically just question and answer. Mentioning entities or having ordered an under ordered list, those are the best ways to get featured snippets right now.

Raymond: 00:42:12 So as you were talking right there, I just looked I just searched it again. And what's interesting, and I don't know if this makes sense or not, but on my computer, when I search best places for engagement photos in Indianapolis, it's a list that it comes up with the one through, you know, 10 or whatever before it says click here to find out more. But on my iPad right in front of me, it is the I forget what, what it was that you said, but it shows the inboxes. Yes. It shows the locations as well as the the photo of, of each location that says 18 more and learn about them. And then it takes you obviously to their, to their information. If you click that little box, it'll take you to there in this, in this case, it's a, Oh, wow. Interesting. It's so it's showing another photographer and her snippet of a, of why it's a good place for an engagement session as well as, as well as mine and another photographer and another photographer. So

Corey Potter: 00:43:09 Yeah, it's really interesting how that can happen. Sometimes you can like get step act snippets, two or three on the same search, different types of snippets. Like it's, it's complex right now. I feel like it's kind of the wild West of, of certain features and featured snippets. So

Raymond: 00:43:27 I gotta say though, I mean for real, it's one of those things that I almost couldn't believe how quickly it brought traffic, brought traffic to my website. So, but now what's interesting and is that I'm not, I'm no longer number one, I'm not the person who's who's information is showing up. It's another photographer who I've never heard of. But yeah, but like if you look on her website, it says that she's been featured. I mean, like in all of these different locations. So in that case, would it go back to possibly a domain authority thing because other sites have said that she's more reputable than I am.

Corey Potter: 00:44:06 Yeah. For the most. I mean, that's basically when I say that links are a force multiplier, that's exactly what I'm talking about. Whenever it's like two sites are equal, then they're going to look at authority based on links. Almost always as kind of the differentiator.

Raymond: 00:44:18 See that's not cool cause she only has 24 locations, but I got 26. Yeah. I just want to help out people even more than she does 1% more than what the, than what she does. But here's somebody who wrote 80 engagement. Oh, Ady engagement photo ideas to steal from couples who totally nailed it. That sounds terrible. So, okay. Okay. Click baity stuff. It works. Yeah. Okay. So let me ask that question. In a, in a situation like this, our people are our couples thinking to themselves, you know what, I really wish that I had a large amount of photo ideas that I could steal from other couples who totally nailed it. Is that what they're searching? Or how does a, how does a, an article like this

Corey Potter: 00:44:58 Rank? Yeah, it's really, it's, it's pretty interesting to see like how intricate the understanding is. So Google understands what that article is about to the point where they understand that it's relevant for someone searching for engagement sessions or engagement session locations even. It's potentially relevant for that. It's, it's separate intent that, but they're trying to show variety of tents intense on the, on the search results. So anyway, it's, they're good enough to understand it and sometimes they'll get it right. And it's interesting

Raymond: 00:45:33 Because I think that's always where I come from is I try to figure out like what are people searching for? And then I just like would try to make the title that exact same thing. But clearly this is not, this is not that case. You don't have to do that

Corey Potter: 00:45:45 As much anymore. You sometimes it can still be beneficial but

Raymond: 00:45:51 So, okay, let's, let's move on and now kind of talk about images because images are an important part of photography. They're also an important part of our websites and putting information out there as, as I told you earlier, my, my engagement session blog, I had to put engagement photos on there. You know, cause part of it is trying to be helpful. Like here's these locations. But then the other half of it is, Hey, look at my photos and if you like them, you can contact me. Exactly. So when it comes to working with photos, you know, we can't be uploading 24 megapixel large photos, right? Is that, that's commonly bad practice. It is a bad practice for sure. Okay, so how do we, what do we do to our photos? How should we optimize them and make sure that we are good in the eyes of Google? How does it [inaudible]?

Corey Potter: 00:46:40 Great question and it is extremely

Raymond: 00:46:43 Complex, unfortunately. Got three minutes to answer it. So chop chop,

Corey Potter: 00:46:48 Right? I'm going to give you the short, short, short answer. If you are on Squarespace, then you basically just need to size them appropriately, ish. So to, let's say, say it's 2000 pixel. Squarespace is going to re sample this photos like they're going to make 1,500 thousand 1500 2020 500 version of each photo. Even if you upgrade it, load a 2000 pixel image, they're going to make a 2,500 pixel version of it. And even if you compress them beforehand, I'm saying all of this from my testing and experience in the past few months, it could change. If you're listening to this in a future like [inaudible], well maybe it's changed but this is what I mean. Not anymore. That's what I've seen in the past is that they'll up sample things so it almost doesn't matter, but you'd still want to make sure that they are relatively close to what they should be.

Corey Potter: 00:47:41 So typical blog widths are going to be most now these days are like anywhere from 900 to 1200 pixels wide. So I typically go with a little bit larger now because I believe that the screens are getting larger and we'll probably continue to go up a little bit. So 1500 pixels on the long edge or wide depending on how you're handling portrait photos. If you're like putting two beside each other, you can adjust this however you want, but you typically want to go with something around 1500 pixels wide. And so that being said, if you're on WordPress, my typical suggestion is going to be take that 1500 pixel image and then either install the short pixel plugin on WordPress or run them through the short pixel stand alone tool. And make sure that it's on the glossy settings. So there's a lossy, a glossy and a lossless setting on short pixel.

Corey Potter: 00:48:35 The middle one is the one you want, it's called city. It's really optimized for best JPEG compression at very high quality. It's going to be about the best ratio of quality to CYA eyes that you can get. The best one I've ever found, a lot of people use something like JPEG mini that's not going to get it in your, I mean a short pixel on average gets me 40 to 60% better compression than JPEG mini. Wow. Yeah. Difference is very, very small. Five to 10% maybe. So I'm willing to go a little bit extra to get that 40% extra compression. Yeah, for sure. For sure. However, again, going back to Squarespace, I have seen where you run through your short pixel upload and then your file is still larger once you have uploaded a Squarespace than it was after you compressed it because they're doing some sort of recompression.

Corey Potter: 00:49:33 Other platforms may do the same thing, so show it has their own sort sort of compression. They'll even tell you upload 3,500 pixel images. Don't worry about the size, we'll compress it. And to some extent that's true, they get it pretty close. But if you upload something that's already compressed through short pixel, often it'll be significantly better than what they would've done. So you really, that's why it's so complex is it depends on your platform. It depends on the tools you're using. It depends on your tolerance. For a quality to size ratio make from an SEO perspective, I lean towards better size and lower quality, but you don't want to go too low because if they look like crap, then no one's gonna wanna hire you. Cause I think your photos look like crap. So find that balance. But I would say you know, the, the walkaway tip here is 1500 pixels on the long end is probably going to get all of your photos down below a megabyte.

Corey Potter: 00:50:22 So that's a great place to start. And then short pixel, if you're on any platform that's not like automatically compressing that can get you down into the F 1500 pixels, I would expect most photos to be between 150 and 300 kilobytes after you run them through square pixel glossy. So then with that is there some sort of best practice for how many photos should be on, on a blog post or a, yeah, that's a really good question. Another timely question because in in this current time we're in, it's a little bit tricky because we have two things happening at once. One is Google and other big companies like pushing for speed, like really, really fast websites. Google wants websites to practically load instantly. It's a whole separate topic. But that means that they have to be more strict on the things that like if you run a Google page speed insights test, you're going to probably see on most photography websites they're going to get between 10 and 20 or something. They're like really low scores out of a hundred.

Corey Potter: 00:51:35 And so that's very, very common. And it's because typically the images are not compressed enough for or whatever. On the other end of the spectrum, we have, we're on the verge of 5g being like a thing that spreads across the nation. When that happens, I mean, we're probably three to five years away from that being pretty common. You know, like why does it matter if most people in the country have 5g you could upload so many photos and the size doesn't even matter anymore, but we're not there yet. So we're kind of in this weird spot. As far as that goes, the Google does consider page weight and whenever they're thinking about ranking, especially on mobile, and what they're thinking about is not just the speed, but they're also thinking about the data that it costs someone to look at a page. So like I am actually on Google fi and Google fi charges by the gigabyte used, so it's $10 per gigabyte.

Corey Potter: 00:52:31 And so if I go to a photography website that's a hundred megabytes because it's got 200 photos from a wedding, it costs me a dollar to load that on my phone. And so if Google sees that, like on average it costs people $5 to go to this website, they're gonna be like, Oh, I don't think we should rank this and the top 10 because we don't want to charge people that much money. Now a lot of people have free or unlimited data. And again, that's one of those weird scenarios we're in this time where some people have unlimited, some people are still paying a lot for extra data in other countries. If you have an international audience or you're not in the United States, it's probably an even bigger deal that there's going to be more people on three G or lower and there's going to be a lot of people who pay for data.

Corey Potter: 00:53:11 So all those things said, I typically would say the short answer is like 20 to 30 photos is kind of the max that I like to go on my blog posts. Sometimes I might go as much as 50, but I don't think I ever go above 50 anymore. Anything. and I'm trying to really keep that at like three megabytes or less, even on those big posts if I can. So that's kind of my range. I mean, if it gets up to five megabytes, maybe it's okay, but it's like, I just like to keep those as low as possible.

Raymond: 00:53:40 And how do we know the size of our,

Corey Potter: 00:53:44 Our blog post? I would just run it through something like GT metrics. So if you just go, I think streaky metrics.com or search for GT metrics. I th I think that's spelled G T M E T R I X GT metrics. You can also use Pingdom or I think Peacefood insights will even tell you. And there's webpage tests. All of those tools will tell you the size overall from the webpage.

Raymond: 00:54:07 Gotcha. So you can so you would, you would publish the blog and then you would take the URL and then put it in there and it'll tell you them. Gotcha. Okay. Write that down. Cool. Cool. Okay, so I will, I'll put links to that in the in the show notes if anybody wants to find that. Okay. So we went through how to brainstorm some ideas, how to kind of narrow them down to picking the right one that we want to work on so that we don't work through a hundred different blog posts at once. We talked a little bit about an outline, those featured snippets and the images. Now we're ready to press post. At this point we just hit publish and then we let Google find it and serve it to millions of people and we need no promotion necessary. Is that right? No, not necessarily. Okay. Okay. I've been doing same back

Corey Potter: 00:54:51 Really quick before the, the promotion part of it. One more step that kind of comes in between before you press publish is there are some specific SEO optimizations do you want to do and and really in particular, right now I'm talking about the title and the meta-description. Those are so important. I didn't mention those briefly earlier. I'm not going to go into a whole lot more now, but just know that you really want to spend some time working on your title and your meta description. There's a tool, it's on the main goals, M a N G O L S mingles website, and it's a, if you want, are there free tools? There's one that's basically a SERP emulator and you can start typing in your title or your meta description and it'll tell you the, the length and now whether it's going to get cut off. And that's a really good way to like craft your titles, meta descriptions and see what they're actually going to look like in search.

Corey Potter: 00:55:43 Because the title is the big blue link and Google and meta-description is a little snippet underneath it. Now that's by default, they may choose other text on your page, but if they are doing that, you maybe want to rewrite your meta-description. So that it kind of matches more what they want to show for the most popular queries. Again, not going to get into all the specifics of that, but just know title and meta-description have a huge impact on not only, okay, meta-description is not really a ranking factor. Title is a ranking factor, but they have a huge impact on click through rate and click through rate. Again, even if you want to rank position three, you could possibly get the same benefit out of position seven if you have a really good title and meta-description. So that's somewhere where even if you don't have the power to continue ranking higher, you do have the power to write a better title and meta description.

Raymond: 00:56:30 Yeah. Yeah. So once again, how did, did you mention what that tool was called?

Corey Potter: 00:56:36 Yeah, I'll get you the link so you can post it in the show notes. It's under, that's on the main ghouls website, which is the one that has Katie, we find her and a couple other tools and it's under their free tools section. Gotcha. Emulator.

Raymond: 00:56:51 That KW finder recently became a paid service as well, right? I think, yeah, that'd be fine. There's been a paid service for awhile. I think enough. What is Oh not that it matters for this podcast. Keywords everywhere. Yes. Keywords everywhere. It did become a paid tool as well, but it's so cheap. It's $10 per hundred thousand keywords. So I do a matter of, you know, it could be expensive, large, large amounts of searches over here. Okay, so, so there we go. We have that we were gonna work on the best title in the best meta-description as possible to make sure that Google understands what it is that we're doing and serves it to the right people. Now let's talk about that promotion. What should we be doing to promote our newly written piece of just golden content?

Corey Potter: 00:57:42 You want to really start by thinking about who would be excited to share this? And if you can just reach out to a handful of people, one or two people even you want to think about who is most likely, who do I have a connection to already, who is most likely to be willing to either a, share this on social media or be even better link to this blog. So if they are a blogger or if they have a blog or if they have a website where they can add links under resources. If you know someone like that who would be excited to add this as a resource or a link, a reference, you somehow then you should reach out to them manually and I mean, I mean if you want to email them or text them, great. If you call them you might get even better results, especially if you have that like excited tone.

Corey Potter: 00:58:30 Like I just wrote this amazing article about date night ideas for pregnant couples and I know, I know your clients would love this. In fact I mentioned you in my article. Would you be willing to share that and know you are active on Twitter or Instagram or whatever it is. Would you be willing to share a link to my posts? Would you be willing to billing to me on your blog or whatever. If you can do that kind of thing, you'll have a much higher success rate, especially for these like few targeted, get this outreach in the very beginning to people you already know. And then after that I think you want you to start kind of stepping out into, okay, where else on the internet are these topics covered? Do they link to similar articles to mind? Can I find places where I could email the author and ask them to link to the my article because it's a better resource.

Corey Potter: 00:59:15 There's all kinds of building techniques out there. But in general you do want to try to get some links. You could also use your own site to link to this article. I know that sounds like, well duh. But in this example of the date night ideas. Okay, so I published it a week later, nothing, crickets, maybe a couple of impressions or something. And then I took the article and I featured it on my homepage. Okay. So I just put a little eye on my homepage of my website. I have like recent blog or featured blog posts or not recent blog posts. I can pick which ones go there. And this one wasn't on there, I or changed it. So this one was on there, like literally overnight, started getting tons of impressions. Why? Because what had happened is that Google saw it on my site, but they didn't see it linked from anywhere important.

Corey Potter: 01:00:09 So they're like, ah, this content is probably not that important to this website. When I put it on the home page, they said, Oh, this is a very important piece of content to this website. It's also passing the page authority from the homepage to this new page to make that page instantly more authoritative. So there is some weight in internal linking and the way that authority flows between pages, I know that's complex topic that you don't really need to worry too much about. Just know the tip here is if you want something to rank and it's a big piece of content featured on your homepage, or at least on a page, that's only one click away from the homepage.

Raymond: 01:00:44 Wow. Yeah. So that, that kinda goes back to what we talked about last time, which was a pillar content, right? Content pillar. Yeah. I call it cornerstone content. Same cornerstone content. That's what it was. Excuse me. Pillars, cornerstone. Do people call it different things? It's all the same. Yeah. Yeah. And that's something that, you know, isn't going to go out of style. Right. Cause that's not something that's like, Hey, you know, bill and Jenny's engagement session know next year nobody's going to care about. But I'm just that kind of always helpful. Evergreen content, keeping that on your homepage. I like that idea. I like it. I like it. Okay. I got one. Go ahead. No, you know, you, yeah, I mean I was just going to say like

Corey Potter: 01:01:28 Those are, those are like the initial outreach are, you know, share it everywhere. You can ask anybody who is you know, would be eager to share it, to share it, look for places to get links, link to it from your own site. And then as far as like follow up, what I like to do is kind of forget about the post for 30 days or so. It was hard to do, especially for people who are like, I just put 10 or 20 hours in writing this and I got to check search console every day. Don't do that. Wait, wait 30 days and see what it's doing. Before you really worry about anything else. And then in search console, which by the way, if you don't have search console, you need search console before you even start this process. So make sure you set up search console.

Corey Potter: 01:02:08 I have a blog post about it, there's plenty of resources about it around the internet set up search console. So then what you're going to do is go into search console under this post after 30 days and you're going to see what queries are traffic to this post and you're gonna make sure that they align with what you expected to get. So sometimes you'll read a post date night it is for pregnant couples and then you'll get this like most of your traffic is coming from some random other keywords. It was like you know, romantic dates in the rain, something like you just, one of your ideas was like something somehow it just like that's what you're getting. Keyword you're getting traffic from. And so what you want to do is just make sure it aligns with what you expected. If it doesn't or if there's new opportunities that you didn't think about before and you're starting to rank for it but maybe not very well, you can even add a subsection H to that is covering that topic that was starting to get some traction in search console and maybe even push that on up.

Corey Potter: 01:03:02 So you kind of cast your net wider and get more impressions from the same piece of content. So yeah, 30 day or even a 60 day, it doesn't have to be in 30 days. Heck up just to see how it's doing. Search console and Kenneth,

Raymond: 01:03:15 That was actually going to be my question was what, because last time when we talked, I believe one of my biggest takeaways that you said was it doesn't have to be perfect the first time that you publish it because you can come back and you can work on it. And then I was like, yeah, I like that. And then that's what I started doing and then I never followed up on my content. So now I know not only, you know, well now I know how to do it essentially is, you know, wait that week, that 60 days. And if I would imagine if you'd like batched all of your blog posts at once, you could just come back two months and check the past four or five blog posts and then spend a day optimizing all those.

Corey Potter: 01:03:54 Yeah. And I also feel like to do this around the beginning of each year. So for example, earlier you mentioned that you had that engagement session, location list that was getting a featured snippet. And then, I don't know if we were in that little spot where it cut out, but you said something that you're not getting that feature snippet anymore. Someone else has it. One of the ways that I've found to gain back featured snuff puppets, these featured snippets are very volatile, but they're also really easy to get in some places by easier than a first, a first position ranking. And so what I'll do often is like come in and say in my title updated for 2020 if it's updated, like, you know, change a couple things, like make sure that it's up to date and then just say that in the title and almost maybe 50% of the time I'm just making up that number. But it's a lot. I will get a featured snippet back just from updating that title to say updated 2020 or something related to updated in 2020.

Raymond: 01:04:48 That's what I'm going to do today. Now that's a, you just said it. Yeah, for sure. For sure. I'll let you know in 60 days when I come back and I check up on it. That's perfect. That's perfect. All right, well, Corey, before I let you go, is there anything that I didn't ask you about that you think is really important to this topic that that new photographers should know about blogging and creating content in 2020?

Corey Potter: 01:05:15 I guess maybe one final for people is that you don't have to do this as frequently as you would expect. So a lot of people when they're thinking about blogging sessions, they're like, I need to do this at least once a week, maybe two or three times a week because Google likes fresh content. Google likes updated websites. That's a myth that's kind of been pushed as a myth. It's like a partial truth that's been twisted to make people believe something that's not true. In general. Google doesn't care about updated content on a photography website. However, in specific cases, like what I just described, if you have a timeless piece that's getting a featured snippet and you update it and you say that this is relevant to right now and Google believes that based on the query they want something relevant for it. Now that can still matter that you have something updated, so just want to clarify that.

Corey Potter: 01:06:08 But in general, updating once a week, random blog posts that's probably never going to rank anyway is not helping you and so cut that out. Instead, start working on a strategy that will allow you to post. I like to say at least quarterly, ideally monthly or twice a month. If you really want to be aggressive, you could do once a week. But that's like really aggressive. Most people can't put out a quality piece of content, like these kinds of content. Even for me who's got the professional tools, and I've done this for years now, when I did that example posts for the course, it probably took me 10 hours. Wow. Yeah. And so investment in time. So for someone who's not quite as experienced and doesn't have the professional tools, I would, I estimate that this is going to take 20 hours. Right? And so break it down. So you're spending an hour or two an hour a day maybe, and then they'd be on a weekend.

Corey Potter: 01:06:58 You've got like five hours to put into it. You finish it in a couple of weeks maybe. But if, if it takes you a couple of weeks, you should be aiming for like one post per month. It's one of these like really strong pieces of content that's a resource for your clients. And if you think about it like that, it's not that hard to call it with 12 topics in a year and then schedule them out to write them. You can do that. You can make that happen and it can, when I say that, like in some in my course or in the workshops that I do, when I say 10 extra traffic, that's what I'm talking about is over the course of a year, if you can put out 10 pieces of content that are, that follow this kind of strategy. I mean again, my example was just one example, but it's very common for me to get 200 to 500 clicks per month off of one of these types of content and if you do that times 10 you're talking 2000 to 5,000 clicks per month. Most photographers who are professional have been a professional photographer for a years and have been blogging consistently have great SEO, don't get 5,000 clicks per month, right? Two or 3000 is like really good clicks from Google. You could be getting 5,000 just in one year from just being intentional and following a plan and making sure that you're going after these topics that are more likely to win. That's how it's done. You see,

Raymond: 01:08:16 When it gets broken down into something, this a, this simple, it just gets me excited to go out and start writing a bunch of stuff because I know that, you know, as a photographer, there's just so many things that you know that your clients don't. And if you can be that helpful voice for them, that's that's really exciting. And then if you can book a few sessions off that, that's even more exciting. So, yeah. Well, Corey, I gotta say, man, thank you so much for sharing everything that you did today. It's always a blast chatting with you before I let you go. Once again, for the new people listening, let them know where they can find you online and what you got going on.

Corey Potter: 01:08:52 Yeah. Cool. So really three things. One is the fuel of your photos Facebook group. That's where we have just a free group and you can join and ask questions and hopefully get good advice. I at least monitor to make sure that there's not terrible advice being being given in that group. But we have a lot of people now who give advice. So it's a really cool group. Second is the fuel your photos websites. So we're working on more and more blog content and even YouTube content, most of that's either linked from the website or you'll find it somewhere on the blog there. We have a free SEO guide there, so the less cool resources on the website. And then third, we have our course SEO course. And we even have this, this topic that we've been talking about, content creation. We have a specific blogging course that walks you through all this.

Corey Potter: 01:09:38 Plus it has like templates for what to look for when you're doing the research or what to look for or when you're doing the brainstorming. And then all the stuff I talked about, about formatting, all that's covered in all those lessons. So those are the, if you, we really believe that photographers need to have a fundamental understanding of SEO. You don't have to be an SEO expert. You could hire someone to help with SEO, but you need to be familiar with these topics so that whenever you're speaking to someone or asking for advice or, or you know, hiring someone help or whatever you do, you need to at least know what your goals are and what kind of results you're expecting and kind of what steps need to be taken to get to that. And then if you don't have time to do it, you know, outsource it. But I say that because that's kind of what fuel your photos stands for is like helping people be empowered to take control of their own SEO. I hope if you hang around in our group or on the website or whatever, that you'll be able to do that.

Raymond: 01:10:36 Yeah. And once again, I can attest to it. I wouldn't have made that one engagement session blog post without you, your help, your knowledge and your group as well. So you know, personally I have to thank you for quite a few weddings that I booked for the year. Cause without that blog post, you know, who knows how they would have found me cause they were just looking for something fun to do. And and that was that. So I'm going to put links to obviously the group, the, the page as well as the course in the show notes as well for this for this episode. So if you're interested, just swipe up. It should be there. And then that's it. So Corey, again, man, thank you so much for coming on. I really do appreciate it. I look forward to chatting with you next year, the year after that so that I can embroider you a sweet jacket and then maybe we'll make a, a, a, a, a, a live event out of it. That'd be pretty fun. That would be awesome. Yeah.

Corey Potter: 01:11:28 Yeah. Thanks for having me.