SEO for photographers: websites, social media, and Google Search

0:00JOHN MUELLER, Hello, and welcome to another episode of Search Off the Record, a podcast coming to you from the Google Search team, where we talk all about search and, who knows, maybe have some fun along the way. My name is John. I'm a search advocate at Google in Switzerland, and I'm joined today by a famous subject matter expert, Martin, who's also on my team, actually. Welcome to the podcast. Hi, John. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. What subject matter am I an expert of? JavaScript? script? FRANCESC CAMPOY, You are our designated subject matter expert of SEO for photography. FRANCESC CAMPOY, Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, what?

0:56FRANCESC CAMPOY, Well, I heard you take some snapshots. FRANCESC CAMPOY, I do. FRANCESC CAMPOY, So you're now a photographer, right? FRANCESC CAMPOY, Oh, God, I know where this is coming from. OK, I think what you're trying to get at is the fact that I do take pictures and I recently got accepted for like an exhibition kind of thing. Does that make me like a... Yeah. Okay. That's like, you're an expert. You're an expert. I don't know. Like there's proper good photographers that I learn a lot from. So I'm not sure if I'm an expert. Well, I think for talking about SEO and photography, as you understand a little bit of both and you can probably bring in some information.

1:43I think maybe positioning you as the photography expert overall is perhaps a little exaggeration. But this is a podcast, right? This is not... Fair, fair, fair, fair, fair. Yeah. And actually I have like tons of questions that I'm pretty sure other photographers will also have because I'm not like a content SEO expert, really. I'm more on the technical side of things. and I recently realized I built my photography website kind of thing and I realized I don't know if this is reasonable for search or not and if the content makes sense and I have so many questions. So this is going to be interesting.

2:21Okay, cool. Do you use JavaScript? Actually, that's a really good question. I don't think I do. Let me double check that I'm not saying something that is not true. I don't think there's JavaScript on this page specifically because I believe that's... Actually, there might be because I think the light boxes are using JavaScript. Okay. So I have to check. I'm sorry. No, that's a legitimate question. That's actually a really good question. Do I use JavaScript? So I'm using a content management system, which is very unlike me normally, but I'm like, I don't want to hand code everything here. Okay, cool.

2:58So that's going to be interesting. So I wonder what happens if I disable JavaScript and then I am using JavaScript. Okay. So the light boxes are all JavaScript. Yeah. Okay, cool. So, I mean, why do photographers have websites anyway? It's like, isn't Instagram enough? Oh, touchy subject. You probably want both a website and the presence on like social media. But there are certain challenges here. Number one, you do want to have control over what you publish and how you publish it. As in like a friend of mine recently told me when we were at an exhibition, like so the challenge with exhibitions is it's not just your photo.

3:41It's your photo in connection to everything that is exhibited around it. So it's similar to Instagram. In Instagram, you control your feed, but people are not necessarily clicking on your account and going through your portfolio, so to speak. but they are on their home feed and they see like their friends pasta picture from yesterday and then like some political news story that has a picture attached to it as well and then someone's video of a birthday party and then your photo of a landscape and depending on the context that or the the mind space that the person is in and whatever gets shown around your picture your picture might just drown in it and just like not fit or it might actually be the perfect fit and you actually can achieve the the emotional connection that you want to achieve with this photo so you have zero control over that on instagram on facebook on blue sky on whatever you don't have control over what people see on these platforms you can just be part of it and for photographers especially those who are doing like more fine art stuff where not just a single picture tells a story, but like a collection of pictures tells a story.

4:57You want a place where this story can unfold and be told properly. And that can only happen on some space that you control and that is generally your website. That's one aspect. The other aspect is the business aspect. You need some sort of like business card, right? Why should you pick me for your wedding? For instance, I would never do weddings, but... Okay. I guess like there are different types of photographers and they kind of are online for different purposes. Yeah. So if you were a wedding photographer in London, you have kind of a different purpose than if you're taking photos of fish and publishing that because you think they look cute.

5:39Yeah. And the latter is me. So I don't really need a website because I could just put them on Instagram. Instagram also does compression. So the photo might not look as good as you would like it to look. So that's also a problem. But yeah, there are different types of photographers. And for instance, I could actually think of one that I don't know if they need a website or not. And that's people doing stock photography. Oh, interesting. Yeah. Yeah. There are people whose whole livelihood depend on stock photography. So I don't know if they need a website necessarily. Oh, that's that's an interesting kind of mix because my mental model was like, there's some photographers that are hired for the task of taking a photo and others that basically have value out of what they have produced for their name.

6:24And stock photography is almost like, well, you're hiring yourself to take photos of things that you're not selling yourself directly, but rather you're kind of selling through a stock photography service, I guess. Yeah. Basically through a marketplace. Yeah. Through a marketplace. Okay. It's almost like the stock photography photographers then are not like building a brand or anything like that it's really kind of like the content that they're providing yeah and it's it's really an interesting niche i think and also it overlaps heavily with seo because you can't just go out and take a picture of every tree in every house you see well you can and you can upload that to stock photo websites, but they are probably not selling well enough.

7:11So you need to understand, like, what is in demand? What are people specifically looking for? How do I phrase because like, I recently realized this, I took a picture of a skyscraper in Warsaw. It looks really nice. It's like a glass, very tall glass building, the clouds reflect in it, the blue sky reflects in it, it kind of melts into the blue sky as well, because the glass is kind of tinted slightly blue. and I'm like, well, if I were to sell this on a stock photo website, what would I sell it as? Skyscraper? Skyscraper in Warsaw? Or more like conceptualized because, you know, like big, heavy glass buildings with the blue sky and sunlight and clouds on it.

7:51A business, corporate, success, power, money, bank, financial. Like, how would I frame? Same picture. You can frame so very differently and I'm not sure they would perform the same. I'm pretty sure they wouldn't perform the same. That's like very SEO related. I was like, how, like what, what do I want my business or my content to be found for? And that's very direct because I think with these stock photography sites, you basically list a set of keywords, right? Yeah. You have a title, you have a description and you have keywords. That's what you get. Wow. That's if SEO could only be so simple, right?

8:36Here is the title of my page and the keywords I want to rank for. I don't think it's that easy for stock photography websites because there you have the exact same mechanics as you have on the open web, like ebb and flow in terms of seasonality. So around the holidays, people probably want holiday themed or wintery themed or summery themed, depending on the season photos. And then sometimes people need more corporate kind of stuff. Sometimes people need more family kind of stuff. And there's lots of people competing for a very small set of keywords that people can because obviously like people looking for photos, they won't like sit down and research for 25 minutes what they're going to call what they look for.

9:15it's like okay so i need a birthday and then they type in birthday that's it and you're competing with i don't know how many other people taking pictures of birthday parties true okay so maybe for sake of this podcast we can skip stock photography okay um because it feels like that's almost like a topic of its own also it's like use of stock photos on your website which I know has been very controversial over the years. And I guess we could also skip things like event photography or wedding photography where people hire a photographer to kind of do the act of taking a photo because it sounds like that's not what you're doing, right?

10:06No, I just take pictures for the fun of it, I believe. but then a bunch of people are doing it as a business and i think yeah some of them just want to be booked for time yeah i have like hourly rates and others are yeah okay i mean my my feeling is those who are doing photography as a service i guess it's like photography as a service is more like a traditional service type website where you have on the one hand you have the problem that there are probably a lot of people competing for very generic terms. It's like, you want event photographer in London. It's not like event photographer for London within a brick building for 15 people who are doing something.

10:58It's not that you're like searching for something very niche. You're kind of like event photographer London. And at most, you'll have some preconception of like, well, I know these people. and I will just go to their website directly. Yeah, I mean, fair enough. Or you hand out like business cards or you're listing yourself in some place or you're going to. So for wedding photographers, I'm pretty sure they all go, or most of them probably go to like these wedding kind of fairs, these expos where. Oh, yeah. So it's almost like the traditional marketing there and probably a lot also of working together with wedding planners.

11:39Yeah. Because if someone plans a big wedding, you want someone to just organize everything. Yeah. Yeah. I think our wedding planner, we had one back in the day. I think she suggested a photographer that we turned down. Okay. Well, they tried. Yeah. Okay. Okay, but that feels like more traditional service type work where basically you have to make sure that the text on your pages is very clear, that you're also doing the usual SEO things like, I don't know, connecting up with others, making sure that your pages are easily findable, easy to understand, those kind of things. which I've seen some photographers focus more on the design aspect.

12:29And then it's almost like, well, it's like, what is it that you actually want to be found for? It's not mentioned on this page. Yeah, I think that's a tricky one because a bunch of them see themselves as artists. I mean, my photography isn't great, but I think there are people who are legitimately kind of in the art market. They exhibit their photos in galleries and then sometimes these photos get bought and it's the art market. It's ridiculous. I recently visited a really nice exposition in Konstanz and I saw that you can buy the pictures that hang there. And they're like upwards of 3000 bucks.

13:10And that sounds ridiculous only if you don't understand how much work went into these and into like how much led to this exhibition. and I think that's also a very specific different kind of niche and I'm not sure people necessarily need a website to kind of sell their services they need more of a website that kind of explains what is their artistic vision and they might actually have a website for each exhibition I guess I don't know how this is done or at least like have a page for each exhibition like a category page yeah okay so with your website what is it that you want to be found for oh man i'm just like a hobbyist i am trying so i'm i haven't actually done any like optimization work on it i just wanted a place to like have all my pictures in one place uh that i control so um i also use like the german word unterwasser which is underwater dot photo as my domain now it's out there if you want to look at not great pictures um go there i guess i mean i sold a few prints so how bad can they be i exhibit some fuel okay so that i think they're okay we have some of them in the office as well yeah yeah they're good thank you and i i just basically have like a bunch of galleries and they're each like a topical thing so for instance there's an exploring underwater switzerland do i want to be found for that i don't care too much but if i were interested in that i wouldn't know how i could do that because i i can only give like the the images a name and then maybe have like some descriptive text okay and that's that's it but taking a step back would you say that your brand is on tavasa that photo i think or like like if people wanted to find your photos would they search for your name or would they search for this brand And I'm actually not so sure.

15:12I think, unfortunately, I believe I'm the brand. OK. So it's almost like you, I mean, I didn't take a look at your website. It's almost like you would want your domain name, which is kind of this generic term, but you would have your name as a big heading somewhere. It's like, this is Martin Splitt's photo page. So if someone is searching for Martin's photos, they could find it. Should I have that on the homepage? Or is it fine if I have it in like an about me kind of thing? Because as an artist, so to speak, I'm not an artist. But like this mindset of like, oh, it's about my photos. I don't want me on the front page.

15:54I want my photos on the front page. I will give you the answer you want, which is it depends.

16:03Beautiful. I'm so sorry. No, but I think fundamentally, I see a lot of small businesses make the mistake of taking a generic term and calling it their brand. So kind of you're walking into that trap because like underwater photography, it's like super. That's like what your domain name is. Like if that were your brand, you would have trouble ranking for that. I mean, I assume I assume there are lots of people that do this. whereas if your brand were martin split photos then like people would be able to find you immediately okay i mean not to say that you should change your website i just like this is kind of like the generic feedback i would give anyone that is working like if if you were a small business and you wanted to be online that's kind of the direction i would go so kind of make it easy for people to find you because being found for this generic action is like pictures of fish, like very simplified.

17:09That's probably going to be hard. Whereas telling people is like, hi, I'm Martin. You can find me on the internet as a photographer. They could find you there. Okay. But I guess that all depends on what your ultimate goal is. And it sounds like your goal is more I want to organize my photos and I will send out links to people who are actually interested. Okay, but if I were to take the next step and say like, okay, I want to make some money off of my photos and for instance, sell prints, which I think is a business model that I've seen more commonly these days. So in that case, I need some sort of brand, I guess, for people to find me.

17:48Well, you don't need a brand, but it's more that if you've built up a reputation as being kind of this underwater photography guy and they remember your name, it's a lot easier to find you with a clear brand name. True. because I assume like the website you you would be able to check in search console like probably is hard to find for generic terms I believe so yeah that brings me maybe to the first point like do you have search console set up I I have search console set up I should probably look at it every now and then as well that might make sense okay but I do have it set up I mean It's not going to make you rank first.

18:37So not? JOHN MUELLER I'm sorry. So sorry. But you see things like what people are searching for, which can be kind of insightful to kind of see, like, oh, well, it's like you're wrong, John. It's like actually people searching for my brand name. And I'm ranking first for it, which is great. JOHN MUELLER Yeah, I don't think I am. OK, I need to fix that, I think. OK. Okay, then you have like the gallery pages, which I guess are kind of like a category page, if it were an e-commerce site.

19:15And probably on those category pages, you have text, headings, like which locations, what kind of photos, some kind of classification. I don't have that actually. The gallery system that I use, it's a theme for the content management system that I use, actually doesn't have that. like it it has just like so if you go to the website you see like exploring underwater in Switzerland which is the name of an album if you want to call it a gallery and then you click into it and then you just have the images and like a little bit of text for each of the images but that's it there's like no freestanding text is that the problem so I mean like I guess it like all depends like how you want to be found right like everything kind of boils down to that uh Which could be, like, if you have galleries for specific locations, specific times, like, I don't know, ice diving in, I don't know, a specific mountain lake kind of thing, you could mention that in the title or kind of like as text on a gallery page like that, which would make it a little bit easier for people to find that gallery.

20:25I assume a lot of these are very niche terms and not a lot of people would be searching for photos of fish under ice in this mountain valley kind of thing. Fair. But they could and they would more likely find your gallery page because you're linking to that from your homepage than some random photo that you have on your website. Of course, you're also competing with that random photo on all of the social media sites that you published it, where you also included some of those words, right? Yeah, true. Can they even be indexed? I'm not even sure if the same photo shared on social media can take away my chance of indexing.

21:12Well, the web pages could show up. Like if you're searching in web search, then it's like on the one hand, the image might be the same, but the web pages are going to be unique. Because your website probably doesn't look like Instagram or like all of these other networks, like everything kind of around the image is very different. Oh, OK. I guess if you're looking at image search specifically, then it's possible that we would recognize these as duplicates, maybe fold them together. I don't know. OK, so but if I upload to my website first and then wait quite long for it to index, and then Instagram or the other platforms get indexed, then I will be the canonical, right?

22:02I don't think it works that way. Also, it might not matter, right? Because if, for example, someone is looking for a photo of someone diving in this mountainous lake kind of thing, and they go to your Instagram, like from Instagram, they can find your website if they want to buy a photo. If they're like, oh, I just want to look at it because it's pretty and it's calming, it doesn't matter. Yeah, that's true. Then the search impression and the click would probably also not matter that much because they would just click on the website, go, oh, that's a nice picture, and then just jump off. Yeah, I mean, maybe they would browse your profile and kind of follow you on the social network or, I don't know, depending on how good your photos are or how good you describe them.

22:48But that's almost like a different, I don't know, user journey, so to say. Does Google penalize me or dislike me if I watermark my images? No. Oh, okay. So that's fine. Oh, lucky me. The other thing, I guess, is from the gallery page, you link to your individual photos as a landing page. Is that correct? Or do you just have a landing at the gallery page? That's a really good question. I believe each picture has its own page. Yes. Well, it's using fragments. So it doesn't. So it doesn't. Okay, great. All right. So would I want each image to have its individual landing page? Is that a good thing?

23:36JOHN MUELLER I think if you have something unique to add to the image, like a unique text, longer description kind of thing, and you want people to explicitly visit that image when they go from image search, then yes, having a unique landing page for the image makes a lot of sense. Because then we can also understand this is the primary image of this page, and here is some additional information about this image. Whereas if you only have a gallery page, then we're like, oh, there are 50 images on this page and there's a bit of text, but is this an image landing page that someone might be looking for?

24:12Which perhaps not. So it's almost like if you're interested in having your images individually findable, definitely make individual landing pages. Ah, okay. All right. So, okay. I need to make sure that my images can be landed upon. Fair enough. Dang. Why does this use Fragments? I don't know. That's an odd one. MARK MANDELAVYSCHENKOVICHERSON WONG - Well, luckily, you know someone who knows about SEO and Fragments. So I know. I can fix my website. Yay. But I would just wanted the gallery system to just do it for me. But that was too hopeful. MARK MANDELAVYSCHENKOVICHERSON WONG - I guess the other things that people or SEOs often talk about when it comes to images are file size, file type.

25:00Do you know how your site is doing there? Or is this basically also like, I'm just using the CMS? No, no. No, no, no, no, no. I made sure that the system, so I can disclose, I'm using Hugo, which I believe you've also used in the past. Yeah. It's like a static site generator. calling it a CMS is a big word, but effectively it's a CMS kind of thing, I would say. And it has what's called a pipeline and it can actually process images and it can generate like multiple versions of an image so that you have responsive images. Oh, fancy. Yes. I don't want to, I think I might have like not deployed this yet.

25:43I'm not sure if I have deployed responsive images yet, but I want to make sure that when you're on a small screen device, you get like a smaller version of the content. But if you're looking at it on a bigger screen, you should get the high resolution version of it because it's a photo after all that you're coming to the website for. So giving you the best possible version for the device that you're on is something that I think makes sense. So that's something that we do. And you would call that responsive images. And I would argue that that's a good thing to have. Yeah, I think that's great. Yeah.

26:18But I don't think you'll rank first because of it. I think the challenge with regards to SEO, it's like, oh, these are good practices. Fair. But just because you're doing these good practices, you're not going to rank for underwater photography Switzerland automatically. Fair. You have to do more. And to be fair, like I think on the first version of the website and maybe even still now to this day, I'm not sure if I've actually rolled it out. I might just deliver the highest resolution anyways, because I'm like, you're coming to this website to look at this photo. You have the time. If it takes too long, it takes too long.

26:54I don't care. But your core web vitals, Martin. I know. But then again, people are here for the high resolution picture. So I just have to deal with it, I guess. I don't know. But maybe I roll it out eventually. I don't know. The other thing is file types. I just use JPEGs. Oh, OK. Well, it's fine. I mean, they work everywhere. where I know that we support other file types. We have it in our documentation. I know that AVIV and WebP are in there. I think BMP is in there as well. So we can link the documentation here in the show notes. We have a bunch of support. And since you take photos, you obviously take videos, too, because it's just the same thing, right?

27:35Ah. Like, videos are a whole different beast. Oh, my god. But they are different in how you make them. They're a lot more effort because you have to like color grade them and you have to edit them and cut them and yada, yada, yada. And if you put together a video coming from multiple clips or multiple cameras, then you have to make sure like the colors match because one might be a little more bluish. The other one might be warmer. And oh, God, no. So that's a different kind of skill set. But I know that a lot of photographers are also videographers. So yeah, a bunch of people do the same thing.

28:08Yeah. I mean, for video, I think the main thing from our side is it should be really the primary part of a page if you want to show as a video. Because if people are like explicitly clicking on your video thumbnail, they want a video. They don't want a big gallery page with a lot of photos and this random video attached. I remember that change. It's a relatively like a year ago or something, right? That hasn't always been the case. Cool. I think this is pretty insightful. Hopefully. Yeah. Do you think photographers will go away now that generative AI just creates any image you want? Ah, get out of here.

28:47Get out of here. No, come on. So I, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I mean, I do it as a hobby, so I'm not really impacted here. But I think like a lot of photographers who studied photography, who learn how light works, how our perception works, how to elicit different psychological responses or emotional responses to an image. I don't think AI can do that and not anytime soon. Like, of course, if you need like a illustration chart for something, then maybe it can actually generate that for you. But that's not really what photography is about. It's about human connection through visuals.

29:24And I think that for that to happen, there needs to be a human on both sides of that connection. Cool. Okay. so I hope you picked up some thoughts on photography website and I guess like it's in my own best interest that your photography website doesn't perform that well on search so that you continue working for us but don't worry about it my photography doesn't perform as well so don't worry about it anyway cool well that's it for this episode um uh if people want to find you and chat more about photography? Where is a good place to go? Do you have a social network of your choice? Blue sky is pretty good for this kind of stuff.

30:08LinkedIn is more for the work kind of topics. Cool. Well, thanks for joining. Thanks for being a subject matter expert. Very happy to help. Yeah, I'm not sure about the expert part, but thank you so much for bringing this up. And I think if people out there have follow-up questions, do definitely post them in the comments on your podcast platform of choice or on YouTube or go into the office hours on developers.google.com slash search and ask us questions because I understand there are lots of questions, even if you're not a photographer, but from a different business or industry, ask us. We're here to help.