I’ve talked about PhotoMerchant before, but have yet to mention Sydney-based rockstar Kain Tietzel. He’s their Creative Director and Digital Strategist who has been working in digital media since 1995, creating award winning campaigns and online applications for clients such as Audi, Yahoo, Virgin Blue, Telstra, Optus, Foxtel, Channel 4, BBC, Southern Star Endemol, Sony Music and Lego.
As the Creative Director of new online photo service PhotoMerchant, Kain wears many hats including interface designer, video producer, marketing director, strategist and customer support. He is also a passionate lomographer, occasional podcaster and self-confessed digital media nerd. He’s spearheading a lot of the SEO work going on over at PhotoMerchant (recently expanded into the US) so I asked him his take on some search engine optimization stuff.
What’s exciting you these days about SEO?
SEO is the cheapest and easiest way to get traffic coming to your website. Although some people treat SEO like a mystical science, in practice, it really comes down to using some common sense and a little bit of work. I’m excited by the idea that photographers can start to take control of their own marketing and brand image by following the simple rules laid out in the Photographers SEO Book. This is made even easier by using web-publishing system like WordPress or our own PhotoMerchant service.
Will SEO features become the competitive edge for a website company like yourself?
If photographers manage their photo assets well and create useful titles, descriptions and tags, then that information can form the basis for their images to add more depth to their search optimization. PhotoMerchant retains all the EXIF and IPTC information stored in the images and embeds that into the website with no additional work. I think that making the tools easy and intuitive to use, as well as integrating with analytics tools like Google Analytics, will allow Photographers to have a greater understanding of the impact SEO can have on their traffic, and more importantly, their bottom line. PhotoMerchant plans to take analytic data and make it a useful and intuitive tool for growing a photographers business – we have some incredible plans in this area.
Zach: That EXIF transfer can be a big time savings for Geotagging. And here’s more on my review of PhotoMerchant’s SEO features.
How important is SEO to your platform?
Search optimization is one of the key pillars for PhotoMerchant published websites. While we may not have completely nailed our implementation yet, we are continuing to find ways to make it easier to use and more deeply embedded into the site structure. Our primary goal for SEO is to make it an accessible tool that Photographers can use to grow their business.
What are you hearing from photographers about SEO?
I think the major issue with Photographers and their understanding of SEO is the language used to explain what it means. Only a small percentage of photographers understand the importance and relevance of SEO but almost all of them want to “appear in the Google”. I believe that as technical practitioners we can default to using industry terminology to explain our practices, but photographers do not live in this world. We need to create a terminology that makes SEO more accessible and understandable.
Do you have any advice for photographers just learning about SEO?
Yeah, buy the Photographers SEO book and then take the time to go through and implement all the recommendations. Then track and follow the success of your work, make adjustments and then track it some more. Like growing a plant, managing a photography business and website takes constant maintenance. Unfortunately a lot of photographers treat their website like a cactus – only watering it when it looks dead!
Zach: Wow, thanks. I didn’t even tell you to say that. Or they can sign up for PhotoMerchant then get the book for free.
SEO is new for a lot of folks. When did search become big?
Search has been big news since about 2001. The difference is that it’s becoming a more accessible tool in the marketer’s tool kit – especially as it’s relatively easy to do yourself at no cost. With rough 80% of people finding new websites through search, it’s soooo important for websites to implement even the most basic SEO practices.
There’s a lot of talk recently about whether SEO is still important in this day of social media. In my opinion, Social Media is fast becoming an important part of the Marketers toolkit but it will not replace Search any time soon. If you’re looking for a particular image or photography service, would you type it straight into a search engine or would you post your request to Facebook/twitter and wait for a response. Chances are you’ll do both. Search will give you the most immediate results and kick-start your research and by the time your social network responds, their suggestions are likely to augment and clarify the research you’ve already undertaken.
Zach: Nice response. I said similar in my post on Profiles and Social Search.
Are photographers more concerned with ranking their images or their businesses? Or do those go hand-in-hand?
I think this depends on the photographer. Hobbyist and emerging photographers are probably more interested in peer feedback and recognition whereas the more professional photographer will be more focused on maximizing their profitability or growing their business and specializations. I believe that photographers should be more focused on their business strategy and then find the appropriate tactics that support that strategy.
Do you have any thoughts about how social media and mobile usage might change the SEO landscape for photographers?
Social Media works best when you freely contribute your art and your self to the community. Too many photographers are missing out on opportunities to distribute their art and find new customers by ruining their work with intrusive watermarking and not providing useful meta data with their images.
By loading your images with relevant meta data, your contact information travels with your image allowing your photos to be more easily found and traced, but more importantly, allowing a prospective buyer to contact you and pay for additional services.
Photographers are paranoid about photos being downloaded from their website and somehow feel re-assured when customers are unable to right-click to save the photos. What they fail to realize that it’s just as easy to take a screenshot using basic screen capture tools that come with Windows and OSX. When an image is copied in this way, the meta data is no longer attached to the image and you’re no longer in control of where or how it is used.
In my opinion, I think that watermarking should be used to create a brand around your photography, it should promote the website where the image can be legitimately purchased and be integrated into the design to enhance it’s aesthetics, rather than destroy it’s practical application. The image should be packed with useful metadata that includes your website address, instructions on how the image can be distributed and attributed, keywords and EXIF information. Then, use Social Media to share your photographic gift with the world, allow it to be used in Creative Commons instances and set it free. The more you allow the photo to be distributed, the more likely you are going to create new business opportunities for yourself.
What we need is better image tracking and digital fingerprinting technology so that photographers can keep track of where their art is being used.
Obviously, stock photography has another set of rules to service based photography and intrusive watermarking is important.
That all said, the debate around copyright, watermarking and image theft will continue to rage with or without my contribution.
Mobile? Let’s leave that conversation for another day…
Zach: Good point about screenshots losing meta data. I agree that turning off right clicking is annoying and watermarks are much better practice.
What does the future hold for PhotoMerchant?
There’s a wealth of new features that we’re rolling out over the next few months that will provide our customers with the foundations they need to manage all parts of the photography business online. Our plan is to create an online application that anticipates the trends occurring inside a photographers business and then provides relevant business and marketing recommendations. Our goal is to make PhotoMerchant the dashboard to their business allowing the photographer to focus on managing their customer relationships, improving their workflow and refining their art.
Essentially, we want PhotoMerchant to become the photographers version of a HAL9000 – anticipating their every move and performing business and marketing tasks silently in the background. That is, before HAL went crazy and killed everyone on the space ship.
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