When it comes to blogging, there are a lot of things that can help drive traffic to your site. Unfortunately, there are also a lot of things that you can spend tons of time on and be left with a minimal return. In this video, Corey and Dylan give photographers a solid game plan for going into 2020.
I know for me, my past blogging strategy has been to ignore blogging for six months, fill a few days with frantic blogging of past sessions, and follow with another six-month spree of ignorant bliss. What I didn't realize was that blogging these sessions was giving me little to no return. I didn't have a plan of action going into each post, so choosing keywords and optimizing for SEO was an afterthought when the post was done.
In this video, Corey and Dylan from Fuel Your Photos walk through some great examples of how to research blog post ideas as well as check those ideas for relevance. They also talk about the importance of checking your ideas and keywords against other sources of competition.
Once you have a list of ideas, they then give you some guidelines on how to make each post carry the most weight with search engines such as Google — things like the free Chrome extension Headingsmap, which can give you a great idea of how Google will process your site's headings. Corey goes on to explain that if you can't determine what your content is about from this heading map, then you probably have some work to do in order to clean things up.
Toward the end, they also give some great advice on how to best leverage some of this long-form content on your site. Instead of simply posting to your blog, you can also create a section to feature these posts on your main homepage. Not only does this lead clients directly to the content you want them to see, but you also give the new post more authority by having it linked on your main page.
The video is a solid hour-plus in length, but I feel it was absolutely worth the time.
Thanks for the feature!
I love this tool for finding out blog post topics https://answerthepublic.com/
Answer the public is fun to use for sure! I personally find that with most photography related topics, most of the suggestions are pretty weak. It feels like they just take a generic seed list and add "how to" and "what is" and other question terms. I also run into plenty of topics where all they do is add cities to the end of the query, which isn't usually very helpful. Still, I like the visualizations, and sometimes I still find a gem with it... especially when you just use very broad words. For example, putting in "maternity" gives much better results than "maternity photography."
The main reason I stopped recommending it though, is because Ubersuggest now includes a "questions" tab in the keyword research tool, and it returns most of the same results... so I just prefer to stay in the same tool that can also do competitive analysis (if I'm using free tools).
The last sentence should read - The video is 200 dollars and is a solid hour-plus in length, but I feel it was absolutely worth the time.
The video is free and is posted in this article. They are selling their full class at the end of the video, but they give plenty of great and useful content in this free video.
Blogging can clarify your thinking, and motivate you to shoot. Trying to get those posts seen is a real challenge.