Help Google (and clients) find your website

Today I want to talk about Googling. Everybody does it. Go ahead take a second to google your business, I'll wait. Hopefully your website or blog shows up when you google your business name. Now google your business category, for example "wedding photographers in Pinehurst". Do you show up on the first page? At all?

A super easy way to be sure that you are coming up front and center is to create a Google local business listing. It is fast, free, and pretty cool. Since you just googled something you should be at a screen that looks something like this:

I show up under the local business results because I already have a listing, but lets pretend that you don't. Click on the headline "local business results for...". At the bottom of the next page you should see this:

Click on it and it will take you to a screen where you can enter in details about your business like contact information, website, hours, and it will even let you add pictures and video. I found the picture interface to be a little buggy so if the picture thumbnail comes up as "image not available" save it anyway, navigate to another page and then navigate back and it will probably show in your listing. Once all of your info is entered save it and it will bring you to your dashboard, which looks something like this:

As you can see, the details of your listing are shown at the right and on the left side of the screen it shows you a nifty graph of how many people are seeing your website and how many of those people are acting on what they see. Since I set my page up a little over a week ago I have gotten 67 impressions (the number of times people have seen my page as a result of a search) and 13 actions, including 10 clicks through to my website. That tells me about 20% of the people who see my page click through to my website. Not bad! It also tells you what words people are using to search for you so that you can use that knowledge for SEO or improving your ad. I have already gotten a client inquiry this week from my local google page. One thing to note, this page is not so easy to locate once you navigate away from it so it may be a good idea to bookmark it. The whole process takes about 15 minutes and it is a great resource for helping people find you. Have a great Wednesday (090909)!

I have to admit two things. The first is that even though I really like blogs and have several that I watch daily on my iGoogle page, I was incredibly intimidated by the thought of actually creating one. How does someone even go about it? It seems really hard right?

Fortunately for me, it is really incredibly easy. So easy that I kinda wondered if I was missing something important along the way.

This leads me to my second confession; even though I know that I should hate Google for smothering the small businesses of the world and feeding the corporate conglomerate of America blah, blah, blah I really just can't. In fact, I might just be obsessed with all of Google's services (including Blogger) to an unhealthy level, but how can something that makes my life this much easier possibly be bad?

Now that I have gotten that out of the way, I wanted to talk about what my primary goals for starting a blog are.

First, I want this blog to be a place where my photography clients (both current and prospective) can come to get a feel for what I have been up to, who I am, and how I like to do things so that they can feel confident that once we enter into a professional relationship we will be a good match. I feel that it is important for the photographer and the client to feel comfortable with each other. Photographs always come out better when both the people in front and behind the lense are relaxed and in sync.

My second goal is to share some of the information that I have gathered along the way with other photographers. While there is a lot of great information out there in books and on the web, I still feel like I can probably help other up-and-coming photographers by sharing what I have learned. I strongly feel that this profession is a never ending learning cycle. No one can ever know it all, and everyone has something usefull to contribute to the whole.

On that note, keep an eye out for new information. I have several ideas for future blogs in both categories and hope to have a better idea of the structure that the blog will take in the near future.