Sara Dunn 0:26

Thank you so much for having me on. It's so fun to see you for real. instead of just your Threads account and the things that you type into threads because that's how I met you and fell in love with what you do. So it's awesome to get to chat with you and have a little bit more of an SEO conversation and I. I can find any opportunity to talk about SEOs, but I know it's not everyone's favorite topic. so I'm really excited for anyone who pressed play and, I'm talk a little bit more about how I became such a nerd for it. So. background is actually in digital marketing. It's not in the wedding industry particularly. I started my own business making websites in 2012, and part of that process, when you're making someone website, eventually someone will look at you and say, will this website help me get found on Google? And when 24-year-old Sarah got asked that question, I was like, of course it will. But I had no idea what that actually meant. And so I started to actually teach myself SEO as part of my web design process, and it really became. Part of what my agency became known for was creating websites that actually ranked in search engines and not just looked pretty, but actually brought our client's business. And for years I did most of my networking and client work in southwest Michigan. So I was working with all. sorts of We're talking lawyers, dentists, mortgage companies, like Not the most exciting topics, but that was the business that I was getting until 2017. I got my first wedding planner client. and let me tell you, that was so much more fun than working with law firms and mortgage companies. And oh my gosh, we had such a great time. She was a major wedding planner in one of the biggest markets in the US and I actually didn't get to make her website. She called me in because someone else had recently made a website for her and it actually tanked her Google And so she was like, if you know something about websites and you know something about SEO, can you fix this because everything's on fire. Like I was on page one for years. Now I'm on page nine. No one's finding me. I'm not getting any inquiries and can you fix it? And I was like, I am pretty sure I can, but I've never worked on a website I didn't build before. So let me try for free and we'll see if it works. And oh my gosh, I had such a great time working with her. Guided the strategy, gave her some blogging strategies to use, fixed everything that was technically wrong, and we got her back to page one in just a few months and. I have heard to thank for all of this because then she was like. You're amazing. I love you. Who can I tell about you? And she got me all sorts of additional wedding industry clients. So that's when Sarah does SEO was born. Um, first client to thank, and I've been focusing completely on wedding SEO for over seven years Social and world events, Yes. Yeah for sure I get to be an observer sometimes and be like, okay, I'm looking at so many wedding businesses all at once, and I get to see what people are doing differently and how they're responding to different things. And that's always really interesting to me as Like an optimizer mindset. I'm like, what's working? What's not? How do we do more of what's working? So I always have that in Yeah. The first time I did it, I didn't know what I was doing. It was I worked for an electrician. I discovered he was number one on Google. Before I was gonna redesign his website and he was like, I wanna make sure that we stay number one on Google when you do this. And I was like mm-hmm, Okay. Um, and at that time I was like, I don't know. So I Google myself learning how SEO worked. I was watching videos and just like trying to figure out why he was number one on Google to I could, so I could retain those rankings when I redid his website. So that first time, I mean, self-taught, figuring it out myself, and I enjoyed it enough. That I ended up investing in actually getting SEO education, going to a live workshop in person. That was a multiple day workshop on how to have SEO as a process Um. incredible. I mean, of the reasons that I teach SEO now because actually learning a process for it was such an unlock for me as opposed to just, okay I'll, I'll read blog post. I'll go to this webinar, I will try this thing. It was like a woman stood in front of me who was an SEO expert, and she went, you need to do this first. Put this into this spreadsheet, look at these numbers, make this decision, and then put these keywords here, here, here, and I was like, that's a lot more organized than how I've been doing it. So now I try to really be inspired by that and teach my SEO students in the same Yes. So the number one thing that I see as an issue with wedding businesses who have DI Yed their own SEO, is they become obsessed with just one keyword. So, I bet anyone listening to this can think about, what's that one keyword you keep Googling to see where you show up in the search results? And it's usually, plus the phrase wedding photographer, right? So you're typing in your city or. State or your province and you are adding wedding photographer and you're like, where am I today? And yes it is really important to think about that one main keyword that describes your location and then your service. But what people do wrong is then they overdo it and they're like, I'm gonna put Detroit Wedding photographer on every page of my site. I'm gonna write that in the title of every single blog post. I'm gonna make sure that. It is on my website 5,000 times. And the problem if you do that is you're really over optimizing and really looking to Google like you are trying to manipulate the search engine rankings. So when I teach my SEO framework, what we do is we actually choose a unique keyword for each page of the website. So if Detroit wedding photographer is your most important, we optimize your homepage for that. Then we might optimize your about page for maybe a specific suburb of Detroit where you're actually located. Maybe it's Birmingham, Michigan photographer on your about page. And then maybe your services page is something like Michigan photography in general. So we're using slightly different keywords. We're not just obsessing about the same one and putting it everywhere on the website. So that is really core to my SEO framework, that concept of which page on your website do you wanna get found for which search? And is that a good fit? And Then once you've done that, you get to like, take foot off the gas on the pages of your website and move on to blogging strategy. Um, blogging is so important. If you wanna expand your reach beyond just one keyword and get found for really relevant searches, maybe when people aren't quite yet searching for their photographer, you can get found for so many other things. That's what I would recommend as far as like the basics of what to do and the most common mistake not to It looks very over optimized The other problem is you can actually cause your own content to compete with itself. So if you've got Detroit wedding photographer all over the homepage and the about page, Google can't decide which one you actually wanna show in the search results. So it's gonna rank both of those pages This is the common misconception Everybody thinks that you're trying to make your entire website look relevant for one keyword. When you're actually trying to rank one page, what shows up in the actual search result, it is a blue link to one page on your website. and to decide which page that is. So when someone searches for Detroit wedding photographer, most of the time it's your a homepage that's gonna show up And so we don't wanna compete With the about page, we can use the about page to rank for something different and then we get even more traffic. It's So many people come to me and they're like, Sarah, if I'm gonna redesign my website, I wanna choose the best platform for SEO. What is it? like? Give me the magic answer. What do I need to be on? And this is a question that I will never give one answer to because I actually think it is more important if you're a small creative business owner. I want you as a business owner to be so comfortable going into your own website, making changes, adding galleries, adding blog posts. if if you end up on a platform that you hate, that you won't log into because you're so overwhelmed, then you'll never update your site, and that's the worst thing for your So I've seen them all rank. And in my SEO agency, we work on websites on show it Squarespace, WordPress, Wix, and Pixie Set. and we've been rank all of them. So I, I really think that A photographer should choose whatever platform makes sense to them. Not whatever platform their friend likes or the web designer they wanna choose only works on one. Like figure out which one actually makes sense to your brain. 'cause for some people it show it, for some people it's pixie set. For some people at Squarespace, so they all can rank. They're It can, if they don't handle it carefully, There's a couple things. If you are gonna switch platforms, You have to make sure that you bring over any content that's ranking right now. One of the biggest mistakes when people switch platforms is they don't bring all their blog content with them. A lot of are like, oh, this is actually pretty old, or, it doesn't represent my style anymore. I'm just gonna start over. But if you had this nice backlog of 40 blog posts. they could be ranking, they could be linked on Pinterest. They could be bringing you traffic and they're making your website bigger. They're making more helpful resources on your site. If you'd redesign and your site is now five pages instead of 50, it looks way less significant to Google. You have less helpful stuff there. There's less reason for Google to send traffic there, and so we don't want to just. Willy-nilly delete dozens of pages in a transition. So I generally recommend if you're switching platforms and you rank really well, this is a rare situation where I'm like, you should probably pull in an expert to help handle that transition because you really can. Just like my very first client um, was getting most of her business from Google, did a website redesign and then lost all her inquiries There is the potential for that if you rank well and you're going to switch your website, so bring over your blog content. The other thing is you have to make sure that your SEO is set up on the new site before it launches. So don't do the thing where you're like, oh, I'm just rushing 'cause it's engagement season and I want this beautiful new brand up. And I'll worry about the SEO later. Because if it is like three later, Google will have already seen, oh, this site doesn't have keywords on it anymore. Um, broken. The SE o's not set up, and you'll lose your rankings pretty much in the first seven days. They'll start to go down if you don't have your SEO set up properly in that Ooh Yeah. Okay, so here's what happens is that Google has A finite amount of resources to go out and check out what's on the internet, And so it's gonna send a crawler to your website every so often. Now this might be, you know, it comes a couple pages, maybe once a week. But If it finds that those pages haven't changed, you haven't added anything new, it'll start coming less often. So sometimes we get into sites and Google hasn't really crawled it in a couple months because the site hasn't been updated at all. I'm not saying you need to go into your website and like arbitrarily update something, but just know that if you start making changes and Google isn't coming to your site very often, it takes a long time for Google to notice. So they're gonna send out their bot to crawl your website, see what you got going on. This is called crawling and And then they're going to kind of put your the index, and then as they change the way that the Google algorithm works, you can move up and down based on the quality of your content versus everyone else's. So not exactly searching the internet every day. It's just updating its own database of what every website on the internet looks like and has on every Once in a Absolutely. Yeah. I think One blog post a month is really what's realistic for most wedding pros. Especially solopreneurs I don't think you need to be a full-time blogger. If you put something quality out once a month, you are probably creating more content than your competition So Google comes out to your site, they discover you have put the right keywords in the right places. They're like, okay, we finally understand that you're a Detroit wedding photographer. And you've got great content. And so now we're gonna reconsider. how high quality you are versus the other websites that are also options. So we just wanna be making tweaks that help us improve our site quality, our reputation um, you to the site. All of those things show that we're a high quality business and trying to help searchers to get the information they need and find a great So number one thing is to optimize the homepage of your website. and by optimize I mean put the keywords where the search engines are looking for them. Search engines are all just robots that have been trained to go out to the internet and look for certain clues to understand the content that's there. And so we as SEO professionals have kind of studied what clues they're looking for, and that's how we develop best So we know when Google comes to your website, it's looking for a heading near the top of the page that says what the title of that page is. It's usually our most important keyword, so maybe it's Austin Wedding Photographer. Google wants to see that near the top of the page because that helps them understand you're an Austin wedding photographer. It gives context to the rest of the Google also wants to see probably that you mention that in a sentence somewhere. Okay. I'm a wedding photographer based in Austin, Texas. I have this many years of experience. I offer these kind of services. We have to use text to help search engines understand what we do, which I know is a really sad thing to say to photographers. Um, you all want your work to really speak for itself. and be visually appealing. Um, not saying you have to have a big wall of text on your website if you wanna rank, but you do have to have. Written content that describes your business if you want to rank, And then Google has a few other things that it may consider, like the SEO title of the homepage, pretty important. That's what up usually as the blue link if you're included in the search results, and it's usually in an SEO settings panel. So show it has one. You'll go to SEO settings. It'll say page title. We wanna make sure your most important keyword is in that box. Austin wedding photographer. Then you usually want that keyword in your description as well. So, an Austin wedding photographer specializing in destination weddings and documentary style film photography, whatever is to describe your business and why you're different. So those are the clues. These are the places that Google is looking for your keyword to understand what you do, and that's where we wanna put it. So that's step number one. Optimize your homepage for your most important keyword. Does that And a lot of people will give you like a minimum Of a number of words. I've heard 300, I've heard 500 words for a blog post, but my guideline is I could tell you 500, but if everything else that's ranking for a particular keyword online has a thousand words, you may need to write something that's longer in order to compete. So How long a blog post needs to be, depends on what keyword you're targeting with that blog post and what's already ranking, because people don't think enough about how the search engine results are just a comparison of what's out there. You're trying to create the best content out there on a specific topic. Is yours more in depth? Is yours more helpful or more interesting? That's what's gonna help you to rank higher and to search engines. That usually does mean writing more so that they have more context about what is going on about that topic. So for example, if you wanna rank for big sir elopement, the location in California so popular, lots of photographers are like, I wanna rank for big Sarah Elopements. I'm like. Great, awesome. You're gonna need a blog post that's probably at least 7,000 words. because that is how in depth the content that ranks on page one for that term is already. So you gotta go out to the search results and look what are you up against and what could you bring to the table that's even more helpful, different special. And for some keywords, it's harder than So a lot of it is about Trying to figure out what's the most in depth? And they train their systems to figure out, um, yeah, you know what it's looking is the grammar correct? Have you talked about something that none of the other ranking blog posts have talked about? That means you're bringing something unique to the table, so. Maybe in the big sir elopement post, nobody has given um, the best seasons for a big sir elopement. You're like, Ooh, I think couples would really find that helpful. And so you add that to your blog post and no one else is talking about it. So we don't always know what Google's been trained to look for. And so what I really recommend is that we don't necessarily always think about the algorithm. We think about how we can best serve the human that is searching for that keyword. Because ultimately that's what Google wants to reward. They want to help real people find the best answers to their questions. And so instead of us trying to be like I, you know, what is Google looking for? I want you to be like, who's the person who wants to elope big sir. What do they need to know to make the decision on if they should, when they should do it, what they should wear um, what the location would be like. Think about that person and what they need in that moment, and how can you deliver them something that really answers all of their questions? That's the most important angle to take because. we don't know exactly what Google's looking for, Um, but we make sure to serve the searcher Absolutely not Yeah. And here's what we're finding in this age of AI tools that can write for you. Google is looking more and more for the unique things that haven't been said. because something that nothing else on the internet has said, then you probably actually have firsthand experience with the topic. Me never having been to Big Sur, never having photographed an elopement. I could ai right for me, right now, a blog post about how to plan a big sur elopement. But all it's gonna know, all it's gonna take is information already on the internet and it's gonna spin it up and it's gonna consolidate it and it's gonna spit something back So Google's training its systems to say, is this basically what everyone said already? Let's try to find an article that shows firsthand experience and something unique because that indicates that it's not just AI written content, it's a real person bringing their expertise to the topic. yeah, and this is totally my opinion, but I feel like I'm someone who can identify AI written content. 'cause it's my job to spot patterns. And so I start being like, why is everyone it's not this, it's that. in their content. like there's tells and even, in. AI written blog posts for the wedding industry. You see that chat. GPT likes to use the same words when it's writing about weddings. 'cause it's just been taught that people love the word swoon and they, or we need to figure out what AI written content looks like and we need to work harder to train AI on our voice, our preferences, avoiding really trite patterns in the I'm not necessarily against wedding pros using AI for simple things like real wedding blogging. Okay we need to tell the story of a wedding day. It doesn't have to be the magnum open, like the best novel of all time. We do wanna get something up that describes that wedding day. So I don't wanna discourage the use of AI for that kind of blog where you're just trying to tell a story, show your imagery, and get it out there. if you're trying to write something in a really competitive topic for SEO uh, elopement guide, a list of your favorite venues in a location handwriting, at least some of it is going to bring a lot to that content. And maybe you use AI to help you write the introduction or the conclusion or the tougher bits, but at least try to hand write some of it in your own Yes. And telling ai, Use my style of speaking as the style of writing like me. and Things I would say that's not perfect. I've said that to AI a lot. when I give it a video transcript and it doesn't Do amazing, but at least it does better than the really flowery language that it starts with for the wedding the It's so bad right now I don't yeah Yeah I'm out on AI generated clones No thank you Not doing Yeah I wanna talk about the fact that we're all using AI basically as our personal assistants and So are engaged couples. So a lot of people are starting to use Chachi, bt, or Claude, or their AI tool of choice to assist them in their wedding planning. And that can mean asking for vendor recommendations. So I'm seeing it more and more in our client's inquiries, you know, how did you find us CHA GBT AI search? Um, actual inquiries come in that say, I heard about you from CHA GBT. So it's a really exciting opportunity. It is something that I've seen my clients and my students get really excited about, and yes, I am absolutely diving into the world of AI search optimization. How do we get our own businesses to get recommended by these AI tools? Like we want to show up, like imagine ideal client is asking for something super detailed. I want a wedding photographer and this location that has this kind of style that's at this budget level, and you're the perfect fit. Like you want that tool to be like, this is the photographer for you. Well, how do we that? It's definitely something we've been studying, but before we go too far down that path. because this is so exciting. I do wanna say that this is such a tiny percentage of the search market still. So if you're hearing people online say, oh, Google is dead, everyone has moved to just asking their AI tools. every this is not true. In the wedding industry, we still see Google search Drive 70% of our client's traffic. And I've never seen more than 4% of website traffic come from an AI tool to any of our wedding industry clients. So I don't want anyone to get so excited about AI search that they just wanna throw traditional SEO in the trash. Because there's still so much opportunity to get found in a Google search, and it's important that we do Absolutely there was even, um, I should actually know the exact stats off the top of my head, but I would really recommend the wedding report from Think Splendid, which is a company that does a big survey and study of engaged couples about how they planned their wedding at different budget levels around the world. And they found that even in the ultra luxury price point, more than half of couples hired a vendor they found in a Google search. So, people keep saying that all of these clients just come from planner referrals. It's not true. According to the data, even the highest budget clients are finding their vendors through online I really recommend also having Google business profile. so. That is Google's free listing service. It's basically one of our only ways we can talk directly to Google about what your business is, where you're located, what services you offer, and it's so important to gather Google reviews. And again, even if you're more excited about AI search than Google search, I was doing some test searches yesterday on Claude. I know a lot of people have switched to using Claude and I asked for the best Wedding photographers in Roanoke, Virginia. And it pulled up an actual map inside Claude and gave me four names that I had never heard of before. And I was like, who? who are these people? And I did the same search on Google and I realized that those results came directly from the Google Map results. So it was showing the same top three businesses that were at. the top of Google Maps, including their rating and their review count direct from Google Business Profile. So even if you don't care about Google search anymore and you just wanna be found in AI tools, Claude is actually sourcing from So set up your Google Business profile. Make sure you fill it out completely. Make sure the photos on there are actually updated and represent your current work, not just your cover photos from seven years ago and doesn't even look like your photography anymore. Like that thing needs some love. That was like the number one thing I tell people if they haven't touched their SEO in years, like. go search for yourself and make sure what shows up on the right hand side on desktop. Actually looks like your work. That's where I Yes So if you've never done the step one that we talked about earlier today, optimizing your homepage is really gonna give you the boost and the awareness with Google that you ai, search, all The things. The other thing that I really wanna recommend that photographers do is consider where you can exist. Off of your own website? So most of the things that we talk about with SEO, everyone's like, what do I put on my site? What do I blog about? But keep in mind, all of these search tools are looking at how you're represented across the internet. They're looking for signals that show that you're trusted and respected. So are there Best of lists in your area? Can you get on those? Are there publications in your area that write features on local business owners? Can you get one of those? Are there listing sites in your area or associations where you can be mentioned and linked? All of those things show that you are a high quality business that other people trust, so, if you wanna show up higher. in Google or other search tools six months from now. it's important to build up your online presence and reputation beyond your own website Awesome. I loved your questions I loved where we went with this so yes, this was amazing. Yeah so I'm Sarah does SEO on every single platform. That's Sarah without an H. So Sarah does seo.com is my website. I'm also, that as my handle on Instagram and TikTok. so wherever you wanna connect, And if you wanna kind of dip a toe into SEOI do a free monthly SEO lunch and learns. 30 minutes every single month on a different topic. And I'll teach you something simple and actionable to do to improve your SEO. It's super fun. I love it. There's no pitch and we get to hang out. So I'd love to see anyone on lunch and learn who wants to leave, learn a little I'd Hi