Picturing Success
How a comprehensive SEO effort tripled visitors for a Mastermynde client
The product: Photographytips.com, a website offering tips and techniques for photographers from beginners, to advanced amateurs and professionals.
The mission: To increase traffic and revenue in the highly competitive online photography resources market, using proven SEO/SEM techniques.
When Mastermynde principal Leif Jason was recommended to Dan McCormick, all he wanted was more potential customers finding his photographytips.com website. With a range of useful advice and products for shutterbugs available to site visitors, selling them on the value of photographytips.com wasn’t the top priority. Dan knew all he needed was for visitors to find his site. The combination of great content and innovative offerings, such as his unique Guide to Posing the Female Model, would do the rest. But, as the business relationship developed, McCormick discovered he gets far more from Mastermynde than just search engine optimization.
Great Results and Good Advice
“When Leif came on, it was essentially SEO (search engine optimization) and marketing,” says McCormick. “The name of the game was to increase traffic and revenue. But with what Leif has done, he’s actually become more than that. He’s become my chief advisor when it comes to anything to do with the website and computers and the market itself. So, not only does he do things that increase revenue and increase traffic, but he’s a great resource in other areas as well.”
One of the first things Mastermynde did to improve the site’s rankings was ensure the page headings for the photographytips.com site featured SEO-friendly titles, headings, and meta-data.
“We made sure the pages on the site had unique and page appropriate content in the title, META Description and H1 areas,” says Jason. “Dan already had great content. It just didn’t look like unique content to the search engines.”
He notes that these factors (page titles, meta-data, and content) are extremely important in building your search ranking and convincing visitors to click through to your website from search results while good quality unique content keeps visitors coming back.
“It’s a crucial step in search engine optimization,” Leif notes. “Make sure your titles, meta-data and web copy incorporate search phrases describing what you are writing about and matching the search terms your target audience is using. It’s a cost-effective tactic to ensure your site is giving search engines the results that will improve your traffic. Obviously it’s best if you can incorporate that information at the outset, but it’s also possible to revise a site that’s already up and running, so it’s helpful to almost any situation.”
Focusing on Opportunities
McCormick’s association with Mastermynde has also led to the development of innovative products to take advantage of popular new technologies.
“When I was looking to create an iPhone (and iPod Touch) version of the posing guide, Leif recommended a programmer, helping me create a new product, from its birth, right through to ongoing sales success,” says Dan.
Not surprisingly, with Apple products a ubiquitous sight amongst creative professionals, this new variation on the posing guide has been an instant hit.
Mission Accomplished: Photographytips.com is now one of the top-ranked photography sites on the Internet. McCormick definitely got his hoped-for increase in visitors and revenue. The site went from relative obscurity, right to the top of the results for a number of crucial search terms. That increased exposure to potential customers quickly paid dividends.
Within a month of initiating a comprehensive SEO effort, photographytips.com site traffic nearly tripled, to over 70,000 visitors per month, with peaks approaching 100,000 visitors per month. These impressive results are a testament to the difference search engine optimization can make for web sites that have desirable content but low visibility.
The trend continues. The site still boasts a steady increase in traffic, more than three years after Mastermynde began the SEO program. Along the way, photographytips.com has also been recognized as a valuable online resource by media outlets from around the world, including the BBC, USA Today, PC World magazine, and others.
For Dan, the benefit of increased traffic has been accompanied by greater peace of mind regarding his web business, “I have learned and grown into a sense of real confidence and faith in Leif. I rely on him enormously.”
Using proven techniques and expert analysis, Mastermynde has made Dan’s website one of the most visible photography sites on the Internet and the combination of a great search engine ranking and positive reviews from users and industry experts has photographytips.com’s future prospects looking as pretty as a picture!