What’s the difference between traditional SEO and AI SEO for photographers?

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Hey, how you doing? Hey, I’m good. How are you? Oh, I can’t complain. You know, it’s going to be it’s going to be a high of 75 degrees here today. Or at least where I don’t know if you’re in Asheville or not. Yeah, I can’t I’m kind of blown away with how it’s definitely like it feels like May. It is like still March, bro. I know. It’s so crazy. It’s so warm. It was like 81 or something the other day. [laughter] I know. I know. I always Saturday. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I did um I’m trying to get back into trail running because I love technology and stuff, but it’s like um I it helps to move and destroy your body so that you can get more work done in front of a SC. So I did I did 12 miles in Dupant with the dogs um on a trail run on Saturday and that was probably the farthest I’ve ever been. Um Oh, that’s awesome. Cool. I was getting 17minute miles. I did in 3 hours and 40 like 3 hours and 45 minutes. So it was uh pretty hardcore. It was awesome though. I couldn’t even move yesterday though. [clears throat] Yeah, great weather for that though. That’s awesome. I know. I know. It was awesome. So uh I think I’m trying to remember how we got connected. Uh can you refresh my memories? Mary. That’s right. And and you um I think were working with her or are working with her. Yep. I was working with Mary up for about a year and a half. Yeah. Yeah. And you and you a photographer um based out of what do you focus on? So I’m based out of Asheville and Tampa

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and I my stickick is like all things people and so I focus on weddings and large events portraits and head shot. I look at your site that’s beautiful. I love that shot there. You mind me if I give you some feedback on your website? I would love that. Yeah. And so just to like um let you know what I’m searching for. Um Mary said that she had you at one of her workshops. Mhm. Um but I was out of town so I wasn’t able to make that. And so she was like, "Man, I I really wish you could have been there for that. Um he has great information." So I’ll try and link you guys up. Um, so I really don’t know much about what you do aside from SEO stuff, but I am definitely interested to learn more about what you do. And um, I so my business has always just run off word of mouth and client referrals. So I have literally never in my life done any advertising. And so with this website, it’s a pretty new website. I’m trying to um like do some SEO, right, to get like um web uh like uh more um web traffic

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because I I never have focused on getting web traffic. Um and so yeah, that’s that’s where I’m coming from. Um, I would love any feedback that you have and also would um love to know how you pair up with people to help them. Man, these photos are just are stellar, man. You’re like probably one of the best photographers I’ve seen real recently. Um, love this shot, too, cuz this is a great like promo shot, you know? Like maybe one tiny little thing here, and this is being recorded, so if you want this recorded, let me know. Maybe take a um a a black um opacity and and knock out the this picture just a little bit so that these pop a little better. I’m done at like maybe 20% opacity or something minor. I don’t want to take away from the photo though. But you do want to maybe have this pop just a tiny bit. But I mean it’s that’s a minor little thing. But I love the photo. Love the layers, the background there. Um, you know, sometimes people will even take um a photo and fade it out. Uhhuh. Um, is another idea, but um I don’t know if that would work here. Um, but this is great that you’re showing basically your like the website totally sells you um your work. Um, you know, you could see the um, you know, you could, you know, these are all this is just super well done. Um, thank you. And you do like and this is f is this sort of the edge of fantasy

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photography or is this this is still just work? Yeah, I mean that’s still just a natural portrait but yeah I do um some stuff in the realm of like more creative art style portraits and I love how you have some video on here. It would be cool to have the video load directly on the site versus going to Instagram, but it’s again the these are these are the small little things. Most of this this is like awesome. Um so then you have the breakdown the category. I’ll be honest with you, every time I’ve tried to do SEO for photographer, I have 45 clients, right? and I um take on more when it makes sense for ongoing SEO, but every time I’ve tried to do SEO photograph for photography, it has just failed because the competition is so fierce. Yeah. Um it’s probably a nine out of on a scale of 1 to 10, it’s either eight or nine on a difficulty scale up there with real estate basically. It’s almost as hard to get Asheville wedding photographer at the top of Google as it is to get um ash as it is to get um uh ash homes for sale in Asheville. You know, real estate is like insane. Um so now that is sort of the old thing. Um what’s basically happened in the last couple years is AI and AI searches are now about half the equation. So, um, what I’m going to do is just walk through,

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um, the I mean, the only other thing I’m thinking of would be like more videos, a page with videos and your process. Um, maybe some videos throughout the site. Um, like I like to embed videos on um on u I know you’re promoting photography, but people love to see your work in action maybe. Yeah. And so to show that like process or any like five or second and I like to host them on Vimeo and put them on the site so that it’s not um taking the bandwidth away from the site but doesn’t matter where you do that. Um what about um posting on YouTube and then because I also do have um some videos on YouTube and I want to plan to do more. So I feel like that would be a good place to Yeah, I would definitely you can definitely put them on YouTube and embed. The only problem is that at the end of the video, it always shows, unless there’s a way to get around it, it always shows related content, which I think is so stupid, but I don’t know if there’s a way to get around that or if it’s changed or like with my video as the next one that comes up. Yeah, exactly. Where like I don’t think that YouTube really gives you control over that. So, let me give you a quick little training. I have a hard stop at 11:30, but I don’t mind meeting again. Um, but let me just show you this. And you’re totally on right. you’re on the right track with YouTube. Why a zero dollar YouTube video piece of 5,000 SEO campaign? So, this one company studied

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75,000 brands and they found something insane that I was like, what? YouTube mentions of the number one signal for AI visibility. So that basically means that if someone on their channel, if I go on my channel and promote you and talk about you and just say silver mean photography or your name, but mostly your brand, that is the signal for Gemini to make you show up in Gemini searches. Um, and so, um, now the other study also found that a plumbing video, plumbing company with 40 YouTube videos showing things like real job walkthroughs has a stronger AI signal than a comp a plumbing company with 200 back links, perfectly optimizing SEO, doing all the SEO, but they have no YouTube. It’s insane. It was like three It’s like three or four times stronger of a signal. Why? Well, good question. Why did you ask? I’m just kidding. Um, why are AI systems hard? Because it’s hard to fake. I mean, yes, but who’s gonna fake like, you know, a walkthrough video? Like, that’s thousands of dollars or hundreds or dozens, whatever. But then Google also owns YouTube. So, they’re looking at the text around the video. And then we’re moving into what’s called entity SEO, which basically is that your business, Silver Moon Photography, is more of an entity. And if you are in multiple places on multiple places online, not just your website, then um that’s like your website, YouTube, LinkedIn, social media, um any kind of press releases you

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do, the more places that AI can find you, the more they can triangulate, right? Because chat GDP constantly makes up ex, you know, it’s why I don’t really use it. Um it’s not that accurate. Um, and then, um, they were saying that job walkthroughs, before and afters, educational video. Uh, personally, I’m a fan of this tool here called, um, Big View. Have you heard of it? It’s called Big View. Um, it’s, uh, let me open up. It’s called Big View. This is what the color and what it looks like. It’s a 7-day trial and then it gives you a, um, it’s like $130 a year. It’s a teleprompter. video add it does does the te teleprompting it does the captions and it will upload directly to YouTube from the app. Um, what I love about it though is it does that it fixes your if you’re reading a script. I don’t know if you’re are you a one take one during video or are you a video video? So if you have a script you can read the script just make it sound like you’re not reading the script. Um, and then it will fix your eyeballs with AI. So that’s how on Tik Tok all these 20-year-olds are like how are these 20-year-olds nailing it? Like it’s cuz they’re look they’re using the apps like this. That’s so crazy. So, I would literally make one video I would think I would write down that your top 20 questions FA or that your top 10 FAQ questions that people ask [snorts]

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and then make one video answering each question and then make another top 10 FAQ questions people should be asking but they never ask you. Then make an answer video answering each of those. And then what you do is start each just like you’ve seen this. I’m assuming you’re a Tik Tocker, right? So you or you’ve been on Insta or whatever, right? So you it’s like an intro where hey, you know, I’m Michelle. We’re Silver Moon Photog and then this video we’re just talking about I’m answering some common questions. So [snorts] why should you hire professional wedding photographer versus doing it yourself? Well, here’s why. Here’s a story that um I heard or something that happened, something personalized. Stories are so much better. 23. When you share a story, it’s 23 times more likely to get someone’s attention than just like sharing something. And then end with a call to action. If you want to learn more about my wedding photography, go to Silver Marine Photography, check me out on Instagram, socials, whatever. Um, and then um and then boom, that’s your one minute video. So, you could have the script for that and you could crank out 20 of those in an hour and then uh start uploading those. Um, so I would totally do that. Um, over upload them to to your YouTube channel. They need to be on your YouTube channel. And what I would do them I would I personally you could embed them on the site is is your first option. Your second option is to put them all in Vimeo or some kind of video

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hosting service where it’s not going to show related videos. Remember that good is the enemy of great. So it just needs to be good enough. Doesn’t have to be great. Um, and then um, and then if they’re short, it seems like they get shared. Like a YouTube short is less than 60 seconds. It’s a vertical there. They they’re get they get shared and and then it seems like I would the best con the best plan of action is do shorts and then also do some horizontal like longer form content. the the actual study found that an unedited video like an unedited video unedited video of 10 or 12 minutes long where you’re just talking is actually better than anything else. Um because the the last thing to remember is that you need to you need to optimize these videos which is doing a t doing the video in a title and a question format and then answering the video answering the question in the description of the video. So, why should you hire a a professional photographer over um a friend is the question of the video. Answer that video. Professionals um know what they’re doing, have a have a work that you can look at. You get what you pay for. Do you want to do you want to inve 60 40 40 to 60 words and then for bonus points you can upload transcriptions

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to the videos after they’re uploaded but YouTube does that but the biggest thing that the study found is that AI systems can’t watch the video they don’t look at the video but they look the at the text around it so a perfectly filmed video with awesome some editing but no blank description or a title that’s just nonoptimized is totally invisible. So that’s what people get wrong is they try to spend all the time editing the quality when it just has to be okay. But yet so that’s that’s the first thing is just to give you a crash course on YouTube so you’re on the right track. And by doing that you don’t have to even show up in regular Google cuz it’s again a nine out of nine difficulty. If you were to pay me a thou I had a I’ve had a photographer who’s a real estate agent. It was a real estate agent who paid me $1,000 a month to get on the top of Google. Nothing moved in six months. But but the AI showing up for AI is like the wild wild west right now. So if you can get um and then and then and then I’m just going to give you a real fast crash course of what I went over on the actual training. So I’m going to put like an hour training into 10 minutes. Are you ready? I’m ready. Yeah. Okay. Um, it’s it’s this is the lightning round. [laughter] Um, and I don’t mind s I don’t normally have backtoback meetings, but today I to right now I do. But I’m just going to show you um quick little

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quick little um results that I’ve got skipping past the background, all that stuff. Basically, the five things to make SEO work for AI SEO is it still helps to know what people are looking for, but they’re just common questions like, "Why should I hire a wedding photographer?" Putting stuff into your content of your website helps SEO. But the biggest takeaway is publishing inner hidden pages that can have some images on them, but mostly text. That’s how to show up for AI. inner hidden pages around a subject. So, I’ll show you. This is a client of mine. These guys are Wag Bar. They’re up in um in Weaver, Vegas, and they’re like a dog bar. You literally take your dog there, get a drink, your dog could play, like a dog park/bar. And they came to me and said, "Hey, two years ago, we’re opening franchises. Can you help us?" So, step one, we made a list of dog franchises, things like that. um we started putting it into the content of the website which is important right um but what I started thinking is when I was looking at some research I realized that um so these are AI searches for the same thing like pet franchise opportunities I was looking at this the highlighted areas here this is the search on chat DDP and then these are pages that an AI is sourcing they call it citing Mhm. And then I looked at, well, look at this

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one page. Um, there’s trades here, Salty Dog franchise, and I was like, okay, well, this is a page on their site about how to own a Salty Dog franchise. So, they’re referencing that page right here. H, and they’re referencing other pages. So, it must mean that pages in your website are super important for AI. Um, but if you look at this, some of these pages are like hidden and not even in the menu or these these are long pages. And if you and if you look at these pages, they can be text pages sometimes. So, I started thinking about this really old ass movie that you probably never watched. You’re I’m guessing you’re in their ear you’re sometime in your 20s or early 30s, but us old people [laughter] late 30s. Okay. Us old people, I’m in my late 40s, we watch this movie called Fill of Dreams. And in the in the in the movie, it’s this guy walking Kevin costume walking through a field and he’s hearing a voice saying, "If you build it, they will come." Uhhuh. So he ends up building this baseball diamond and the ghost of these um famous baseball players show up at the end and I just ruined the movie for you, but um the whole movie is about f listening to a voice and following your intuition. It’s really what it’s about. Um and it’s I was thinking that’s just the same thing for AI. If you build content on YouTube on a on your website then AIs will come. It’s the same if you build it they will come. So this is what this is

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what this looks like is in the old days we used to publish some blogs make some inner pages connect some pages together. Um but basically um basically um for AI you have to blog a little more frequently. So if you could do a do you do a blog on your site. Yeah. But um not consistently. And that’s one of the things that I want to start doing. If you could every time you do an Instagram do that as a blog post or set up an automation that does that. It just needs to be an image with some text on it. Doesn’t have to be long. Uhhuh. So that’s the first thing I would think about doing. The second thing I would do is you can go to answerthepublic answerthepublic.com and you can and you can go here and you can do three searches a day and this is how you can find what people are searching for without having to pay any money. Um, and you can put in like Asheville wedding photographer. I’m assuming that it loads. Um, and I’ll come back to that when it loads. But basically what you can do is get you can search for anything in here, wedding photographer, and then it will give you a breakdown of what that search is and what are the AI searches related to that search.

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Probably things like um, how do I hire Asheville? Here we go. How do I choose a wedding photographer in Asheville? What questions should I ask a wedding? How to find a top rated? Compare pricing. Um, how do I view them? So, if you start answering some of these questions in a in a video and put that on your site or a blog or bonus points, do both. Bam. You’re answering the question. How many other photographers are doing that? The more you do that, the more you’re going to show up for AI because AI moves a lot faster than SEO. Um, does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely. Yep. And then here is the main kicker that I figured out. You need to publish a minimum of 50 inner pages around a certain subject if you want to show up for AI. I know that’s insane, [laughter] but like the studies have found that a minimum of 50 pages, so I was really bad at uh I grew up in a church and I and um no, I’m not against religious people, but I’m not really more spiritual, not religious now. Yeah. But I never was good at walking into a bar and talking to people. It just felt so weird and in authentic. But if [snorts] we we take this example of trying to pick up a hot guy in a bar, just like an example, the if the guy was an AI, a the hot AI guy, if you wanted to pick him up and get him to look at

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your business, 20 pages, he might look at you and maybe look at you from across the bar. 50 pages might be the wink. 200 pages and he’s going to walk up to you and flirt with you and try to take you home. Uhhuh. if that’s what you’re I’m just giving you an example. Yeah, a real world example. And I was like, that’s insane. 50 pages that get recognized, but 200 and they’re all fanning out from a certain subject. So each page is answering different questions. So I developed automations that do that to publish content, but you can do it. I mean, just you got to do something. So that would be the I mean when you say 200 pages that’s like 200 blogs about 200 blogs or articles. Usually they’re inner hidden pages. So here’s what I’ll show you. This is a um and we could just spend the last couple minutes looking at this. So this is a um this is a med spa that I’ve been working with um the last uh last year or so. So they’re just they’re based in West Feville. They do like, you know, Botox and chemical peels and blah blah blah. Right. And if I look at this, this is all the pages on their website. Mhm. And then, um, if you look here, this is a page that’s mostly a text page. This is the ultimate guide to chemical peels in Asheville. So, I created an AI automation that publishes inner pages that sound

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like you wrote them or the client wrote them in whatever brand, whatever brand voice, and it puts all of this content on the website about chemical peels, the type, different types, addressing skin concerns. I’ve never had a chemical peel, so it’s it’s irony, right? But I I know what it is, at least intellectually. And then FAQs about them and at the and then testimonials. And at the very end call to action, you know. And so after publishing this and then and then these are related pages to chemical peels. This one’s about um this one’s about um the benefits of glyone. I have no idea what glyone is. Uhhuh. Um how to prepare your chem your you know these are kind of like blogs. They could be blogs or they could be inner hidden pages. So this whole thing is what we call a silo is what SEO SEO people call but sometimes hub HubSpot calls them hubs whatever. Um but the bottom line is this is like the main page and these are subpages under the main page. Uhhuh. So after doing this they went to the top of Google for Asheville chemical peel within a week. Oh wow. And they have stayed up there. And so I started doing that for all the other things like for Botox and I think if you Google Asheville Botox, they’re number two now for Asheville Botox. Yeah. Because we have so much um for around Botox. Um Asheville Botox.

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They may not be There we go. Number two in maps. They were number they were the bottom of Google’s first page. And so they’re not in the in the in the search results here, but they’re in the maps, which is like um so it so I I got so tired of doing the content that I created tools that do this. Uhhuh. Um and I have an AI automation that um you know, scan your site. So I can let you play around with that tool. Let me go ahead and send you some free content here. Um and you’re welcome to use this tool. It’s called Incredible Roots. The whole idea is that websites are like trees. Um, and trees with deeper root systems get better, you know, get get better growth, right? So, I’m going to just send you this is going to send you um let me just put this in here and then I’m going to send you this output. Um, and then you can you can feel free to use this to generate some content. Um, or you can use any AI. So, what this is basically doing is scanning your site right now to sign it. What exactly do you sound like? What are your core values? It’s not just like it’s going into a big long thing. Then it finds out what are people looking for. And then it writes 25 pages of Google Docs. Wow. And puts it on your website. So, this tool is how I’ve been able to go from like maybe 30 to 45 clients in the last year. Um, the main issue, and I’m not

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trying to say I don’t I won’t work with you. I just it’s like a usually it’s like a minimum of 750 a month to put to start to do this when clients pay me. And I just don’t know unless you’re like the cash flow, unless your cash flows can support that, it’s probably better just to do it yourself is what I’m thinking. I’m not saying I don’t want to work with you. I’m just saying every time I’ve tried photography, the cash flow is it’s is it’s a little harder, right? because it’s like the the jobs are fewer and further between, you know. Um, how many months would you say? Um, like say I were to hire you at some point in time. How many months would you say it would I would think I think it I think it takes about 3 months to start really pushing the envelope. I published around 250 pages around one subject. Um, like water damage um like these companies that do water damage. It’s called they’re called restoration companies and within two weeks of putting 200 pages I start I’m starting to get I maybe been 30 days I’m starting to show up now for AI searches for people asking about water damage so I’m still not getting any leads directly but it seems like it takes about 90 starting to Yeah. But you can take the Google doc that my tool will send you in a couple minutes and you can push p publish that as inner pages. I would add some images to it. Um um inner hidden pages. Does that mean

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they’re not public? They’re not they’re not in the menu. So going back to um going back to this uh where you went. So um looking at um looking at your website, these are going to be inner hidden text pages that are not in the menu. Um, and you don’t want to leave them as text. You want to put some images. Um, and I like I like to basically rename the image as the question. Uhhuh. How many qu what question should I ask an actual wedding photography studiop? Save it as the newest image format [snorts] and then save that as your file name as your image and then use that as your title and description of your image. for bonus points. Um, and then put those images into, um, so, so, so, uh, so yeah, so that’s kind of what I would be doing. Um, and, um, so I have like, um, trying to remember the name of my page. Um, it’s I, but anyway, um, maybe it’s in here. Um there’s just way too much to show you and I ran out of time. Yeah. Yeah, you’re good. Um but anyway, so that’s what I would do is um is do some of that and remember good is the enemy of best. I probably butchered it already, but like just make

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it good enough. Um and and then honestly probably YouTube is your best bet and spending time but publishing in your pages and if you do want to talk about that in the future that’s fine, but I really need about three months to start pushing the envelope. Okay. But um my tool will publish directly on WordPress um in your brand voice or and we usually do about 20 to 50 pages a month. Cool. Just because you need you have to do so much now to for it to work. But you can do the same thing with AI. Get it to write content and do that. Okay. Hopefully this isn’t like drinking out of a fire hose, but I think it probably was in this case. Well, I mean it’s it’s exactly what I’ve been hearing. So yeah, I’ve already kind of had plans to start incorporating the video and doing a ton of blog posts and all that stuff. So um and maybe I’ll take this video and put it on YouTube or something if you you’re okay with it. But like honestly even videos like this putting it on on it on LinkedIn and YouTube answering questions. AIS love informational content like for sure like AIs are so are so much like BNI the networking group where they’re get their their core value is givers gain if you give and don’t expect in return yeah love you and also people love that too it’s like this whole so um I so um for your permission I’ll maybe put this on my YouTube and other photographers can get the same um but anyway um bottom line is just doing something will push the envelope So, um,

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and if you do nothing, then nothing will happen. [laughter] All right, great. Good information. Um, you seem like the guy to know and so I um I mean, you know, I would love to talk to you more in the future. I know you got set up set up set up a follow-up meeting if you want to meet again. And I normally will have I usually try to spend an hour getting to know someone and not not 30 minutes, but it’s Monday, so yeah. Well, thank you for meeting me. I super appreciate it. Awesome. Let me know if you come across any service based companies that you know have 1 to 2k. Most clients are paying closer to 2k a month for me, but if you know of [clears throat] anyone out there, let me know. So, yeah. Okay. Awesome. Cool. Thank you so much. Thanks so much. Yeah. Good to meet you. All right. Bye. Bye. choose wealth.