SEO for Creatives – Guidelines for Designers, Artists, Photographers & Writers

Creating a visually appealing portfolio website is an excellent starting point for acquiring new consumers. Despite this, as a small business owner, you need to expand and recruit new clients. Millions of new individuals worldwide are exposed to new information due to search engines, including information such as yours. Hence, a guide on search engine optimization is required for photographers and other creatives.

SEO isn’t only for large corporations anymore.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is not only for major corporations, although many results you get when searching Google are from well-known companies.

Additionally, small businesses and artists (including those in Columbus, Ohio) may enjoy the advantages of SEO by taking minor steps to increase their online presence and implementing them consistently.

The misconception that SEO is just for “big boys” also contributes to the illusion that it must be expensive and time-consuming – when, in fact, it does not have to be.

This is advantageous to your website since most creative websites are less complicated and time-consuming to maintain than well-known brands.

Start with hiring a web design company Columbus to make minor, low-cost modifications to your website to reap the long-term benefits of search engine optimization.

Don’t put off implementing SEO best practices any longer.

Many entrepreneurs, small and medium-sized companies (SMBs), and creatives believe that they should focus first on building their businesses and then on SEO. On the other hand, SEO is not a one-and-done sort of endeavor.

SEO demands little, continuous efforts weekly, similar to how you must make weekly updates and tweaks to your social media, email, and other marketing channels to be successful.

It does not have to be a time-consuming process, though. Find one hour every week to devote to optimizing your website’s search engine optimization. Use what you learn about SEO as the basis for your other marketing activities. You’ll be well on your way to success.The most important thing is to get started right away. An alternative is to hire a web design agency Columbus if you do not have the time to implement all this yourself.

Should You Concentrate Your SEO Efforts in a Specific Area?

It might be challenging to know where to begin if you’ve never worked with search engine optimization before.

A simple guide for creatives to concentrate their SEO efforts, master the fundamentals, and develop your company via search engine traffic is provided below.

Mobile-friendly web design 

Around a year ago, Google began adopting “mobile-first indexing” to prioritize mobile searches. For the sake of this essay, we’ll refer to your website as “mobile-friendly” to refer to how Google perceives it on mobile devices. Most essential, make sure that your website is visible on every kind of device that your visitors may be using to browse the internet.

Anyone who has looked for anything on their phone and then visited a website only to find oneself zooming in and out with their fingers on a little screen is most likely the victim of a website that does not adapt to the device being used as the most likely cause.

As an illustration, the Yale Art Department’s website is a fantastic example of this kind of website (on purpose, it seems, as anyone with a Yale ID can edit the site design). The navigation on a mobile device is too tiny to be clicked to read it. It is just as difficult to interpret the authentic text.

It is possible to avoid these problems by using a responsive website that adapts its page layout to the device being used. Check the theme’s requirements, or just resize your browser window, to ensure that your website’s design or layout responds as expected.

Photo quality and site speed

For a Columbus business website to be successful, a Columbus web design company must work on it to be adaptable and self-adjusting but also must load quickly when a user clicks on it from a search engine results page.

Remember when you had to wait for a website to load, you know how frustrating it can be. You likely used the browser’s back button to go to a different page that gave the information you were looking for more quickly. As an image-heavy creative, your website may become unusable if you have assets that are too huge or slow to load.

Even if you want to display the highest-quality photos and graphics on your website to show prospective customers what you can do for them, it may take a long time for those images and graphics to load depending on the visitor’s browser and internet connection.

By compressing the photographs before uploading them, you may enhance the speed of a slow, image-heavy website. You may either use a tool like TinyPNG (which, despite its name, uses “clever lossy compression”) or do it manually.

Another way to keep your photo files under control is to just upload what you need in terms of file size. Instead of uploading an image that is 4000x3000px in size, downsize it to fit your website’s specifications.

Google Analytics and Google Search Console are integral

You won’t know what’s going on with your site’s performance if you don’t have the means to monitor it.

Those with an itch to know: How many people go to your website each week? The only way to become better is to learn how to check it. What are your website’s most popular pages? If you don’t have the necessary monitoring tools, your Facebook and Instagram ads may not tell you how many people are going through your website and reserving your services.

In Google Analytics, you may find such information. If you’d like, you may post it to your website for free (depending on what CMS you have).

Search Console, Google’s tool for webmasters, has this feature. “Monitoring, maintaining, and troubleshooting” your site’s presence in search engine results is what Google says it does for you. You can learn precisely what visitors are looking for when they get on your site with Google Search Console (and if they are clicking you in the search result). You’ll also be informed if your site has a large number of faults that might harm its search engine rating, thanks to Search Console. Your target audience can’t find you online unless you appear in search results.

The combination of keyword research and the creation of relevant content

Keyword research is time-consuming and challenging. There is, however, an alternative. Think about what you’d type into Google if you sought service or a product like yours. Some examples are “web design company Columbus” or “website design company Columbus.”

Search on Google using the search term you’re looking for. The search engine displays what kind of results.

• Is there a map available?
• An image-carousel?
• What’s in the box?
• Do you have a list of URLs?

It is possible to leverage what Google is displaying for the phrases you are searching for to figure out what you need to do to show up for that search. Click through to read what the top-ranked content says about the subject.

• If so, how many items are on the list?
• Is there a video of them?
• How do I use it?
• How long has it been?
• What are the headings or subheadings?

With a notion of what is doing well in search results, apply skyscraper techniques to produce that sort of post — and do it even better.

Google My Business

It’s time to engage in some local SEO strategy if you see maps in a search result and your website isn’t there. Even if you run your company out of your house, you need a Google My Business account.

You may create a “service area” using Google My Business if you don’t want to include your home location. A city or state option is available. Please set it for the United States or your nation of residence if serving others.

In addition to helping you show up in map results (if you have a specific location), this may also be a site where customers can write reviews, and you can publish changes and operating hours.