Expand Your Toolkit with Web Design: Build a Landing Page to Get More Views

Photographers should be expanding their abilities, and building a strong Landing Page is one way to grow.

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What is a landing page?

It is a single-page website full of information for potential clients to discover through SEO.

A Landing Page is designed to deliver the maximum information possible, on a single page, with no navigation from that page other than to your website, or your sales offer. I will explain more deeply below

SEO - Search Engine Optimization - is undergoing serious changes due to the advent of AI and its ability to search deeply and quickly.

Back in the day of music on CDs and waiting for movies to come in the mail, SEO was borne of words that would attract interest.

If you wanted someone to find your website, you would fill it with “keyword” so that the search engines would find it.

Let’s say you were a fashion photographer in Shreveport. You would fill your copy with the keywords “photography”, “Shreveport”, and “fashion”. These were the terms that would hopefully be used when a client was looking for a fashion photographer in Shreveport.

For whatever reason they would be searching for that.

And, basically, that was what we all did and it served us well all the way up to about three years ago, and then more recently about last month or so.

SEO could make or break our operation. We bowed to it, we excoriated it, we had a love-hate relationship to it.

But we did it consistently. We built it into our footers, page descriptions, image descriptions, meta-tags, and everything we could.

But now, AI is looking deeper.

And we have to do all that stuff as well as make sure the page has information that Google (and Bing, etc…), see as being valuable for the searcher.

And as close to a relevant search as one can find.

Photographers, unfortunately, are not big on lots of words on their websites.

“We let the images speak for themselves”, is a great way to have them be muted and unheard since search engines do not look at images, they track words.

This may change in the future, and there are some signs that it already is being used in places like Amazon Photos and Google Photos. But it’s probably going to be a while before it gets to the general population.

So what do we do?

We get a landing page, and we design it to make it do what the search engines want it to do.

The first thing we do is to name our page for the search terms that we believe we want to capture when someone is looking for what we do.

Let’s say that a person searching for a fashion photographer in Shreveport goes to a search engine, most likely Google, and decides to input their search.

“Fashion photographer in Shreveport” gets entered.

And all the logarithms kick in and the SEO of your image descriptions and such get indexed and all that magic behind the scenes takes place, and that photographer’s page…

Doesn’t come up.

Yeah, that happens a lot.

We can do all the work, use all the right words, and all the techniques that we have available, but it may still be lacking.

(“Well, why don’t they just look for John, since he is the Shreveport Fashion Photographer?” Good question, but the answer is simple. If they already know that John exists, they don’t have to Google for the category, they simply google him.)

But here’s something to think about.

What if John had a webpage titled: Best Fashion Photography in Shreveport with a site URL of www.bestfashionphotographershreveport.com

Google will see that fast.

And at one time all you had to do was create this address and “forward” it to your website.

Yeah, that is not working so well now. (You can do it once, but more than one becomes a negative for your ranking.)

But if that page has a few interesting things that make that page informative, and you have done all the traditional SEO strategies that we normally do, your chance of being seen is much higher.

So we build a site to reflect what Google wants to see:

This is a sitemap. It indicates the flow of information and lists the information needed for the page. Graphic made at Relume.io

ABOVE: This is a sitemap. It has nothing to do with design, just a positional list of information you intend to include on your landing page. This is how you track the assets needed to build it.

You can see that you need a few testimonials, a gallery or two, features (what you specialize in), a call to action, contact info, etc… A sitemap gives you an overview of what is going to be on the page.

This page has the information load that can attract Google and other search engines. It is only one page, and the only links are to your main website.

I am even advising against adding social media links here since we only want visitors to go to our site. We do not want to send them somewhere else where they could be distracted and leave.

What will it look like?

Below you will find what is called a wireframe.

It is a ‘sketch’ of what you want the page to look like, and how to organize the information from the sitemap to make the page visually appealing. Each item is individual and can be moved around. If you want a different ‘vibe’ to the page, you can make that change here.

From here we have several places to go.

1. We can send it to a designer. Local designers and online designers like Fiverr can take this wireframe and build it out for you.

2. We can use a program like Wix or Webflow, but they are quite proprietary and require their own closed system and hosting. Very good tools, but a rather steep learning curve initially.

3. Use a site builder like Beaver Builder or DIVI to take the design and build it out.

We will be doing number three. We will use DIVI to take our wireframe and make it into a website using DIVI’s tools and design abilities.

This is a wireframe. This gives a graphic direction to the main units of the page. You can design the wireframe any way you want. Graphic made at Relume.io

This is an easy-to-build, easy-to-maintain website approach. With the URL www.bestfashionphotographerinshreveport.com it will be a pretty strong way to capture people looking for a fashion photographer in Shreveport.

(You could create another landing page with “fashion-photography-louisiana.com if you wanted. And yet another. When you can do it yourself, you can experiment and tweak your pages for maximum return).

And this doesn’t have to cost a lot of money at all.

You can get hosting for under $6 a month, and maintenance of about 20 minutes per month can keep the site fresh and searchable.

And by adding this ability to your toolkit, it means you can offer this service to your clients. Do the photography, sell the landing page, and add a couple of grand to your bottom line.

There are sites where you can build and maintain a landing page for your or your client’s business, but they are much more costly than doing it yourself and keeping it maintained.

Here is a design inspiration site to get ideas.

If you have any questions about creating a landing page, let me know and I will see if I can help.

WEBSITE DESIGN SPRINT, SEPTEMBER 27-29, 2024

I am teaching a Website Building Sprint for the weekend of September 27, 28, 29, 2024.

We start Friday evening, then have meetings on Saturday morning, Saturday afternoon, and Sunday morning.

During the class, you will build and launch your landing page as well as learn how to:

• Plan a website project

• Create a sitemap (first illustration above)

• Create a wireframe (second illustration above)

• Work with Wordpress and DIVI to design the aesthetics of the web page

• Use the best SEO tools to help the page be found

• Maintenance and updating tricks to keep the site fresh

• Design trends (typography, colors, animations, scroll effects) and how to use them

• How to test the site

• Creating headlines, copy, and keywords to help the SEO

• … and more

We will be using a site-building application, DIVI, that is available for a 30-day money-back guarantee. You can use that to build your site, and if you decide to use another tool, what you have learned will be applicable.

ENROLLMENT INFO HERE

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When you are ready, here is how I can help you succeed.

Group Mentorship: a small group of photographers who meet to show images, work on their portfolio, and build their businesses with help from a wonderful group. Lifetime membership for one fee.

One-on-one Mentorship: You and me - working together in an intense 6-month push to get you on the way to over $30K in additional revenue. The work we lay down will help you increase and scale your business for years ahead.