Welcome to episode 67 of the Photography Marketing Masters podcast, brought to you by Zenologue Prime Focus - the place where serious professional photographers simplify their marketing to win in today's complex business landscape. In this episode I want to spend a little time on search engine optimization and SEO for photographers, and specifically how you can get Google to notice and love your photography blog.

If, like most professional photographers, getting found by the right people matters to you but you're not seeing the results you want from your own search ranking efforts, you'll love what I'm going to share with you here. Some of it might even come as a surprise or a revelation, but I promise it will be well worth our time together today.

So far in this short series, we've looked at how photography blogs help attract more clients, how to write a good blog post, and some practical tips on WordPress for photographers.

And now it's time to talk about the super-exciting and thoroughly entertaining world of SEO for photographers - yes, I know it might not sound that exciting right now, but you'll be in love with it by the time we're done here.

There's a lot of nonsense talked about search engine optimization, some of it left over from the last decade that's no longer relevant, but which many photographers can't seem to shake off for one reason or another, so I hope this will help eliminate some of that for you.

You'll also see that SEO for photographers is a lot different than it is for many other businesses, and that we need to take the generally-accepted ideas about SEO and translate them into something more appropriate to what we do.

In fact, I've personally felt for a long time that even the phrase "search engine optimization" itself has become something of a misnomer, and no longer fully represents what it is that we're really aiming for in today's world of content marketing. SEO always seems to bring to mind Google and the various tactics marketers have used over the years to try to outsmart the search engines, or to manipulate Google in some way, but we've really evolved a lot further than that.

While we still think of it as SEO, at least for now, what we're really doing is helping people to discover our photography and the stories we tell around our photographs so that we can connect with them in ways that lead to us booking more of the clients we love to work with.

This idea was actually the topic of a great episode on the "Hit Publish" podcast from Rainmaker FM called "SEO: How To Sweat The Right Stuff" where Sean Jackson talked about the idea of maximizing content discovery rather than pure search engine optimization.

That said, we should still consider making sure that Google understands what our websites and blogs are talking about, which is what I'm going to get into today.