Everyone thinks SEO is really hard and really expensive. There is some truth to this, and it’s understandable that many people who set out to achieve SEO results end up giving up. It takes a ton of time and commitment to rank #1 in a competitive search phrase category.
One thing that we help our clients here at SkyPoint Studios achieve is higher SEO results in Google. Today I want to introduce a way to achieve higher SEO results without having to spend any money on SEO services. This cool little trick is based on photography in your local town and adding those photographs to your website.
This doesn’t mean you have to be a professional photographer or hire a professional professional photographer to do these photos. It can be simply done with a high-quality mobile phone. For example, if you wanted to rank for Billings, Montana or Laurel, Montana or Lockwood, Montana, you would want to go through the city and take photos of all the main attractions.
Take photos of the main stores, the intersections, the parks, the schools, the fire department, the police department, etc. Next, take photos of all these and then label them properly to achieve the SEO trick.
What do I mean by labeling properly? That means that the exact keywords someone will be searching for to find that particular photograph need to be put in as the image title label. Let’s take the Lockwood Fire Department for example. If someone is looking for a photograph of the front of the Lockwood Fire Department building, they will put “Lockwood Fire Department” in Google image search.
This needs to be put on the actual title of the image. What is the title of the image? It is usually just a bunch of letters and numbers from the camera so that’s the actual image title that will be on the image when it’s on the desktop of the computer.
Transfer the images from phone to desktop and then take all the images and rename each one with the exact key phrase that would describe the photograph properly, with the location and then the city and area where it was taken. So “Lockwood Fire Department Lockwood Montana” for example.
This will help Google to orientate the photos when someone is searching for that particular photograph on Google images and will help to achieve this SEO trick. After a search for the keyword that matches the image the website comes up with this photograph that is high resolution, it will then be clicked on by the visitor who will go to the website and will download the photograph.
How does this help? It drives traffic to the website and the more traffic driven to a website the higher the Google search rankings will be. Now that the visitor has been provided with value because of the free photograph to use for their projects, they inavertally create value for the website the image is on.
It’s a cool SEO trick and all it cost was the click of a camera and the time to label and upload and now more traffic will be driven to the website. I highly recommend trying this out by taking photographs of the local city and adding them on pages on the website.
What I do is add one main image page, for example: “Billings MT Free Images” will be the name of the main page and then I would create sub pages for all of the locations around Billings. One sub page might be downtown Billings for example and all the images of downtown Billings will be placed here.
Another page might be West End Billings and have all the images from the west side of Billings, then I would link off to all those pages from the main Billings free images page and then put that link in my footer or somewhere else where people can find it relatively easy.
Does all this make sense? If your having a hard time figuring out how to pull off this SEO trick, get a hold of me and I will advise you on how to go through it.
Read next: Making Stock Images Unique
Leave a Reply
Want to join the discussion?Feel free to contribute!
Leave a Reply
Customer Support
____________________________________________ Looking for SEO in Billings, MT? Ask us why we are the secret ingredient to your business ranking #1
SEARCH OPTIMIZATION
____________________________________________ Looking for SEO in Billings, MT? Ask us why we are the secret ingredient to your business ranking #1
SEARCH OPTIMIZATION
This is a fantastic idea! I just launched a web design in my city in North Carolina and I was actually able to include the city name in my domain name, long with the word “design”. This would work perfectly for my site. Now I just need to get out and take some photos!
Great idea Jason! Wish you all of the best with your design firm (:
What’s the domain name for your firm, Jason? Might as well drop it here for some extra SEO (:
Thanks, it’s greensborodesign.com the site is a work in progress btw!
I live in Washington state. I wonder if it would be beneficial to travel to all of the big cities and do a page of photos for each one. Or just do the photos when I happen to be travelling to that particular city.
Brilliant and clever idea btw.
If your business covers those areas, it would be a good idea. The more resources you offer in each area, the more dominant the site will be in Google. Don’t forget to update these pages regularly for even better results. Good luck! (:
I’m a big fan of this and I feel it could be expanded to many different categories on the internet too, not just local listings. I always make sure my images have the correct titles in them, and it’s helped me quite a bit for SEO. Would love to see some other SEO tricks that you have, I bet you have some other great ones 🙂
Thanks Ella! Yes, making sure the the correct alt image info is set and the image title is set correctly to describe what is the subject and location of the photo. This will help immensely with your website SEO!! (:
It does take time to rank in search engines. I’ve had mild success on my own. When I hired an agency, I had a lot more success, and after I ceased working with them, the benefits did last about a year or two, but my ranking dropped again. SEO work is something that needs to be continuous imo.
SEO requires the most on going work and maintenance to achieve compared to most other actions online. The more energy put into the content and backlinks, the better the SEO will be.
With the insanely amazing cameras on smart phones theses days, not to mention the high quality photo editing apps, you can take some very pro looking photos!
So true! Its a simple thing to do and easy for most people to take some photos of the local town and upload to their website. Free SEO!
So do high res images show up higher in Google search results?
Will this trick still work with med res images?
It’s not necessarily that high res images show up higher in search results, however, the person looking for the image is wanting high res, so they are more likely to click on the image and visit your website to get it. There’s a fine balance to play as don’t want the images to be too large of files, so a hybrid between high res and web ready is the best for doing the SEO image giveaway trick.