SEO Tips: Practical Keyword Application for “Photography”

I’ll show you how to plan your keywords in a practical way and also a short presentation of how to use your keywords. Basically you need to complete two tasks when it comes to keywords. You have to think very carefully at how to choose your keywords and to develop a plan or a strategy on how to use them.

My idea on how to use keywords is based on few easy steps:

1. Choose a main keyword. Main keywords are keywords with high competition, high number of monthly searches and made out of two or more words. Although ranking for main keywords is extremely difficult you should not overlook using it in your content.
2. Develop a list of long tail keywords for you main keyword. Long tail keywords are keywords with low competition, easy to rank for, usually with high conversion rate and made out of 3, 4, 5 or more words. This will be your primary concern: ranking for long tail keywords. Long tail keywords are derived from the main keyword or related to it.
3. Plan an article for each long tail keyword.
4. Plan logical links between articles that will help the reader and the search engine find more on your subject and also evaluate the relevancy of your pages for the subject.
5. Think it like a pyramid, where on top you have the article targeting the main keyword and on the lower floors you target the long tail keywords. And just like a brick and mortar structure plan links between floors and the elements of the same floor.

Now let’s get practical and think a little bit about “photography”. This market is huge, with lots of competitors and high number of searches each month. Aiming for a good ranking on the competitive terms will not be an easy task and you should expect some hard work.

When a market is that big a good thing would be to focus on a niche. Let’s say that your niche is “black and white photography”. This can easily be your main keyword because it has a huge competition of 161 million pages and a high number of monthly searches (246,000 only in US). Now, let’s start and see what other keywords we can derive from that:

-          “Black and white digital photography” with 41,900,000 competition and 2,400 searches/month in US

-          “Black and white portrait photography” with 14,200,000 competition and 1,900 searches/month in US

-          “Black and white nature photography” with 30,700,000 competition and 3,600 searches/month in US

-          “Black and white landscape photography” with 8,370,000 competition and 2,400 searches/month in US

The long tail keywords from above could also be main keyword because of the high competition but the number of searches per month doesn’t recommend it like this. So will consider these to be the first long tail keywords derived from our main one.

A thing about photography is that people are always looking for “tips”, “principles”, “fundamentals”, “techniques”, “lessons”, “free lessons”, “lighting”, “composition” and “composition techniques”. So, these are modifiers that you can add to the long tail keywords from above to go even more specific on the subject.

Remember that each time you add a modifier you should also be able to produce an article on the subject. So modifiers that mean the same thing should be used together (combine it).

You can get more ideas for keywords not only by using modifiers but also by thinking about related searches. You can think about it yourself or you can use the Wonder Wheel from Google Searches. NOTE: you can ignore words like “and”, “the”, “a”, “an” and so on, when searching for keywords. BUT be careful at singular and plural searches: it can make a big difference not only on the number of monthly searches but also on the competition.

Here are some ideas related to “black and white landscape photography”:

-          “black and white wildlife photography”

-          “black and white photography filters”

-          “black and white seascapes”

-          “black and white underwater photography”

Each of the long tail keywords from above can be used in articles together with the modifiers presented a few paragraphs before.

If you want to explore some more:

-          “black and white portrait photography”

• “black and white portrait lighting”
• “taking black white portraits”
• “black and white family portraits”
• “black and white baby portraits”
• “black and white photography kids”

-          “black and white wedding photography”

• “black white wedding theme photos”
• “black white wedding photos styles”
• “black white wedding photos invitations”

Your turn

What you think of all this? How useful do you find this kind of information? I was thinking that besides my usual articles to also write some practical ones in which to explore different markets and to show people how to apply some SEO principles. If you liked this article please consider subscribing and receive my blog in your e-mail.