Digital marketing for outdoor and adventure sports photographers (Part 1) - Choosing a web hosting supplier
The first of a series of articles providing a high-level steer related to digital marketing for outdoor and adventure sports photographers. Starting with choosing a web hosting supplier for your website.
A very rough metaphor for the situation photographers find themselves in online. How do you stand out within a big and competitive landscape? Like these climbers, climbing in the Aiguille Rouges range above Chamonix in France, you take advantage of the tools available to you and use them to help you rise to the top.
My background outside photography includes many years working with digital marketing resource, supporting a FTSE 100 company to produce high-quality digital solutions for their customers. I’m sharing some high-level information from my experience in that field as I feel it can benefit photographers plus others in the industry (for example, photographers adopting a good online approach makes it easier for e.g. Art Directors and other photography buyers to find the right people for their needs).
Do I really need a website?
Despite the current popularity of Instagram and other widely-used social media applications, at the time of writing, accepted wisdom should still steer photographers towards the need for a stand-alone portfolio website. Whether your business approach is to sell direct to customers (D2C) or to a corporate client or via an agency (B2B), interested parties may want to find out more about you than what you’re able to share on social media and, at the time of writing, a website is still the best platform to do this. By mapping out the approach you take to building to your website, optimising it for search and producing consistent, regular, high-quality content that represents what you can offer, you’ll drive the right traffic to your business and put yourself in the best possible position to find work and retain clients.
Web hosting for your photography website
From a digital marketing perspective, choosing a web hosting company that enables you to customise the content you publish online and optimise it for search is key. Important aspects to consider are;
Domain name services (DNS) - Google considers security a ranking factor so check that your domain name come with an HTTPs prefix and the HTTP version automatically forwards to the HTTPs version. In addition, you may find that your clients don’t type in the www when they enter website addresses so you’ll want confidence in your DNS that your domain will work both with and without the ‘www’ prefix (e.g. www.colinhendersonphoto.com and colinhendersonphoto.com both point to https://www.colinhendersonphoto.com).
Meta data - Page meta data is a key consideration for Google and other search engines as to how and where they rank your content. Look for a solution that will let you customise your page titles, page descriptions and URLs.
URL rewrites - URL rewrites are related to DNS. They’re not an essential feature when you’re choosing a web hosting solution but if you move content around in your website structure (or change a page name) and still want to retain your SEO value, the functionality enables you to tell search engines when they land on the old page to go to the new page. The common options are a 301 redirect (permanent move) or a 302 (temporary move).
Content management system - If you’re adding content regularly to your website, you’ll appreciate a content management system that makes it easy and efficient for you to create, edit and update pages, one which has a simple (WYSIWYG) content editor so you can format your text and add HTML markup such as headers, italics and bold text to aid online viewing.
Blog - The advantages of blogging for SEO can’t be over-stated. Blogs enable you to cover the peripheral aspects that are relevant to your business and which may be of interest to your clients and they strongly support your efforts to build up brand awareness. Be aware that the ability to present your blog using Google’s AMP functionality may make your blogs rank better but check what your pages will look like to your client (Tip – perhaps nothing like your nicely branded website).
Analytics - Understanding how many people are viewing your content and what they do next is key if you want to maximise the return on your investment. Looks for solutions that enable you to integrate a third-party product such as Google Analytic or Matomo but also check if your desired web hosting provider has their own analytics solutions built within.
Tools - Does the solution enable you to add in marketing solutions such as online forms, which you can use to gather email addresses from existing clients? Do you need the ability to include shopping functionality? Or schedule posts for specific periods? Check what options are available to you before you buy.
Note - I use Squarespace for my content management solutions, specifically for their SEO capabilities (fully customisable meta data, advanced DNS capability and blogging functionality) but also because they had a web template I wanted to use. Photoshelter had a similar web template and great database functionality plus sharing tools but I didn’t rate their their SEO capabilities (e.g. random parameters added to your database images) and their mobile functionality is behind the times (no pinch and zoom for example on mobile devices and generally a poor mobile experience overall). Up front, Photofolio were my first choice (I like the work that owner Rob Haggart does on aphotoeditor.com) and using their CMS was very easy but I couldn’t find a template I liked and the effort involved in customising the ones they offered outweighed the value I saw in it. I have also used Wordpress in the past, which comes with SEO plugins such as Yoast that makes things easier, but, overall, I’d almost always recommend Squarespace unless you need an out-the-box searchable image library, which is where Photoshelter excels (it’s possible to create one in Squarespace but it’s hugely time consuming). Your mileage of course may vary and I’d encourage you to trial them all.
Web hosting solutions for photographers
(There will be more).
Tip - Consider choosing a web hosting company that also hosts your domain name. Not for SEO advantages but for ease of administration (the less suppliers you have, the easier it is to keep track of who you’re paying for what and in this instance you’re not at great risk of putting all your eggs in too few baskets). There may also be cost benefits for your business, e.g. if you’re in the UK and you use a US supplier, your bank likely charges you transaction fees on each overseas payment.