Photography News

Ranking on Photographers.com.au

October 6, 2017 by Photographers.com.au

Whilst it’s not quite a complicated as Google’s famous ranking algorithm, we have gone to some effort over time to try to push the best results to the top for potential customers who are searching for a professional photographer.

Behind each profile on the site is a score. This score, combined with three other things (location, subscription status & responsiveness… we’ll talk about those later) dictates how high up the search results you’ll be on any given search. This is obviously really important – if you’re a wedding photographer in Adelaide, for example, you want to make sure that your name is in the top few results, or at least on the first page.

The biggest factor in this score is your profile completeness. Searchers (potential customers), don’t want to see profiles devoid of images, information and a just a few lines in the description. They want to see a profile page with plenty of images, reviews, a detailed description of the business and details of accreditations and past work history. So we reward those complete profiles with a higher score and therefore a higher ranking.

The Big Three

  • About Us – Write at least 250 words of unique content. Make it compelling – talk to the customer and tell them why they should get in touch with you
  • Reviews – Ask previous/current clients to hop on your profile and leave a review. Note that all reviews are manually vetted so may take a day or two to become live
  • Portfolio – Stating the obvious but without showcasing your images, you’re not going to impress potential clients. At least 25 images across your main fields are recommended.

Other Items

Testimonials, Clients, Awards, Affiliations & Social Media Links each add a small amount to your overall score but don’t worry too much if you don’t have much to complete here – this only makes a small difference.

 

So check off above and, not only will your profile page look great (and therefore convert more enquiries) but you’ll rank higher throughout the site. So it’s a double win – greater visits and a higher visit-enquiry rate!

Now, the other factors… let’s look at these in turn.

Location

Simply speaking the closer you are to a requested location, the higher you’ll rank.  But this is multiplied against your profile score so more often than not, you’ll see photographers located outside the locality at the top of results.  The way distance is calculated is logarithmic (so my nerds tell me!) which means that in the immediate range, there’s hardly any difference.  This makes sense – if you’re looking for a photographer in a particular suburb, one in an adjoining suburb is almost as good, right?  The distance maxes out at 200kms so beyond that you won’t show up.

Subscription Status

Simple – pay us your hard-earned and you’ll show up higher.  We need income to pay for marketing the site so we unashamedly reward photographers who take on one of our packages with a rankings boost.  In fact, paying photographers receive approximately 14x the amount of quote requests as the freeloaders basic members.  We also find this adds value to the customers as someone who’s paying is likely to be a little more responsive and, on average, a little more professional.  Packages start from a measly $113/year inc GST

Responsiveness

This is a new one.  Sometimes we have customers keen to hire make a quote request to a couple of photographers but not get any response.  It doesn’t happen a lot but, in our opinion, once is too much.  It’s the ultimate let-down for the customer and destroys the value of the site.  So, if you get a quote request and ignore it, you’ll get a small temporary penalty on your score for the next few weeks.  Do it twice over a 60 day period and the penalty increases (but it’s still not large).  It sounds harsh as I’m typing it out but I hope the logic is clear.

Hope that helps de-mystify the ranking on photographers.com.au!

Photographer here...

Leave a Reply

Want us to do the hard work?

You can book a pre-vetted photographer instantly with the Snappr service