5 Photography Website Blunders To Avoid

How important is your web site to you and your business? For example, if you woke up tomorrow to find the Internet had suddenly vanished, what would you do?

How would you attract clients to your business? I’m sure you would feel like you’d been thrown back into the early 1990′s!

So, I’m guessing that your web site is very important to you, and that your business would find it very difficult to survive without it, right?

Is Your Web Site Sending Clients Away?

It’s interesting then that so many photographers and businesses are not taking the proper care and approach to their web site to ensure it supplies them with a steady stream of leads and clients. In fact, without even knowing it, some of them might be sending people away!

As a photography business coach, I spend a fair amount of time looking at other photographers’ web sites, either to see what people are doing, or in the course of helping a client improve their web strategy. Unfortunately, I see a number of mistakes on many sites, which could be costing the business thousands of dollars in lost revenue through potential clients.

Here’s a quick list of my top 5 current pet peeves:

1. The Generic Artist Statement
2. No Compelling Headline
3. No Call To Action
4. No Specified Location
5. No Testimonials

Let’s take a look at these 5 areas in more detail…

By the way, there is a PDF download of this post available in the Member Resources Area.

#1 – The Generic Artist Statement

Photographers need to communicate to their prospective clients that they care about what they do, that much is pretty obvious. However, the real issue lies in how photographers are doing that. On so many web sites, I see what I call a generic artist statement, which is clearly intended to let the visitor know that they’re a professional who values what they do. Unfortunately, these generic statements are very ineffective, partly because they’re so overused, and also because they really don’t say very much that the visitor doesn’t already know or expect from them.

This is actually a bigger problem than it might sound at first, mainly because it comes from the fact that many photographers experience difficulty in articulating the factors that differentiate them from the other photographers in their community. I come across this all the time in my coaching business when I ask photographers to tell me what distinguishes them from everyone else. I usually hear responses such as these:

• “I have a passion for photography…”
• “I have a great eye…”
• “I approach photography from the perspective of an artist…”
• “I take great care and attention over every detail…”
• “I create the highest quality portraits you can treasure for a lifetime…”
• “I believe that photographs are memories, not just snapshots…”

The problem here is that all of these are required in order to be in business as a photographer in the first place! If I were a prospective client, I would not hire a photographer that was missing any one of these attributes.

Of course, it’s okay to make reference to these ideas in the web site copy in order to gently reinforce them (better still, have your clients say it for you – see #5), but the main concept we need to communicate is who we are as a human being.

It’s a bit like going out on a first date – we have a much better chance of the other person liking us if we talk less about ourselves and let our personality speak for itself instead. Common sense tells us that there are few things more likely to eliminate the chances of a second date than spending the first one talking about ourselves to the exclusion of all else!

How we come up with our own set of unique factors varies from one photographer to the next, but most of them will have little or nothing to do with the photography itself and more to do with the person – philosophy, approach, personality, business principles and other things that define the photographer as a human being.

#2 – No Compelling Headline

As a component of your marketing arsenal, the job of your web site is to persuade visitors to take the next step towards becoming a paying client. That could be calling you on the phone, emailing you for some information, joining your mailing list, or filling out a contact form.

However, before any of those things can happen, you need to keep the visitor on the site long enough for them to clearly understand what it is you expect them to do.

Unfortunately, average site statistics suggest that we have less than 2 seconds in which to catch their attention. If we fail to do that, the majority of them will leave before we have any chance to educate them about why they need our photography.

This is where we should have a compelling headline – something that will catch their eye, appeal to their curiosity, and perhaps encourage them to read further. Newspapers, of course, have been doing this for as long as they’ve been around. Billboards are another example, as are direct mail postcards and a whole host of other marketing platforms.

The headline should appeal directly to your target market, and address her needs. The more a headline can communicate a distinct and obvious benefit to the visitor the better. Economy of words is also a good idea, to make the headline quickly and easily digestible.

An effective headline is not something like “Welcome to XYZ Photography“, but rather something that communicates the reason why the visitor should continue reading.

For example:

• “Five More Ways To Make People Cry At Your Wedding…”
• “How To Get Your Children To WANT To Have Their Portrait Created…”
• “The 7 Mistakes People Make When Hiring A Portrait Photographer…”
• “How To Use Family Portraits To Decorate Your Home…”

#3 – No Call To Action

Having piqued the interest of the web site visitor enough to encourage them to stay awhile, the next problem I see is that there is no definite call to action that tells them what to do next!

Without a real call to action, all the effort of attracting the visitor, enticing them with a good headline, and wowing them with beautiful photographs and persuasive copy is all in vain.

Sure, I see most sites have a “contact us” menu item or link somewhere on the page. Sometimes, I see some vague sounding text that says something like, “contact me if you’re interested in learning more…” Think back to the dating scenario. Imagine the effect of saying that to your date at the end of the night… it couldn’t possibly result in a good outcome!

The truth is that your visitors need to be led; they need to be instructed on what to do next. That means having a very clear and unambiguous call to action. The more it stands out the better. In fact, if you think it’s too “loud” then it’s probably just about right!

Finally, there should be a call to action of some kind on every page of your web site. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that they will click to the contact page, because they probably won’t.

#4 – No Specified Location

SEO (search engine optimization) has become so important that no one can afford to ignore it any more. Actually, it’s been important for a very long time already, but most folks are only now just catching on that they need to be on top of it all the time.

One of the most critical elements in SEO these days has to do with “local search“, meaning that the search engines have become very focused on providing quality search results from the user’s local community for many types of search. If your web site is not in those search results, then you may as well be invisible.

It’s hard enough to optimize a web site for the search engines as it is, but I see so many photographers making the fatal mistake of not mentioning their city or service area on their web site anywhere!

For example, I had a photographer request a consultation with me the other week, and I was reviewing their web site ahead of our coaching call, as I always do. I soon realized that I had no idea what city the photographer was from, but the only way I could find out was to do a Google search for the area code from their phone number!

It’s no wonder that the web site in question did not come up in the search results anywhere for the simple search of “photographer in city/state“…

So, please make sure you do this! I know it sounds as though it’s really basic, but you wouldn’t believe how many sites out there are lacking this fundamentally essential piece of information.

#5 – No Testimonials

So you have some amazing photography on your site, and you know that it clearly represents what you do and is the very best you have to offer.

Sadly, no matter how incredible your work is, the general site visitor looking for a photographer can’t really tell the difference between mediocre work and great photography.

They need to be told – in words.

Forget the romantic idea that a “picture is worth a thousand words” because that’s vastly overestimated in this context. As hard as this is for some to accept, photography really doesn’t sell itself. Your site visitor isn’t going to look at it long enough for even ten words, let alone a thousand, to go through her mind before she moves on.

This is where testimonials really become powerful, and are so valuable. Not only can your clients say things about you that you wouldn’t be able to get away with saying for yourself, testimonials also allow you to communicate the emotions and feelings that your photography brings to your clients. The fact that these sentiments are in the clients’ own words lends a degree of credibility that couldn’t be achieved by simply writing them yourself.

How many testimonials should you have? The quick answer is “as many as you have photographs“. You just can’t have too many testimonials, and there are plenty of methods to elicit them from your clients. It is important to make sure you have the client’s permission to use the testimonial, which I’ve never had any problem with, and you should also include the client’s full name, city and state.

A word of warning… Under no circumstances should you ever invent a testimonial and use it with someone’s photograph, even if you believe that’s what they will actually think. By all means craft a testimonial and then ask them if it’s okay for you to use it, but I prefer to have them write it, and preferably at least several sentences.

Something that will become increasingly more important as time goes on is the use of video testimonials. This is still in its infancy, but I know that some businesses are already making very effective use of those. As photographers, it’s a natural progression for us to use video more on our web sites, yet many shy away from it for some reason.

Either way, don’t ignore the power of testimonials to persuade and sell for you.

So, there you have it, my top 5 pet peeves for web sites. I hope you enjoyed reading, and please add your comments, it’s always great to hear other people’s opinions and I read every comment personally. For example, what are your top web site mistakes?

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