Loosing To Competitors! Way Behind In Google SERPS! Please Help!

My friends website is currently last when you search "Wedding Photographer San Francisco, CA" in Google. What can we do to improve this? Here is his url...

http://www.peterbrucephotography.com

 

I would try and get as many backlinks with the anchor text "Wedding Photographer San Francisco, CA" as you possibly can. Especially from relevant websites.

 

Is there anything he is currently doing wrong as far as on page SEO and coding goes? The h1 and h2 tags on his page are they ok or should they be changed? Should we change the title of his site? What about all the links at the bottom portion of his page, should they be removed?

 

I see you have a sitemap, but I would recommend some good old fashioned keyword rich text links in your text. Other then this text:
San Francisco Wedding Photography and Videography

{Capturing the moments of your day }

Serving the entire San Francisco Bay
Area for Wedding Photography and Videography. You get the best
of both worlds utilizing both film
and digital. Everything from your
wedding day and engagement poses
to the best man's toast...

...you really don't have much content on there. Remember, "Content Is King"

 

Sorry, I didn't see the bottom of your page. That may seem spammy to the big three

 

It's actually 39 for "San Francisco Wedding Photographer CA" - formerly 60 and 113 for "San Francisco Wedding Photographer" before 260 achieved by changing just ONE word!!! I already told you what to do next.

 

You did help us out allot with that info! Thanks so much! You also mentioned to remove all the spammy links he has at the bottom of the page. I think we will move forward with that change today if you still think it will work?

 

Ya, add more original content and get rid of the spamy links! You should have at least 300 words!

 

i suggest social bookmarking will help u to win battle against comp.

 

I suggest not to do ANYTHING in the moment; there is a strong update running!

 

Have you done any keyword research?

http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/index.php

Before they spend their time targeting keyword phrases, you want to make sure there are people who actually are searching for it. It might be that "san francisco wedding photographer" would bring more traffic. Let the competition go after high rankings for keywords no one searches for.

 

I agree with mjewel. Optimizing for Wedding Photographer San Francisco makes no sense at all.
I would suggest you to focus on other keywords / phrases. Use these tools:

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/
http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/

 

should he be focusing on the keywords "Wedding Photographers" instead?

 

If Google is smart enough to show local results when searching for "Wedding Photographers" - yes totally.

 

So far the only way for Google to display local results is by searching for "San Francisco Wedding Photography" That is why we decided to target those keywords. Now you're saying to change them, but only if they show local results? Isn't that what we're already doing? Now I'm confused!

 

I wouldn't focus on "wedding photographers" to start if their target market is only San Francisco. It's really going to depend on where the photographer is expecting to draw from. Does he do work in Napa Valley, or Northern California, Bay Area, Marin, Sacramento, San Jose, Tahoe, etc? You then want to research variations - i.e. which gets more searches: SF wedding photographer, San Francisco Wedding Photographer, Wedding Photographer San Francisco, etc. I think you'll find that most people won't add CA or California when searching for a San Francisco photographer, so you might not want to focus on it as your main keyword. When you rank well for local terms, then you can expand to more broad terms (which are going to be harder to rank for).

 

San Francisco is the only city he works in and focuses on. I will try different combination's like you said!

 

I suggest that you do social bookmarking as well. I am using another metod of link building - I outsource article writing and have 5 articles written for $15 or so. Then I distribute those articles via iSnare ($10 or so) and they get published on approx. 500 different websites.

So, I pay $25 for 2'500 backlink with the exact keywords I want. Some people say that this is not a good technique and that Google doesn't really value it, but I've seen quite a lot of success using it. Try it out, won't hurt you, I guess. But you never know.

 

I'd expect a differend answer from someone with your reputation. Is all your reputation a fake??? Don't give that kind of stupid advice, you should be banned from the forum! Someone is asking for help and all you do is confusing him with absolutly crap!

 

Today has been most entertaining but I think I have finally had it. I have seen everything from people totally freaking out to the point that using the search feature is no longer an option to people dolling out utterly ridiculous advice.

Perhaps Google will take note of this and not throw DC updates into full swing on a holiday so I can get 30 seconds of peace. I can only hope.

Nigel