034: Gabriel Machuret – SEO Strategies for Photographers, Be Impossible for Google to Ignore

034: Gabriel Machuret – SEO Strategies for Photographers, Be Impossible for Google to Ignore

Andrew Hellmich: On the podcast today, I've got Gabriel Machuret. He is the SEO guru when it comes to ranking in Google. He is absolutely amazing. I first heard about Gabriel on a podcast called Mixergy, which is absolutely huge. And I heard that episode with him two years ago, and ever since then, some of the stuff he talked about has stuck with me, and I continue to implement that on my very own website as a result of that interview. I can't believe I've got him on the podcast today. I'm really excited. Born in Colombia, he now lives in the South Coast of Australia, in a little town called Merimbula. He's a father, he's a husband, and he knows SEO like no one else. Gabriel, welcome to the podcast.

Gabriel Machuret: Hey, Andrew, thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Andrew Hellmich: Awesome, awesome. Now I did mention just before we hit record that my listeners do know about SEO, but what I want to find out from you is exactly what we need to do to make the most of it, whether we should be paying someone to do it, whether we should be doing it. But before we get into all that stuff, do you want to give us a little bit of a background about you?

Gabriel Machuret: Yeah, absolutely. I was born in Colombia. I live here in Australia, in a very small town called Merimbula that is in the middle of nowhere. Mainly what I do is I do SEO, I mean, every single day, but mainly I focus on helping my customers and the customers that are willing to do the hard work to become an authority on their, on their niche, okay? So mainly, I'm an expert in the idea of creating authority and in becoming the person that you have to go to talk about something. In this case, Andrew, you are the expert in the wedding and photographers kind of business niche. So you are a perfect example of what an authority is.

Andrew Hellmich: Okay. So if there's 10 or 20 other photographers in my local area, the best way to rank well, to use SEO is for me to become the number one authority when it comes to wedding photography in my area.

Gabriel Machuret: Absolutely. And we can only achieve that by going the extra mile, okay, by actually using everything that we have in our, in our power, in our control, to build a site that is such a big site that becomes impossible for Google to ignore your site. That is the biggest, I mean, lesson here is, when you make something so good, it becomes impossible for the world to ignore what you're doing.

Andrew Hellmich: I want to ask you about how to do that, but before we get into that, I get emails every day from spammers, I guess, saying, "Andrew, I can see your website, it's not ranking that well on Google, employ me, and I'll make you rank." So what are those guys trying to do?

Gabriel Machuret: Well, mainly, I mean, what they're trying to do is they're trying to sell some kind of link building, okay? And this is a bit similar, like, if I see you in the street and I say, "Hey, Andrew, you look a little bit fat today, I can make you thinner, okay? Just come with me and I will make you thinner." And in theory, that works, okay? I mean, it can work for a week, for two months, for three months, but in reality, if there's no strategy behind is going to, it's going to stop working at some stage. So they're selling you link building package that we all know that links help the ranking. But in reality, if there's no strategy behind the website, well, no one is really going to make your website successful. So it's very important to understand that you can't outsource the success of your business. Okay? So, I mean, a few years ago, people used to pay me money and say, "Get me first position. I don't want to know anything about my website. You do everything." Well, it's 2013, that kind of things don't do work anymore. You have to put the hard work also.

Andrew Hellmich: So all those people advertising to help, all they're going to be doing is creating backlinks back to my website. But they're not going to be creating good content.

Gabriel Machuret: Exactly. There's a correlation between link building and the content, okay. If Google realizes that, literally, there's tons of links, but there's no new content, if there's no social signals, if there's no Twitter followers, well they're going to realize something is wrong here. Okay? How is it possible we gain all these links to this site and nothing keeps improving on the site. So there needs to be a core relationship between the grow and the improvement of the website and the links coming to the site. And that's actually pretty difficult. Now you see these happening very good in mega sites, okay, like about.com or, let's say, whatifinaustralia. I mean, all these sites that have so much content all the time that when the links come, it makes sense, because they have new content pumping all the time. But if you never go back and touch your website, if you don't put more stuff in your site, then literally, well, I mean those links, they have no really reason to exist because nothing is happening in your site. So Google detects that and that's where things become a bit difficult.

Andrew Hellmich: If I pay someone to build links, I might rise up through the ranks quickly, but then I'll probably disappear again in a little while. Is that what you're saying? Because Google will realize that it's not correct.

Gabriel Machuret: Exactly. I mean, it may work. You're trying to rank for, okay, for, I mean, baby photography in South Bendigo. Okay, yeah, it may work. I mean, a link building from India is going to work, for sure. But if you're trying to do this as a business, and you're trying to achieve some type of real authority, is not going to work. You need to develop something that you're going to become the photographer in Bendigo, and then all the authority is going to be based on that, on that term of photography, and then Bendigo. It's important to understand that Google, understand that wedding photography and portrait photography are related, and the word photographer, okay, and the word photo are related. So when you become an authority, you start ranking for generic terms. And that is the beautiful thing is, once you achieve that level of authority, you don't have to do SEO anymore. You just need to focus on your site, on the ranking, on your audience, on your readers.

Andrew Hellmich: You keep saying authority, so is authority, does that mean I have to be the best baby photographer in South Bendigo? And do I have to go and give lectures and workshops and teach people that I'm the best? Or is it a different sort of authority?

Gabriel Machuret: Okay, so right now, I'm a world authority in a topic called App Store Optimization. And App Store Optimization is SEO for apps. Now, literally, I have never left Merimbula to talk about these, but my site, that site that I have, has more content about that topic than any other site in the world, end of story. Okay, so I can tell anyone, "Go to my site, read all the information, and if you don't want to hire me after that, I can't do anything about it", because there's so much content on the site that it will sell. It will sell my services, just the content. So that's what you want to achieve with your site. What you want to achieve with your site is that "I see your website, and I realize that you are the guy for baby photography." Okay, now the problem with your industry, Andrew, is that you guys love to post just photos, and then SEO guys and photographers, we have this eternal fight because you keep telling us the photo speaks more than a thousand words. That's true, but not for Google. So if you post a photo and you don't tell me where the photo is, Google has no idea. If you don't tell me, what kind of camera do you use, Google has no idea. So the problem that you have is that you need a content based website. Google is a content based search engine, the one content. So if you ask me, "What will I do tomorrow if I want to rank first for one competitive keyword in photography, and I have many customers in with their photographers?" The first thing that I tell them is, "I want to see a thousand words about your philosophy in photography. I want to see a thousand words about a normal day in your life as a photographer." And that becomes a struggle, because writing a thousand words is not very easy.

Andrew Hellmich: Are you saying that I need to have lots of those 1000 word articles about each of my shoots to give me authority, or..?

Gabriel Machuret: Well, I mean, let's look at these, okay? How much, I mean, you're an expert. So tell me how much cost a wedding. I mean, for me to hire a wedding photographer in average. Let's..

Andrew Hellmich: Let's, say $3,000.

Gabriel Machuret: $3,000, okay? I was going to buy, the other day, a small hard drive. I mean, that cost, I don't know, $200 and I read, like, four hours of reviews, okay? Because this is the way we are. I read so much information. It was just $200. Now a bride is going to look at every single detail, okay? Every single detail about if this is the right person, so why not provide content, and I mean real information. And the real information is, how does a normal day for a wedding photographer works? What can you expect on the day of your wedding? And you write that, you write a thousand words. The day starts when I arrive to the wedding venue and I talk to you. Then I take some photos of you with a makeup. If you want, I can take some photos with your mom. And explain that to me, that content is going to bring you traffic forever. Now the problem is, that we don't write that content for many reasons. One- we're lazy. B- we think that the customer doesn't need that information. Or we keep saying "It's got to be, going to be bored with that content. They don't really need to read the content. If they want me, they call me." Well, they're not going to call the toy in the morning when the bride is nervous and she can't sleep and she's googling wedding photographers in Perth. Because she read the information and what she reads, she can get that personal connection with you, okay? So content is an absolutely must. Now, the challenge is to balance that content with your photos, okay. But if you don't have content, is going to be very, very difficult for you to rank. And I'm going to make a perfect example about this. I had a chat with my wife. I mean, two years ago, I was building sites for my own business purpose, and she said to me, "Well, it's easy for you because you can only build sites that you know about it". And we have this little fight, and I said, "I can become an authority in any topic in the world, in Australia." So she was like, "Okay, what about wedding cakes?" And I was like, "Okay, we have a bet." So I decided to build the biggest website in Australia about wedding cakes. Now, the website right now is redirected to another site, but I build a site where I interview every single wedding cake provider, then I build another site for wedding planners. They are another one for, I mean, for all these topics. And I was interviewing wedding cake makers, asking them 10 open questions. So what happened is I built these mega pages with 3000 words per page full of rich content that Google absolutely love. So that shows my point is you can actually build authority just with content.

Gabriel Machuret: Okay. So you don't need to be the best photographer in your area to be an authority as far as Google is concerned, anyone can build authority.

Andrew Hellmich: You need to be the one that cares the most about the use, I mean, the user, the visitor.

Andrew Hellmich: Okay.

Gabriel Machuret: If you write a thousand words about a normal day in a wedding photographer life, it means you care. It means that you are putting the effort out there. So we're not talking about the quality of the photos. Don't get me wrong. If you are a crap photographer, the customer will realize that. I'm talking about how far are you willing to go to provide content.

Andrew Hellmich: Okay

Gabriel Machuret: So perfect example, you guys use Vimeo a lot. I mean for this, I mean your slideshow, okay? But what about making a video of five minutes where you give your best tips, okay? About what to do on the wedding day to be able to work there with the photographer. You make a video, you upload in YouTube, you transcribe the video, and then you have a video that ranks in YouTube. You have rich content on your site, and then you have even more content that is the transcription of the video. Now is it easy to do? Yeah, it's easy. It doesn't work? It only works if you're willing to do it constantly, constantly, all the time. So if I was a wedding photographer in Bendigo, I will take my camera and go to every single wedding location in Bendigo and make a video of myself. And what I will do is I will tell the user, why do I love to take photos in that location. You can spend a whole day make 20 videos, and after that, you have more videos about wedding locations in Bendigo than anyone on the internet. Boom in one day.

Andrew Hellmich: I like it. Now, I want to, I want to come back to the videos in just a second. But you said a thousand words over and over and over again Gabriel. So do my blog posts need to be a thousand words, or can they be..

Gabriel Machuret: No, it doesn't need to be a thousand words. I mean, we're talking about something that is more, is more, is a lengthy post, okay, something that you go back and can improve. We call it evergreen content. An evergreen content is the content that you can always go back and keep improving. So I have a post on my website called, "What is App Store Optimization", and I think right now, it's 5000 words, and I go back to that post every week, and I improve it a little bit more, I add a bit more, because I want to create that page that as soon as someone reads, they go, "Holy cow, this guy is an expert."

Andrew Hellmich: Okay, let me take you then back to the Bendigo wedding photographer that's gone and shot 20 videos on locations. Now I know that some of my listeners will be thinking, if I go to all my best locations and I do videos there, every other photographer in Bendigo is going to know my best locations. Is that a problem?

Gabriel Machuret: That's a bit similar. I got contact yesterday by a lady that was pitching an idea to build an app and said to me, "I want to hire you, but you need to sign a Non- Disclosure Agreement, because people will steal my ideas." The point is, people don't do it because people are lazy, okay? And once you do it, it's out there. You make the video initially, you become the expert. They may steal your ideas, they may see your locations, but they're always going to steal your locations and your ideas or your, or your style, okay? That is part of any industry. The important point is to put that content out there, okay? So if you're not putting content because you may think my competition is going to try to take it away from me. Don't worry, they will, okay. It's going to happen, okay? They must be right now, right now this, a photographer thinking I could do a better podcast than Andrew, okay? And he's got, he's driving his car thinking I could do a better job, and he's never going to do his podcast because it takes a lot of courage. It takes a lot of work, and that's a beautiful thing. To become an authority, you need to work your butt off, and people are lazy, so if you do the job properly, it's going to make even more difficult for the other people to do there, to compete against you.

Gabriel Machuret: Okay, perfect. Now, let me just take you back to the videos again Gabriel. If I'm shooting video, now the reason I have to get it transcribed is because Google will only recognize the text. They don't recognize the video. Is that, right?

Gabriel Machuret: Well, the video can click on ranking in YouTube, okay. So what I will do is, I was going to make a video about the location. I will make the video about the location as a wedding location in Bendigo. So I will put the park, okay? And then I will, I will talk. I'll say, "Hey, in, hey, this Andrew, and I'm in Bendigo, as you well know, I'm a wedding photographer, and I want to explain you the advantages and disadvantages of taking photos of the park." The advantages: in the afternoon, we get the sun from the north side, and it's right with the camera, but the disadvantage, it can be very windy from November to December. So if you're planning to hire me and you want to do in the park, keep in mind that it's starting November, December, but could be a bit windy." Okay, there you go. So, so that is the video that if I'm a bride, I go, "Wow, yes, you're right. We were going to do on the park", and automatically, I build this bond with you. Now, if you transcribe the content, you can also put that content as an article on your website. So it's trying to recycle content. Okay, so right now, one of the things I do with in my podcast is I pay for transcription of the, of the whole interview, is expensive, is a bit expensive, it's $1 per minute. But then I come up with amazing content, I mean written or spoken by experts.

Andrew Hellmich: Perfect. So now you have the SEO juice from the transcription. You've got the video. So you're building that, that authority on your website.

Gabriel Machuret: Absolutely, exactly. That is the main, the main point that you create content to a point of the competitor go, "Oh, I can't even bother to go against this guy. There's so much content."

Andrew Hellmich: Okay, so now a lot of wedding photographers and portrait photographers, what they will do is they'll do a shoot, a photo shoot, or a wedding, and then they'll come back and they'll say, "This is the wedding of Jimmy and Marie, and it was a lovely wedding, and everything was beautiful, and the dress was lovely, and it was a perfect day, and everything's every blog post is the same."

Gabriel Machuret: Absolutely, yes, I've seen that before. I mean, I have some photographers are my customers. Yeah. Okay, so how do we fix that? Okay, so when I was doing my, and I did this experiment for makeup artist, idea website for makeup artists. I mean, in my interview, I asked them, "What is your favorite brand of makeup?" And they were answering that very, I mean, innocent, but that was a very naughty question from an SEO point of view, because I wanted to trigger traffic for brands. Okay, so in this case, when you go and post the photos of Mary and John. You want to make the video title, Wedding on Bondi Beach. I mean Wedding Photography at Bondi Beach, and then you can pull it through an attack, okay, Mary or whoever. Now, if I was going to make it, I will even ask the bride, "What type of wedding dress was she wearing? Okay, what designer? Okay, what location? Where was the hotel?" Because all that keywords are keywords that people search for, and you can get a lot of traffic. That is indirect traffic. If you post information about wedding dress maker on the description of the photos, there's got to be someone looking for a wedding dress of that brand in Bondi, and she may find your website. Now, maybe she's not looking for a photographer, but she goes, "Oh, wait, we also need a photographer at some stage." So those are the type of keywords that can generate more traffic if it's going to be about "It was a lovely photo. They were beautiful. They were sensational. I love them." That is content that is very airy content. It's not going to trigger any real traffic.

Andrew Hellmich: Okay, okay, so that might be nice for the clients to see, but it's not going to help your business.

Gabriel Machuret: Absolutely, yeah.

Andrew Hellmich: Let's say we are targeting Bondi wedding photographer, or let's say Bondi baby photographer, and there's 10 other photographers in the area that all know a little bit about SEO, and every post that they write is 'Bondi Baby Photographer Meet Little Jamie'. How do we make our post, or our website rise to the top if everyone knows a little bit about SEO already.

Gabriel Machuret: Okay, that's a great point. Okay, so here, here's the point that is important to understand. That is, here's where you need to start thinking in a guerrilla point of view. Okay? That, I mean, I'm from Colombia, so, so we're very good thinking I could .. Okay, so what I will do, let's say I'm, I mean, tomorrow I changed my career and I become a baby photographer in Bondi. Holy cow! Okay, poor baby. So I'm in Bondi and I have 10, 10, evil, evil, evil photographers surrounding me, okay, taking advantage. So the first thing I will do okay is I will find every single, okay, every single baby shop in Bondi, every single baby shop in Bondi. There must be places selling baby clothes in Bondi, and what I will do is I will interview them for my baby blog website, okay. So I'm going to let them generate content for me, and they're going to generate content for me. And guess what? These baby shops are going to absolutely love me. Why? Because people don't ask for interviews to them. So I'm going to use different sources that don't have to do with the baby photography itself, but have to do with babies in Bondi and their content is going to generate these pages for me. Not only generates pages, but I create some network, a better relationship with these people. You follow me?

Andrew Hellmich: Yeah, I do. So to do this interview, they could walk in with their iPhone and just record it. Or they could take notes. They could do, doesn't matter, they could record a video?

Gabriel Machuret: It doesn't matter at all. Okay, you could do any way or form. I mean, I have done over a thousand interviews by email where I don't even interview people. It's my virtual assistants send the interview request. Exactly, you can, you can do it with anyone. So then what happens is, you have 20 people that know your name, you have their interviews. And here's the fantastic part, Andrew. Sometimes you have more content about that business that business have in their own site. When people Google their name of the business, your site appears first. Okay, so you're building those pages. So that's a nice way. Now I'm going to give you other ninja tips later on, okay, of how you can generate unlimited amount of content on your website without writing a word. And that's going to be pretty cool.

Andrew Hellmich: Awesome. Okay, so, so, so far, what I'm getting is that the secret to ranking well, and the secret to SEO in today's world is to have content and lots and lots of it.

Gabriel Machuret: But it's content that matters. I mean, you see, I can pay, I can pay my spammy writer in India, okay, $5 for 500 words, and he can write, I mean, 20 articles that are absolutely rubbish. And that doesn't mean I'm going to rank. This is very important, okay? I have sites that are awful that will never tell anyone that I own, and they're awful and they don't rank because it doesn't engage people at all. So what we're doing about engagement is that I see a post and I know you're going to tweet about it, that you see a post and you want to like it on Facebook. That is the kind of content you want to do. Content is going to generate links. If I was going to make an, I mean, an epic post about SEO, okay. I have an epic post of SEO that in my website is called "How I lost $250,000 that I Never Had." And it's a post about how I got offered a job as an SEO Director in Melbourne, and they scammed me, and it was a failure, and I reveal all the goals and my dreams. I want to buy jet ski with the money and that's an epic post, because people love to read real stories. So if you're going to make a post about 20 things that I learned about my podcast after 50 episodes, and you put information that is true information that you show that you're human, that you made mistakes, photographers are going to dig that. Okay, it's not so much about two tips about how to take a photo of a baby. That's kind of boring, okay, but if you're a Bondi, I mean wedding photographer, you can make an article that says "10 of the Most Popular Baby Names in Bondi." And you see, that stuff is going to go viral a little bit in the Bondi community in Facebook.

Andrew Hellmich: We want to have lots of content, but it has to matter and have some personal aspect to it. We've got to make it good enough or interesting enough that people want to read it.

Gabriel Machuret: Exactly. Is there, is your name goes link to the content. So, I mean, if you're going to post rubbish, well, I mean, hey, I mean, by all means, go ahead, but it's your name that goes attached to the article.

Andrew Hellmich: So it's got to be good content. Okay. Now you mentioned social signals earlier on, and you just alluded to Twitter and Facebook again. So does that matter today in SEO?

Gabriel Machuret: Okay, content that has no social signals makes it very, very difficult for Google to believe is real. Social signals are difficult to fake, especially constantly. So you make an epic post, you're going to get Facebook likes and tweets forever, okay? And I mean, if you don't get those links, it becomes very, very difficult to well, to justify that your content is good. So that is what Google uses as a reference.

Andrew Hellmich: We should have plugins on our website to make it easy for people to tweet or like it or share it on Facebook?

Gabriel Machuret: Absolutely, yes, that's the whole goal. Yeah.

Andrew Hellmich: Okay, all right. Now talking about plugins, I know, so plugins, I guess not everyone will have access to plugins, because it's going to depend on the, on the style of website they have. But from what I've gathered so far, really, we as photographers, we should all have websites that we can add content to ourselves, shouldn't we?

Gabriel Machuret: If your site is not WordPress, you have serious issues in the world, end of story. I'm going to be very hard with that statement. If you don't have a WordPress site and you're a photographer, you need to change your site right now.

Andrew Hellmich: Okay. You probably just scared a bunch of listeners. What's wrong with other things like Joomla or, you know, just having an HTML site? What's the problem?

Gabriel Machuret: HTML site is that, I mean, if you, if you have a webmaster that managed your website for you, he is going to blackmail you for life. Okay, somehow friendly he is, but he has you. I mean, he controls your life. So you say, "Hey, Bob, I need a change on the website." "Yeah, that will be $200" okay, and that's going to screw you up. You need to be able to wake up at two in the morning. You can't sleep, you want to work on your site. Boom, you can do two hours of work on your site. Okay? Joomla is nice. The problem is that you can't get, okay, all the functions that you have in WordPress in Joomla, and it's got to be more expensive to outsource stuff. So Joomla is okay. I mean, WordPress is even easier.

Andrew Hellmich: What about Squarespace that's getting more and more popular these days?

Gabriel Machuret: Well, I mean, you can go for any. The point is, go for any system that is mainstream, okay, that you can hire someone for $20 to fix something very fast. I had a web designer told me we build Drupal sites because usually cost a $1,000 to change anything, and we love that, okay.

Andrew Hellmich: Okay, so WordPress is going to be simple, it's easy. We can manage it ourselves most of the time, and we've got access to all these different plugins.

Gabriel Machuret: Absolutely that's the whole goal, yeah.

Andrew Hellmich: Okay, so let's talk about SEO. Let's assume that we're talking to listeners that have WordPress. So we have an SEO plugin that goes with each of our articles?

Gabriel Machuret: Yeah, usually an SEO plugin, what it does. It allows you to customize the titles, to change some, some tags, and, yeah, it helps, it helps life a little bit. I mean, it's mainstream. We can actually Google how to use these SEO plugins. They're free, very, very easy to use. Yeah.

Andrew Hellmich: Does it make a difference if we don't have it, or should we have it?

Gabriel Machuret: You should have it because it's free and it's very easy to use, but it's not going to make, I mean, a live difference if you don't have them, okay? My theory is, I mean, simplify a little bit. Simplify the system initially, okay. Don't try to reinvent the wheel, and don't think that your site is not going to rank if you don't have all the bells and whistles. If you have the content, if you have the basics in place, is going to rank, absolutely."

Andrew Hellmich: Is there anything that we should be specifically doing with the way we structure our posts, like with our titles, with our tags, with the first paragraph in our post? Should we, should that have keywords in it? What are some tips that we should be using that's going to help?

Gabriel Machuret: My theory is not to overdo it, okay. So, I mean, write for the user, but keep in mind that they arrive to your page for one reason. Okay, so if it's about Bondi photography, I will say, "Do you, I mean, do you like Bondi? Well, here are my best tips about Bondi photography", and then you go ahead and write your post. Don't try to highlight the keywords or overdo it too much, because it's not going to pay off. I mean, it could be a bit dangerous in the eyes of Google.

Gabriel Machuret: So it looks like you're trying to cheat the system, and then you're going to get penalized for that.

Gabriel Machuret: Exactly. It's not worth it yet.

Andrew Hellmich: All right, so we've talked about possibly doing a podcast and having it transcribed, also videos and having them transcribed and writing posts. Are there any other things we can do to become an authority?

Gabriel Machuret: Mainly, you want to try to have as many, I mean you want to work the social media as much as possible. And you want to try to generate some engagement on your posts. If people make comments on your posts, people, I mean like your post, people tweet your posts, that are also going to be social signals. So you just start wondering, how can I get my readers to be involved in my website a bit more, how they can make some comments? And that is very difficult, to engage people and get people to like you, to make comments, is actually a bit difficult. So that is kind of an art to be able to achieve. People to go back to your blog and make a comment.

Andrew Hellmich: But the more comments we have, that the better Google will see us. Is that, right?

Gabriel Machuret: The post keeps growing and growing and growing. So if someone makes a comment that is 300 words, boom, your post came from 1000 words to 1300, thanks to someone else.

Andrew Hellmich: Okay, all right, that's great. I mean, I'm almost getting stumped. I mean, you've made it sound really easy to rank well, it just takes a lot of work.

Gabriel Machuret: It's very difficult. Okay, it's very difficult. Now, I mean, you can hire someone. I mean, you can do it yourself, okay, you just need some orientation and strategy. Now, keep in mind you also need links. Okay, links are always going to help you. So if you, I mean, if you have someone that is working with you, it's going to be a bit easier, but, but, but one of the things I said to my customers is you don't need me. You don't need an SEO company. By all means you don't need one. If you're out there building and building and building, trust me, you'll be able to crush any SEO company just by your own content. But it takes time and a lot of effort, yeah, and usually people quit. People quit very, very easily. People listen to this interview, they go, "Yeah, I'm going to make my 20 videos." They do two, and they never do one again, trust me.

Andrew Hellmich: Okay, so, so then what's what should we do? We should commit to doing something every single week or every single day? How fast does this have to grow?

Gabriel Machuret: Well, be honest to yourself. I mean, if you literally have seven kids and have four jobs, you don't have to be able to do one video every day. So make, I mean, a conscious agreement with yourself and realize, I mean, "How hard am I willing to work on this?" Otherwise it's not going to really work. Have that agreement with yourself, if I'm willing to do this as many hours as possible or not. Otherwise, it's going to be pretty difficult for you to try to make as many videos as possible.

Andrew Hellmich: So stay consistent and just try and keep it growing all the time. Keep adding to it.

Gabriel Machuret: Exactly.

Andrew Hellmich: Okay. So in the last episode, Gabriel, I interviewed an a Google AdWords Specialist, and we talked a lot about keywords. Should we be doing keyword research to work out which type of blog post we should be writing or which keywords we should be targeting in our blog posts?

Gabriel Machuret: Yeah. I mean, you can. On keyword search is always going to help. I mean, the difference with AdWords is that you're paying for the keywords. Okay, the only information that you have is the data that Google gives you, okay? And Google AdWords people are very data driven. Okay, so it's all about data, what converts the best. In, in my philosophy is find the keywords. But you know what? You know the keywords. You are the photographer, you know what people are looking for. Okay, so if you're a photographer, people are going to be looking for reviews. So post your own reviews on your site. If you're a photographer about babies, you know that is newborn, is pregnancy, is baby, is toddler. You don't need Google to tell you what your market audience is looking for. Sometimes, the data that Google gives you, let me be completely honest, Google is an evil freaking company. Google doesn't want it to be an authority. Google wants you to pay for traffic, okay? The fact that you can get tons and tons and tons of traffic from, from iTunes. They hate that. They want the clicks. The only way they drive money is through clicks. That's what the shareholders of Google wants, that you keep paying more and more and more. So right now, the Google Keyword Tool doesn't exist anymore, has been replaced by Google Keyword Planner, and the reason is very simple. They don't want you to understand this. Okay, the more ignorance is in the market, the more people are driven by pay per click. But the problem with pay per click is a very difficult strategy to make it viable, especially with photographers, because people don't buy from you guys. People are browsing. People are thinking about it. I don't want to take photos. Portrait photography is an impulse buy. I want to look at some sites and I want to go back to look at some sites, and then I go back. So I don't think AdWords is a viable approach versus building something. But if you know the keywords, yes, and if you are doing AdWords, you can have some of the keywords and trying to implement them in your post. Sometimes you need one post to rank in first position for that for the keywords.

Andrew Hellmich: Now, I know this goes a little bit against your philosophy, but let's say you're a brand new photographer. You're listening to the podcast, and you've just told everyone that they need to have a damn big site with a lot of content, and they're not going to be there yet because they're in a saturated community with photographers. Would Google AdWords then be a viable idea in that case, for that, for that person starting out?

Gabriel Machuret: Absolutely. I mean, the deal is, if someone is starting up, you sure they have no money.

Andrew Hellmich: True.

Gabriel Machuret: Okay? So, I mean, I'm in a way that you can get more from social media than from AdWords, okay? You can obtain a lot more, okay from social media, by being smart, rather than going from AdWords. Because in AdWords, if I have more money and you're beaming for my keywords, I'm going to increase the beam and I'm going to crush you eventually. I have some customers of mine paying $20 per click, and the competitor goes and increase $5 more. They don't care, because the end product is so expensive. So if you're starting, my suggestion will be to consider something like, like social media, potentially like Facebook.

Andrew Hellmich: Okay, to get, to drive traffic to our website, is that what you mean? Or to build an audience?

Gabriel Machuret: To build customers. Yeah, absolutely, yeah.

Andrew Hellmich: But by bringing them back to our website, or just using Facebook to do everything?

Gabriel Machuret: Just by build your brand, okay? I mean, pointed to your site or not is different, okay? That doesn't make a difference in the long term. Just to build your brand.

Andrew Hellmich: Okay.

Gabriel Machuret: Okay, so, I can give you, I mean, quick ideas how you can get your first customer right now on Facebook.

Andrew Hellmich: Yeah, go for it.

Gabriel Machuret: Okay, so let's say that you're a baby photographer in a small town, and you starting, you have no customers whatsoever. There's going to be a group of moms on Facebook, okay. So it's going to be a group of moms, or there's going to be a small group of a buy and sell, or something. So here's the, here's the prone that everyone makes the typical douche. They go to Facebook, is they go to Facebook, post a Facebook fan page and say, "Please like my page." I don't want to like your page because I don't know who you are, and I don't like pages people that I don't know. So what you need to do is find this target customer group that's going to be moms and parents. And what you're going to do is also price. Instead of selling, you're going to ask, and the question is going to be, "Hey, I'm going to be launching a service about photography for babies, and I was wondering what is the best location in town to take photos of babies? Where would you like me to take photos of your kids outdoors?" And you shut up and let them answer. And what that's going to do is going to create interaction. You're going to get mom's commenting, "Oh, in the park." 'No, in the zoo." "No, the beach." "Oh, we love the mountain", whatever. Okay. Any questions, keep in mind that I don't know anything about baby photography. But you, for sure that you can put a question out there that's going to create engagement. And what you're going to do is to everyone that says any comment, you're going to give them a discount, okay, for your next gig, as a thank you. You see that discount doesn't become a sales pitch, becomes a thank you for helping me. And that is the whole different approach, is you need to start listening rather than talking. And that is the point that everyone makes on Facebook. People go to Facebook to tell me to like their page, instead of asking me if I need anything from them.

Andrew Hellmich: Nice, I love it. I love it. And I think like listening to what you've said earlier, if that was me and I posted that question, once I had all those answered, I'd take my video out there and I'd go and record me in that location talking about how good it is.

Gabriel Machuret: And at the end, you say, "I want to say thank you to Libby, because Libby suggested this. I mean this location. So Libby, if you're listening to me on Facebook, thank you so much." And, boom, you posted there. So what that means, okay, is that, well, automatically that Libby is going to watch this video she's going to share with all the moms. She thinks amazing. You appear in my YouTube video, blah, blah, blah, and you become the small celebrity in South East Bendigo.

Andrew Hellmich: Nice. I love it. All right, now I want to be conscious of your time, Gabriel. What were these tips that you're talking about generating this unlimited amount of content for my website?

Gabriel Machuret: Okay, so here we go. The unlimited content from your site is going to come from your customers. So once you start getting some customers, what you're going to do is you're going to ask them, to interview them. So don't ask them for testimonial form. Don't do that, okay. Because testimonial form is a little form with name and email, and you should, they write something like, "Great, it was amazing." "Thank you." "Andrew, you rock." And that's not testimonial, okay? I can do that. I can, I can post 20 of them tomorrow. What you're going to do is do a small survey to them, and you're going to post that survey on your site, okay? And the survey is going to be something about the wedding. "What did you spend?" Okay, "What was your expectation to hire a wedding photographer in Bondi?" "Why did you chose me?" "Can you tell us a little bit about?" And what you're going to do is you're going to bribe them. If they fill the form, you will give them a discount on the prints, okay? If they fill the form, you're going to give them something. And that's going to become very, very easy, because you can give them the original prints or the USB drive a bit cheaper, for free, if they fill the form. Now the form is going to be a ninja form, there's going to be open questions. You don't want to hear that yes, no, I wrote.

Andrew Hellmich: So open questions.

Gabriel Machuret: Open questions.

Andrew Hellmich: Okay, so this is, so this after the wedding, they've come back. They've seen their photos. They had a great experience. Then we send them to our to a page on our website to do this survey. And it's a written survey.

Gabriel Machuret: Absolutely yes.

Andrew Hellmich: Or Google Docs or something, or an email.

Gabriel Machuret: Yeah, that's the whole idea, yes.

Andrew Hellmich: Okay, and then I take those answers with those open questions, so hopefully there's a lot of text, and I copy and paste that into a blog post using some of their photos as well.

Gabriel Machuret: Yeah, the whole idea, exactly. So then you have a case study, and you can build, I mean 10, 15 case studies that are proper answers, proper questions from real customers, and that the social proof that you need. And you can do this automatic. Every time that you get a wedding or a gig, you send the service like, "Hey, I'm going to give you 20% this kind of this, if you fill this for me". And it's automatic, you start getting customer. I mean customers testimonials all the time that are mega pages.

Andrew Hellmich: Okay. And that becomes a whole blog post, and that's giving you authority. You've got keywords built in, everything's working.

Gabriel Machuret: Yeah, exactly, the whole idea.

Andrew Hellmich: And the photographer gets to show off their photos as well.

Gabriel Machuret: Yeah, that. I mean, everyone wins.

Andrew Hellmich: I love it.

Gabriel Machuret: And I mean, and you're building pages that are long, that have social proof, and you didn't write them, so you get them for free.

Andrew Hellmich: Unreal, unreal. So let me finish off with this, Gabriel. So you've totally, totally blown me away. I mean, I know that you absolutely rock. I heard you for the first time on Andrew Warner's Mixergy podcast a couple of years ago. And you know, you've been in the back of my head ever since then, in regard to SEO. And, and I know that a good mate of mine, Ben Marden, who other listeners would have heard on the podcast earlier, is using you. So if someone hires an SEO, if someone hires you to look after their SEO, what do you do for them? Because you've just told me so much now that I can run with, what do you do to help your clients?

Gabriel Machuret: Okay, I got to change the answer. "If you go to hire an SEO consultant, okay, hire someone that is going to make you accountable." And that is the most important part. I mean, we all do the same stuff, okay? And you can get someone in order to do the stuff that I do, to be honest, okay. So we do the link building, we optimize the site, we help with the content, but at the end of the day, it's all about accountability. This a little bit like losing weight, okay? I mean, I'm the personal trainer, but you have to go and treadmill, and run. It is a difficult part, okay? People, really, people have, I mean, their lives. So the big question is, the SEO consultant needs to, I mean, I actually had a chat with one of my customers this morning. It's to them, "Maybe you don't need SEO. Maybe you can do fine without me", but this is the most important part someone that can be honest with you and tell you, "Hey, maybe this is not for you. Maybe you can get all the traffic you need with just writing content." If you want to run for Southeast Bendigo baby photographer, you don't need me, because you can do it yourself, just with content and optimizing the basics. If you want to crush it in a very competitive market, okay, you want to be top winning photographer in, in the Gold Coast, and you have 25 guys doing SEO and doing very cool things, maybe you need someone to coach a little bit and have an instructor in place.

Andrew Hellmich: Judging by the fact that you were interviewed by Andrew Warner on Mixergy, you've got customers from all around the world, do you?

Andrew Hellmich: All around the world, yeah.

Andrew Hellmich: That's awesome. So it doesn't matter where you live, SEO works the same wherever you are.

Gabriel Machuret: Absolutely, yeah. In some countries becomes easier. For it was in Australia is easy. I mean, if you want to rank for Perth, it's going to be easier, well than New York, yeah.

Andrew Hellmich: For sure. For sure. Look, that's been absolutely fantastic. Where , Gabriel, can people find you and check out your stuff and, yeah, get in touch if they want to with you?

Gabriel Machuret: They can actually check internetninja.com.au. There's a contact form there, and I'm always available to have chat with anyone. And they can contact me through a form there. I mean, more than happy to help them. Or they can find me on Facebook. I mean, Gabriel Machuret, M-A-C-H-U-R-E-T.

Andrew Hellmich: Perfect. I'll add links to both of those sites on the, on the show notes as well.

Gabriel Machuret: Thank you so much mate. Yeah.

Andrew Hellmich: Thanks Gabriel has been absolutely awesome.

Gabriel Machuret: My pleasure. Thanks, Andrew!