Mike Broadway – PhotoBlog

1106 is Missing

I saw this on my lunch time perambulation yesterday; very strange, steps that lead up into a bush. It is a suitable metaphor for my success selling prints from this web site: Fotomoto is the staircase that makes it technically possible but there have been no purchases and no profits to send to Save the Children.

Let’s be clear about this, the problem is not with Fotomoto; their technology works as advertised and the results are generally very good. In traditional brick and mortar sales the mantra is “Location, location, location;” if your store is in the wrong place you won’t get enough customers through the door. In Internet speak this translates to “Traffic, traffic, traffic.” My lack of sales can almost entirely be blamed on a lack of eyeballs arriving at http://www.mikebroadway.com. If I had a lot of traffic and still wasn’t selling then it would time to look at the site design but my visitor count is so low that site design doesn’t matter.

According to the Alexa statistics web site, mikebroadway.com currently ranks 20,921,835th in traffic volume. The tin foil lining in that statistic is that up is the about the only direction it can go. Sobering as this dismal number is, some of Alexa’s statistics are unreliable for low volume sites; Alexa only credits mikebroadway.com with one incoming link from another web site whereas Google’s Webmaster Tools give me a more hopeful 360 incoming links.

Still, whether my ranking is below 20 millionth or 10 millionth the consequences are the same: little hope of making a print sale. If I want to change this I will have to work on SEO and partnerships. SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the term given to mixture of art, science and magic used by web site marketeers to ensure that thei sites appear on the first page of results for any relevant query entered on Google, Bing or Yahoo. My SEO for the term “Mike Broadway” is pretty good with Google awarding me both second and third places; I used to be first but I am in a horse race with a baseball pitcher of the same name and he has edged in front for now. Big deal, the only people who will search for “Mike Broadway” are the ones that already know me :-) I need to reach people that don’t know me and that want to buy prints.

It is generally recognized that the key drivers for search engine ranking are content (the text on the web site) combined with the number and significance of the incoming links. My content is a bit of a problem; a camera review for the Panasonic GF1 may deliver fellow photographers to the site but is unlikely to bring people looking for fine art prints to hang on their wall. Photographers looking to buy a camera have enough of their own prints on the wall; they are not generally looking to buy someone else’s images.

I can tweak a few keywords easily enough, put “Fine Art Prints” into the web site title etc (see footnote below), but incoming links are at least as important if not more so for SEO ranking. Google wants to ensure that its results are as relevant as possible for any query; Google depends on people coming back for all their searches and that will only happen if the results are consistently on the mark and useful. If both my site and Mike the baseball pitcher’s site have an exact match for the query “Mike Broadway”, but the baseball player’s site has a dozen incoming links from well known newspaper and TV station web sites where mine has just two incoming links from photography blog sites, then the baseball player will win the race to the top of the that particular search’s results.

The incoming links I need most are those from sites frequented by art buyers. Links from gallery web sites, LensWork, B&W and The Center For Fine Art Photography would be valuable. These links will have the double benefit of delivering direct referrals and improving my search ranking for queries about print buying.

My goal is to raise money for charity. The most valuable incoming links will be those delivering people who both want to buy art and support the charity that sent them across at the same time. That is the kind of partnership I need to establish and I think I know just the person to talk to.

Footnote on “Fine Art Prints” and Fotomoto: There, did you notice? I just tried to do something to improve my SEO for print buyers by entering the term “fine art print” into this posting but I must clarify that I would not class Fotomoto machine prints as “fine art prints.” While most of the results are excellent, and the process does deliver 100+ year archival quality fade resistance, the term “fine art print” conveys that the print was individually made, approved by the photographer, and signed. I can’t start claiming to offer fine art prints in any quantity until I am ready to spend a lot of hours fussing over color matching and paper blemishes; I am not quite there yet. Maybe it is a good thing my traffic volume is low?