Stock Photo of Bride

Since I don’t do weddings, the image to the left is a stock photo that I paid to use in this blog post. This post is not even about weddings in general, but it is a bit of a mini-rant about search results for the phrase “Photographers In Raleigh” that happens to return a lot of wedding photographers in the results.

When someone is searching generically for a photographer, what type of photographer are they really looking for? For the Raleigh market, Google must feel that is a wedding photographer based on the organic results. There may be a logical reason for that which I am not aware of. The engineers behind Google search are far smarter that I am.

Don’t get me wrong: I am fine with earning my place on search results. What I don’t understand is why Google’s search algorithm puts wedding photographers in 7 or 8 of the Top 10 Organic results with a generic search phrase like “Photographers In Raleigh.” Although the reality is that if I did come up in the Top 10 for that phrase organically, it may not be relevant to what the end user is looking for either since I focus on nothing but business photography. Who knows what someone is looking for when using a generic phrase? But why in this case return so many wedding photographers?

There are so many areas of photography that could come up in a generic search result: So to see if there was a pattern, I tried “Photographers in Charlotte” and found that about 5 of the Top 10 organic results specifically mentioned weddings with most of the rest being family and/or lifestyle photographers. There were no non-consumer focused photographers that came up in this generic phrase for Charlotte and only one of the 10 in Raleigh was a non-consumer focused photographer.

The algorithm is very good in the photography world as a general rule when the search phrase is specific to an area of the industry. Typically when searching for a family photographer, commercial photographer or other specific phrase, the results are very relevant to that segment which is great and better for the end user.

I’m simply baffled by this particular search phrase returning so many of one particular part of the photography industry. I do wish Google would return more business focused photographers and mixing up the Top 10 organic results.

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