The “Art” of SEO – Headshot Photographer Case Study

Let’s just take a quick moment to acknowledge how great this title is – it’s the “art” of SEO for multiple reasons, but the one that stands out is that this covers work on Phoenix Headshot Photographer “Art” Dickinson’s site to improve his rankings with search engine optimization.

But before we get to the juicy results (there aren’t any yet, this is a work in progress!) let’s cover how this all is setup and came to be.

Art is a member of The Photo Business Collective who decided to take me up on an offer to work on his SEO. After meeting with him it became very clear that he’s highly motivated to make things happen because he LOVES what he does. He just wants to be out shooting great photos and working with people. It’s awesome to work with someone who is so passionate about photography!

His business was doing well up through COVID with Yelp advertising. I hear very mixed things about Yelp and their practices so it was nice to hear some positivity for a change – until it turned the other way! He was also doing well with Google ads at times but a few things have changed and the results aren’t really coming in like they were.

He paused Yelp advertising and has shifted his approach with Google ads, that will be a part of this process as well because I’m here to make things happen and I love to help photographers!!

So let’s go ahead and line this all up with the before metrics and then over the next couple of months. I’ll be revisiting this to update as I make site changes and start to see results.

One quick note: Google made a SIGNIFICANT change to their reporting in Google Search Console and also to how other sites can track rankings. You’ll notice that impressions (people who saw Art’s site in search) had a sharp decline right before the screenshots were taken and we started. Supposedly they are no longer showing a lot of impressions that were from bots or scrapers – tools that crawl the web and check ranks for SEO purposes. The site has not actually had any decline.

Screenshots and data from start of work

Homepage First Thoughts

The homepage is clean and simple which makes it an easy place to start. I’m not too concerned about the way things look just yet, but I will say that I immediately notice that we need more ways to get in touch with Art – rather than just some links in the header that don’t stand out. I’ll be adjusting that and likely adding a link in the menu to “Book Now” I’d also like to spruce up the CTAs and restyle the homepage for a smoother flow and so that key information is easier to find.

SEMRush screenshots

Next I grabbed an image showing the site according to the SEMRush SEO tool. There are two things that grab my eyes right away. The DA or Domain Authority is very low – considering his domain is about 25 years old I’d expect to see a much stronger DA. This is likely our number one point of focus – improve DA through backlink development. Second, SEMRush is picking up 49 keywords, so I grabbed the 2nd image showing the top ranking words. He’s doing well for Industrial photographers, but his other words are all 2nd page or below.

Google Search Console as of September 2025

This image shows the big picture of the site over the past 3 months. Impressions appeared to be slowly rising, and then dropped over the last couple weeks. The drop is connected directly to the changes they made in reporting with Google Search Console. I’d expect clicks to be similar to what they’ve been over the past few months. 

The image below shows a comparison of the most recent 3 months over the 3 previous. Art has been working on his SEO and posting blogs regularly and it’s showing. He has more than doubled his impressions, great work! Clicks are not much stronger but impressions always increase before clicks.

Map search for main keyword

I added the word “Arizona” to this as Phoenix was also returning results in my area. This shouldn’t effect the actual result. What you’ll see here is that Art shows up on the map, but his listing doesn’t make the visible set of locations – you have to scroll down before you see him. As we make improvements to his site and gain links, reviews, etc.. I expect this to improve dramatically!

Site Search on Google

For this step I see how Google is showing the site to searchers. I’m specifically looking at the title and meta descriptions to make sure they give the right information and are helpful to the searcher. There are changes to be made here but he’s done a great job of getting this set up.

Google My Business Profile

This profile is well set up, the description is enticing, and has a strong amount of reviews. The only suggestions I have here are to keep updating images and also to continue growing reviews. Having more recent reviews and referencing locations in them will improve his map packs position.

Now it’s time to dig deep and start the work

This section will be updated soon, stay tuned for more as I have a lot of items to research and look into before taking action. 

Competitive Research

This is where I take all the top competitors for the main target keywords and review their sites. I won’t be sharing this information here as it reveals a lot about their businesses and I don’t have permission from them. Things I look at include: Homepage flow, alt tags, headings, content on site, GMB profiles, page speed, web platforms, overall content depth, topical authority (are they covering every point deeply?), domain authority, traffic, etc…

Alt tags

I’ve noticed that the homepage alt tags are over-optimized. Every image has a variation of the keyword even though location is not clear on most images. This is an approach that is recommended by a lot of SEOs but it can actually cause a site to be penalized by Google. Alt tags will need to be changed to more accurately represent each shot rather than stuffing in keywords.