From traction to non existent! What happened to my Photography site and what can I do to fix it?

[Trey3]

Aloha guys,

To start as I always do with the (awesome) Moz community I wanted to say thanks for the insight! This has to be one of the best online communities and help resource with great positive and concise help that really makes a difference, so many thanks everyone! PS I also do my best to relay what I learn here to fellow business owners and point them to SEO boosting avenues to help support the community as much as possible. Anyways...

**My Photo website **

**Current top wedding website (I do enjoy her work!!!) **

Attached below is a link to some stats/graphs!

The Problem!

After the recent Google update last month I've had a drop in my site visibility from 5.8% and some change to now .7% of search volume.. Painful for my photo & video business here on Kauai to say the least.

A few images are attached, is there also any correlations you guys can see or think may help to get my site up to the first page? I know we deliver some of the very best work here on the island and deliver great service too, its a bummer that we cant do more for folks visiting here that dont even know we exist!

The question!

Do you guys have any ideas on what can be done to get my page to gaining organic traction and doing great again? My goal is to have our business rank for Kauai Wedding Videographer, Kauai Wedding Photographer, and Kauai Family Photographer!

My moz dashboard is still saying we're on the way for that but that my search visibility is way way down. Any clarity or ideas are greatly appreciated you guys! I would love to relay this to the wedding community as well!

Warmest aloha from Kauai everybody and have a great day!

NjELT NjELT

[georgehal]

Greetings Trey, from a speed perspective your website is really slow and big. I mean 30mb for your front page? You really need to resize those images and minify you CSS JS, ASAP. That will give you some space to breathe and your website will be more Google friendly (Google insights give you a 1/100 rating). Your competitors websites is a mere 3,7mb big. Speed, Speed and more Speed. Also you need to audit your website because it returns a ton of query errors (27 to be exact.)

I would start with those.

1)resize images (good photoshop compression or https://tinypng.com/ )

2)cache you website (wp super cache plugin if on wordpress platform)

3)Minify your CSS/JS (autoptimize plugin if  on wordpress)

[ThomasHarvey]

Seems you're using squarespace. Have a look through this:

https://gtmetrix.com/reports/www.balihaiphoto.com/vlrcrCO4

You can perhaps use: https://answers.squarespace.com/questions/21445/how-can-i-lazy-load-images-on-scroll-developer.html

If you can, use SSL. It looks like squarespace supports http/2 which would help with the load time of your site too: https://support.squarespace.com/hc/en-us/articles/205815898-Squarespace-and-SSL

[lobeng77]

I seem to be having a very similar problem with my client's website. She is also a photographer.

Since mid-April, her home page keeps dropping from Google rankings on and off on the desktop in incognito and non-incognito browsing. It seems to always be visible on mobile phones though. One day it's on page 4, the next day it's not anywhere to be found (even though some of her other pages rank). The site is here: evgeniaribinik.com

I have done some blog writing (just text) for this client over the last few months, and recently she asked for some SEO help. After looking at her website, I noticed that she had WordPress SEO plugin on her site. She wasn't using this for the blogs, however. I don't think she did much of anything with SEO, but she did say that for the last few years, she was always on page 3 or 4 of Google.

In mid-April, she saw that she wasn't ranking at all for the keyword "boudoir photography nyc" anymore, despite a few years of ranking for it. I told her Yoast would be good to use. However, after she installed it, the same issues keep happening. Right now, she has Yoast and WordPress SEO plugins installed (I'm not sure if this is causing an issue as well). But I really can't figure out why she keeps going on and off page 4.

She also asked me to optimize older blogs that she wrote herself for SEO. When I look at them, they don't have meta descriptions, good titles or good keywords. I realize this is hurting her, but why would her site be fine for years and all of a sudden not now? Is it because Google made changes? Thank you in advance for any help you can give me!

Jill