New Website!
If you have visited this website before, you will now probably say: about time! And you’re right, the previous site looked a bit like ‘the plumber’s leaking tap’. The idea to set up this little side business to STUDIOVHF came up again in early 2019, just a few months before we were about to move back to The Netherlands.
Just after the move I was working from a nice co-working space (Paal5) in the centre of the Dutch town Heino. I decided that I should get a new website live soon, together with accompanying socials. The co-working space was a great place to work, but to really get things done I decided to lock myself up in the office for the weekend when nobody was around. And indeed the three page website hogeringoogle.website was live shortly after that. The only graphic design I had done (by a friend) was the logo STUDIOHIG (HIG: Higher in Google). I decided to design the website myself from scratch, instead of amending existing template designs and it showed! That is now more than 3 years ago.
Still a side business then?
Hmm, not quite…. As we explain on the About page, experimenting and learning about SEO was very intrumental in getting the photography business off the ground and in the years at Amos Beech, we professionalised this further. We learned how valuable this was for the business. The same SEO stategy that brought us photography jobs for a couple of hunderd Euro’s, now gave us leads for complete interior design and fit-out jobs, where quite a number of people work on for months! This increased our sense of responsibility and the days of experimenting with quick risky gains were over.
Covid lockdowns
Although the photography side of things weren’t as badly affected as photographers who solely focus on photography for the private market, we were very happy that the SEO side of things remained strong. Where companies who were relying on paid digital marketing (SEA), cut back their budgets and along with it, the incoming leads, the companies with strong organic ranking still had leads coming in even with minimal marketing budget.
We have also learned that photography and marketing are very much entangled. Where SEO get’s people to the site, good photography gives them the convidence that they are at the right place and conversion rates will go up. Also during lockdown we experimented with ‘remote thetered shooting’ (blog in Dutch), as in taking product images in Newcastle without actually leaving the Dutch studio!
Like Johan Cruijff used to say: “every downside got it’s upside!”
Ready for future expension?
Well that remains to be seen. SEO is a very time consuming job and we believe that it can only be done properly when we are part of the sales and marketing team of the company behind the website we work for and it’s only 2 of us.
Want to know if it’s for you? Browse the site and get in touch!
