STUDIOVHF Websites

STUDIOVHF is a versatile professional photography studio for the commercial market. The studio originates form Vincent Hartman Fotografie in Zwolle and currently has 2 websites, one for the Dutch market and one for Scotland and the North of England.

The Start

The first website ‘Vincent Hartman Fotografie .NL ’ was launched in 2008 using a UK developed portfolio platform designed specifically for photographers and other creatives. The site had a modest CMS and some html coding was needed to adapt it our needs. The experience gained with that website was the start of many other websites and today’s SEO services business, STUDIOHIG. In this eperimental stage we used a lot of SEO techniques that worked brilliantly and swift at the time, but are a definite no-go, today.

In 2014 a new site STUDIOVHF.COM was launched specifically for the commercial photography side of the business and this boosted commercial photography to a 70% share of the business. In addition to this photographerstirling.co.uk was launched in 2017. The original site vincenthartmanfotografie.nl was taken offline in 2020 and some content migrated to studiovhf.com.

Development

The photography sites have been instrumental in testing out various SEO techniques and changes. We are much more risk avoiding for external sites than we are for our own. I never forget taking a risk with vincenthartmanfotografie.nl resulting in not getting leads from the city of Zwolle, for about 3 months. It was an expensive lesson! Interestingly I have discovered that these mistakes are still being made today as one of Amos Beech’s competitors sites dropped from the first page when their new website was launched.

Google algorithm updates

These days we follow changes in the SEO industry on a daily basis. This ensures that we can plan ahead and change methods accordingly. The longest running websites tend to suffer the most when algorithm changes kick in and so was the case with studiovhf.com. The site needed extensive restructuring due to changes in Google’s approach towards ‘hidden code’ and ‘core web vitals’.

RESULTS

The STUDIOVHF site shows stable serps both locally and nationally on long tail specific keywords, used by the corporate buyer. Photographerstirling.co.uk is in the top 3 for long tail keywords in both Edinburgh and Glasgow.

The photography business is characterised by massive popularity and both demand and supply have risen sharply over the years. This results in a very fragmented market. SEO enables us to reach the specific corporate buyer that we want and it has brought us clients like EY, Ralph Lauren, Core-tex, Wibra and Unica (for more details visit the about/over pages on the specific stites).

Obviously, it is worth mentioning that good photography plays a key role in the conversion of visitors on a page 😀…