A Trick For Finding The Best Food Photographer In Pittsburgh
If you find yourself in need of a food photographer and you have never hired one before, I have a little trick that will make your job a little easier.
Your first thought will probably go to google and type in “Pittsburgh food photographer” or maybe “food photography Pittsburgh” and either one of those two options would be a really good starting point. If you do that, you will be shown a list of webpages from all the photographers that offer food photography as a service or have mentioned it somehow on one of their pages. Google does a pretty good job of sorting through the gazillion webpages on the planet earth in order to give you quality search results, but what they haven’t been able to do yet is to determine the “quality” of photography on all those webpages.
The listings you receive from a search will say much more about the photographer’s SEO than it will about the quality of photographic skill level of the food shooter. You will receive literally thousands of returns. Sifting through that many web pages will be a time-consuming, inefficient process, that will soon exhaust even the most dedicated individual. It’s not the best way to go about finding a photographer of any kind, so let me tell you about a little trick I learned from a recent client.
I’ve always prided myself in my SEO prowess, so I’m okay with people searching any way they wish. One way I keep in tuned to the changing landscape of technology is to ask questions of the people that find me on the internet. In the “old days”, Ad agencies or corporations would hire a photographer that they were familiar with and fly them to where they needed to have a photograph taken. They usually did this because it was too difficult to find a photographer they thought was good, in every city where they needed one. Now, with pretty much every photographer having a web page, it’s easy to find a quality photographer in almost every city. In the case of food photography, the difficult thing now is to be able to sort through all the photographer’s web pages in order to find the best food photographer in the target city.
A few months ago, I get this call from a magazine wanting to hire me to do some photography for them and while I’m talking to the Art Director, I as my usual research question… “How did you find me?” Like I expected, the answer was “search engine”. My next question was “what search phrase did you use?”. I’ve found that this is a very important followup question. The answers I get to this question have been VERY helpful over the years in filling in various gaps SEO. I can’t remember exactly now what the client responded with, but it was something that I expected and had covered with my SEO efforts. What really surprised me though, was what he said after that. He said something like “I typed in Pittsburgh food photography but then what I did was click on images, instead of the usual list of webpages.”
WOW! What a great idea I thought. Looking at food photos was a whole lot faster than looking at a list of webpages that needed to be visited, one by one. He wanted to be looking at photos anyway, and this was just a shortcut. He said that he would find a photo he liked and when clicked, it took him to the food photographer’s webpage (mine) where he could see more photos. What a simple idea, but until then, I had never thought of it. Thank God I always optimize my images too. :o)
So that’s the trick that my client used to find what he thought was the best food photographer in Pittsburgh, and I’m glad he did….
If you’re looking for the best food photographer in Pittsburgh, and you think that I might be the one, please call me at 412-232-4444, email me, or visit my food photography portfolio website. I’d be happy to discuss your next food photography project.
