Karen Julia

SEO Consultant

I’m an SEO Consultant who specialises in improving the rankings of photography websites.

From my base in the Botanics area of Glasgow, I serve clients throughout the UK and Europe, the USA, Australia, New Zealand, and other countries around the world.

Education and empowerment is at the heart of everything we do.

Our bespoke consultancy work is always recorded. As we fix your site, we explain the actions we take and the reasons why. This way, our clients learn how to rank well in the long term, and how to comply with Google’s best practice guidelines. This provides strong foundations for future growth.

We understand that improving your rankings quickly is really important to you, and whilst we cannot speed up Google, we have processes that ensure that our work is completed as soon as possible.

Portrait of Karen who specialises in SEO for wedding photographers

Our passion is empowering photography business owners through education, so that they are not relying on SEO services in an ongoing way.

My Office

I made a few updates to my office during the apocalypse of 2020, and now meet clients on Zoom calls for SEO coaching whilst walking on my treadmill.

I’ve had quite a few clients ask about it, and want to see what it looked like, so thought I’d share. I’ve owned it for more than a year now and really love it! I typically walk about 5-10 miles a day. And yep, that’s a squat rack you can see in the corner. I lift weights to stay fit and strong for photographing weddings.

The treadmill is a Lifespan under desk treadmill – I selected my own desk as none of the desks they offer are large enough for the dual monitors I use when meeting clients.

Our Approach

We start with a discovery call. During this 45min call, we’ll get the lowdown on your data, and prepare your project, agreeing timelines based on your personal situation, which is influenced by available data.

If your site is brand new, or you have been tracking your site performance through Google Analytics and Google Search Console – we can get started on our next available slot.

Step 2 is action! Once we have sufficient data, we’ll do all of the work on your site as soon as possible.

This includes optimising your core pages, optimising a selection of blog posts, preparing training videos for you on subjects like Google Analytics and link building, and collating data for you to use in future. This ensures both you and your site benefit as soon as possible.

Google’s official advice is that it takes 4-12 months to see the benefits of SEO work, so once we have made our optimisation changes, there will be an 8 week incubation period where we monitor your site but do not actively do any on-site optimisation work.

During this time, you’ll receive guidance on actionable steps you can take to supercharge our SEO work.

You’ll book a review session with us around the 8-week stage.

We’ll review your data together to check things are moving in the right direction.

We’ll also use this meeting to review backlink improvements and work on conversion optimisation.

We’ll run an uptodate content analysis on your site to check for outstanding opportunities.

This is a final review meeting that you’ll book at the 12-month stage.

We’ll review your data together, and give you guidance to continue to grow your rankings moving forward.

You’ll receive links to your coaching calls, training videos and data so that you can continue to benefit from these.

The Photo SEO Lab Story

In 2007 I moved to a new city (Manchester, England) and started learning SEO as a way to help couples find my website.

In 2012, my site received a Panda penalty, and I discovered I needed to change my resources to ensure that would not happen in future. I implemented quality monitoring software and studied Googles best practice guidelines, in addition to undertaking training from more reputable sources.

In 2014, I started with a brand new site and used a new domain. With my new skills and training, I achieved over 20 page one rankings within 3 months. This attracted the attention of other photographers who wanted to hire me. I started doing direct consultancy work and experimented with different training courses.

In December 2016, I joined a US based SEO agency as an SEO consultant, working part-time alongside my wedding photography business. I soon took on extra responsibilities, and in October 2017 was promoted to Operations Manager.

In my two years with the agency, I worked with hundreds of photographers all over the world but mainly based in the USA. I’ve optimised hundreds of websites and delivered many hours of coaching calls during which I trained our clients on achieving improvements in ranking performance.

I launched the Photo SEO Lab in January 2019 with the aim of delivering a streamlined and efficient SEO service for photographers that would deliver both results and a great client experience.

It’s now the summer of 2024, Photo SEO Lab is undergoing a makeover to reflect that we serve a wider range of businesses and will undergo a name change in the summer.

SEO Training

I keep up to date with the latest SEO in a variety of ways. I’m regularly analysing the performance of many sites, which enables me to spot changes and trends. I invest in developing my knowledge and have completed many of the courses available within the Yoast SEO Academy.

Google Training

Core Web Vitals

I’ve completed the ‘Improve your website with Web Vitals’ training pathway with Google Developers. (Google provides training on their projects to web developers). I undertook this training so I could provide the best support to clients to prepare for the introduction of Core Web Vitals.

Google My Business

I’ve completed the ‘Google My Business‘ training with Google Skillshop in April 2021. I’ve been optimising GMB profiles for years, but sometimes it’s worth going back to basics and checking my knowledge is correct.

Hubspot Academy

Content Marketing Certification

I’ve recently completed the Hubspot content marketing certification. This was an awesome and in-depth course covering all the aspects of content marketing and offered free within the Hubspot academy. It featured 12 lessons, a whopping 56 videos, 11 quizzes, and took over 6 hours.

Digital Marketing Certification

This was a 5-hour course that covered areas including building a content creation framework, finding the right SEO strategy, improving website performance, and creating quality blog content.

Hubspot Academy Digital Marketing Certificate

SEMRUSH Academy Digital Marketing Certification

I’ve recently completed a couple of the SEMRUSH Academy courses. Once covered SEO fundamentals, and the other was based on learning features of the software in relation to completing technical SEO audits.