No Trade Outranks Wedding Photographers. So What Am I For?

“My reviews do the selling. So what am I actually paying you for?”

A wedding photographer said it kindly, about eleven minutes into a call in February, and she was right about the first half of it.

Some version of that question turns up on nearly every sales call I take from a photographer. I usually get thirty seconds to answer before we’re on to dates and deposits, and thirty seconds has never once been enough for it.

Nobody is above you

I check every trade the same way, and star ratings have a top of the pile like anything else does.

Wedding photographers own it. Couples give this trade 4.9 stars on average, which is 1 of 47, with painters and cleaning companies sitting underneath and nothing whatsoever above.

I don’t think that’s an accident, and I don’t think it’s the algorithm being kind to you either.

You spend fourteen hours with a family on the most photographed day of their lives, you hand back something they’ll still own when their children are grown, and then you ask for the review while the gallery is still open in front of them.

Every trade I work with should be doing that. Almost none of them are. Timing is most of what getting reviews comes down to, and your job hands you the best moment anybody gets.

So the question is fair. If the reviews are that good, what exactly is the website for?

What Google does with the stars

Google keeps a listing for your business built out of its own records, whether you ever claimed the thing or not, and your star rating hangs off the front of it.

Search a photographer by name on a phone and that listing takes the whole top of the screen. The website waits underneath, if it gets a look at all.

Now watch what happens when nobody types your name.

She types the job and the town instead, because she has no name in her head yet. Google answers with three businesses in a small box with a map over them, and the rating is the only thing in that box a tired person compares.

Your stars win her attention there. I’ve never argued otherwise, and I’d put a lot of my clients’ money on the stars over anything I could build.

But what happens next?

The questions a review can’t answer

A review tells her you’re good. It can’t tell her you’re free on the eighth of August.

Everything she needs after the tap is a fact about her, not about you:

whether you’re free on her date
whether you’ll drive two hours out to a barn
what a full day comes to, before she has to write an email to find out
whether you direct people, or disappear for eight hours and hand back something she’s never seen you take

None of that fits in a review, because your couples had all of it settled before they ever wrote one. Where is a stranger supposed to get it?

Think about who writes your reviews. Someone who met you at a venue walkthrough, asked you every one of those questions out loud, got answers she liked, and then spent a whole day beside you before she ever opened a keyboard.

Her review is the ending of a conversation. The stranger reading it is trying to work out how to start one.

Where it usually stops

So she taps through, and she’s on your homepage at half past eleven at night with the phone flat on the bedspread and a laptop closed beside her.

15.4% of these homepages give her anything to type into.

Everyone else offers an email address to copy, or a page called Contact one tap deeper in, or an icon that sends her back to the app she just came out of.

Copying an email address at half eleven at night means switching apps, and switching apps at half eleven at night means it happens tomorrow. Tomorrow is where enquiries go to die.

Restaurants stand at the same corner. Nearly every one of them holds a review, and hardly any of their homepages can take a message back.

You didn’t skip the website, either. 90.0% of these businesses have one, which is 9 of 47 and ahead of most trades I check, so nobody in your trade thinks a website is optional. A fair few of them still open without a padlock, and that’s the one check your trade finishes near the bottom on.

You didn’t skip the writing on it. 41.1% of these sites publish a blog, more than most trades manage, which tells me the effort is there and always has been.

The thing she has to do next is the part nobody built.

I don’t read that as laziness, and I’ve stopped saying it is. Your homepage was made to be looked at, the way a portfolio has always been made to be looked at, and nobody was standing behind the designer asking what a stranger was supposed to do once she got there.

What I’d say if I had longer than thirty seconds

Your reviews do the selling. They do it better than mine do, better than my clients in almost any other trade manage, and I’d never take that job off them.

Some trades can’t ask the way you ask. A psychologist told me she wouldn’t put that in front of a client, and she was right not to, so we had to go and find her the people she could ask instead.

Selling and booking are two different jobs, though, and a review can only do the first one.

Your reviews got her to tap. What she does in the forty seconds afterwards is the only stretch of this I can help with, and it’s the stretch nobody has ever put on a quote for you.

The stars introduce you to a stranger, and then the stranger has to be able to start a conversation without writing an email from scratch to a person she’s never met.

Have you ever tried writing that email? Hi, I’m getting married, I think it’s the fourteenth of June, is that a lot of money?

People put it off for weeks. I’ve watched a bride type one out and then delete it.

When someone hires me for a wedding photography website, we settle what a stranger can do on the first screen before anybody opens a design tool, and that conversation is short and slightly boring and worth more than the fonts.

The wedding photography sites I keep bookmarked all answer the date question and the travel question inside the first screen, and not one of them looks any less like a portfolio for it.