A place for you to learn, get inspired, and keep up to date with all things SmugMug and photography
At SmugMug, we're always striving to make your experience better, and that includes ensuring your photos and galleries get the visibility they deserve. In the first quarter of this year, we embarked on a mission to enhance the SEO (search engine optimization) of your SmugMug sites to ensure they get more visibility in search results. Here's a breakdown of what it means for you and what's on the horizon.
We rolled up our sleeves and dove deep into the backend of SmugMug to improve the SEO performance of your photo sites. As we optimized for SEO, we also improved performance and reliability for your photo galleries. The proof is in the numbers.
Since beginning our SEO overhaul on November 2, 2023, we've seen significant improvements in key metrics, as reported by Google Search Console:
This means more of your sites are being crawled and, more importantly, more of your photos are being seen. Not just being seen, but clicked on and engaged with!
While these numbers speak volumes, it's essential to remember that SEO is an ongoing journey, and there's a lot you can do to help boost your own numbers. We've got a guide to help you do just that!
SEO improvements will continue to be one of our priorities. Our commitment to improving your photo site's visibility is unwavering. And while the work on SEO may never be finished, we're dedicated to elevating your SmugMug experience and helping your photos shine on the web.
In 2022, we celebrated 20 years of helping photographers all over the world showcase their art, cherish their memories, share their experiences, and run their businesses. And a lot has happened in those 20 years! We’ve heard amazing stories from photographers about their work and how they run their businesses. We’ve told some of their stories with SmugMug Films, where we highlight the inspirational work of amazing photographers around the world. And we’ve heard from our customers about how much of an impact our platform has made in their lives.
As your business grows, we’re enabling you to do more of it while on the go. We added notifications to our mobile apps to let you know when you make a sale. We also added mobile support for proof delay and made it possible for you to check on the status of orders no matter where you are. These small changes free you to manage your business when and where you want.
When you’re at your desk, we’ve added support for proof delay directly into the SmugMug plug-in for Lightroom Classic, allowing you to stay in this powerful tool while fulfilling customer orders.
It can be difficult to know if your photos are getting in front of your potential buyers, so we added improved SmugMug gallery engagement stats to get the data on how your potential buyers are responding and if the promotional channels you’re using are effective.
Our world-class customer support Heroes answered more than 120,000 inquiries. Many issues were resolved in just a few minutes. We’re proud to continue offering this level of courteous, effective, and fast customer support.
We made improvements to search to make finding photos easier for you and for your customers. Search is now faster and more accurate across all our subscription plans, and for customers opted into SmugMug Source™, it also includes auto-tagging of objects and geolocation.
We improved the purchase experience for customers ordering digital downloads from mobile phones and tablets, solving a fulfillment pain point many of you shared with us. We also added the ability for you to sell digital packages, giving you the best-in-class tools to deliver photographs to your clients.
But none of that matters if all of your photos aren’t safe and readily accessible. In the past two years we made it easier for you to store your RAW files along with your finished JPGs with SmugMug Source, an add-on feature to any SmugMug subscription plan. And in this past year alone, we invested in the stability and reliability of the SmugMug platform and storage. While you can’t always see these changes, everyone benefits from faster page loads, improved browser experiences across devices, and the peace of mind that every pixel of your work is safely stored and ready to be served at a moment’s notice.
You’ve told us you want to sell your work. We’re here to support you in achieving that goal. In the coming year you’ll see improvements that help people find and purchase their photos more easily. We know many of your customers increasingly are giving up their desktop computers (if they ever had them) and are using their devices on the go. We’re committed to making that experience easier for them and for you when managing the sale.
You’ve said you want photos available for purchase faster. We’re investing to enable more options for uploading. We’re excited about the opportunities in this space and can’t wait to see how it accelerates your business.
We want to be the best employee you’ve ever had, supporting you with the mundane parts of running your business so you can do the work that’s unique to you. Letting you do the work that your customers depend on. We’re also working on improvements to help you get photos onto our platform more easily, whether that’s on your desktop, tablet, phone, or camera — uploading to SmugMug should always be fast and reliable.
Like many of you, we’re concerned about the world we’re leaving behind for future generations, so we’re working to reduce the environmental impact of our business. This means continued investment in how we run our platform and business in a sustainable manner. We’ll continue to optimize our software, storage, bandwidth, and energy usage to ultimately become climate neutral.
Our purpose as a company is to build a better world through the power of photography. At SmugMug, we’re creating the best platform for all photographers and we’re incredibly humble that you’ve chosen us to be a partner throughout your journey. The next 20 years will be transformative for the photography industry, just as the introduction of digital cameras was. So stay in touch and look for more from us throughout the year!
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Tell us what you think! Start a conversation on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
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Remember to keep an eye out for updates in the "What’s New" section in your SmugMug account. And tell us what you think or what features you’d like to see: start a conversation on our Facebook, Instagram, and/or X (formerly known as Twitter).
Last year, we told you we were investing in uploading and getting images to your customers faster, a critical component for realizing sales. We kept this promise by focusing heavily on improving our upload experience this year, allowing you to better use the bandwidth offered from high-speed internet connections many of you have in your offices and homes. Some customers were able to enjoy a 50% improvement in upload speeds and reduce errors by 20%.
We also told you we’d be focusing on helping you sell your work wherever your customers are. We invested in improved order experiences for mobile devices, making it easier for people to get the products they want and helping them understand how a print might be cropped for the product they order. We also made it easier to add items to carts, and it’s all paid off—literally. In 2023 you all made more money selling on SmugMug than in any of our previous 21 years!
But it’s not just mobile-friendly access for your customers—you’re on the go, too. These improvements save you precious time before and after shoots as well as give you flexibility to work when and how you want. We added the most important features, including releasing proof delays, checking orders, and engagement stats, directly in the iOS and Android apps.
We were also focused on the impact that we and the photography industry have on the world. As of 2023, SmugMug is Climate Neutral Certified. We’re proud of the work we’ve done for the planet this year, and this is only the beginning of our journey to create a company and business that truly makes the world a better place.
You, our customers, are our priority. SmugMug already offers world-class support, where a real human is just a quick email request away. But this year we resolved your email and live-chat requests faster than ever before; even through your busiest sales times, requests were responded to in less than an hour.
You’ve been telling us where the product let you down, and we listened. We fixed hundreds of issues that prevented you from getting the most from our platform. We touched everything from how you log in, gallery displays, product selection, order delivery, and search-engine optimization, and we sped up parts of the site that “felt slow.” We want your experience to be delightful, consistent, and intuitive.
We’re focused on meeting the needs of your business. We’ve heard from many of you that better insights about how to run your photography business are critical. We’ll help you navigate the things that are unfamiliar. We’ll provide more actionable data and advice so you can make better decisions for your business and help you thrill your clients. You’ve seen past investments in gallery stats, and we’ll do more here to help you understand what’s working for your business to ensure your marketing efforts are driving the outcomes you want.
We’re also making it easier for your clients to find photos of their cherished memories. Not just from search, but finding the right photos in each gallery. Not everyone wants to buy prints of those cherished memories anymore, and we’re making it even easier for them to purchase digital copies and other keepsakes, too. You’ve captured the memories they’ll hand down for generations.
Our money-back print guarantee ensures you can rest easy knowing clients are satisfied with the prints they order and, in 2024, we’ll expand the work we help you do even more. We’ll do more for you through amazing partnerships and exclusive offers, and by ensuring the solutions we build support your business needs. In 2023 this included offers for business banking through Found and discounts on the equipment, education, and software you need—and we’re just getting started.
As we’ve added new capabilities and fixed issues you’ve told us about, we haven’t always done the best job of telling you we did it. We want to go beyond sending you email updates. We’ll help you understand how to most effectively use SmugMug to thrill your customers and grow your business. We’ll do a better job of telling you about new capabilities through multiple channels.
We’re excited about what 2024 holds for photographers everywhere. And we’re thankful for your continued trust in us. Photography holds the power to change the world, and we’re excited to be on this journey together.
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Remember to keep an eye out for updates in the ‘What’s New’ section in your SmugMug account. And, tell us what you think or what features you’d like to see: start a conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and/or X (formerly known as Twitter).
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Remember to keep an eye out for updates in the ‘What’s New’ section in your SmugMug account. And tell us what you think or what features you’d like to see: start a conversation on our Facebook, Instagram, and/or X (formerly known as Twitter).
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Remember to keep an eye out for updates in the ‘What’s New’ section in your SmugMug account. And tell us what you think or what features you’d like to see: start a conversation on our Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
