Dana Goodson Photography: Month 1

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the Canopy, the view from above where we talk GEO, founder life, and growing your visibility in AI search. I'm Jen Shannon, your host and founder of Clemelopy. And if you're listening, I just wanna give you a quick shout out and say thank you so much for supporting this podcast. Today, we're diving into one of my favorite segments, the Clemelopy case studies. This is where we follow real businesses over twelve months as they use Clemelopy to optimize their websites for AI search.

No hypotheticals, no theory, just real results from real business owners. Each month, we do a check-in with our case study participants and post it to our YouTube channel and now our podcast. Ta da.

As I mentioned, our case studies are also available on YouTube if you want to watch, but I wanted a place where you could just listen. Whether you're driving, folding laundry, or pretending to look busy at your desk, I don't judge. Today's case study features Dana Goodson of Dana Goodson Photography. Dana is a professional photographer and she's one of our first beta users willing to let us document her entire journey. In this episode, we're establishing her baseline analytics. This is where her AI visibility stands right now before we start optimizing. This is month one of twelve, and you're going to get to see exactly where she's starting from.

So hi, everybody. Thank you so much for joining us in our case studies. We are here with Dana Goodson today, and I am going to let her tell us a little bit about her story and her business.

I've known Dana since two thousand ten or eleven. Dana is still a photographer. I will let you go ahead and tell us who you are, what you do, who you serve, and what brought you here today.

I'm Dana, and I have been a photographer since two thousand nine. It was kind of an accidental career change for me. My education and background was in health care. I was a diagnostic and vascular sonographer — that is what I went to school for. I actually do still keep that license, but I don't scan any longer.

I had an interest in photography always, since I got married in two thousand, many years ago. My wedding was photographed on film and photography was very important to me. Fast forward a few years later and I was just kind of itching for a hobby. Got a DSLR camera like a lot of people do. Just kinda started taking some pictures of my own family and friends and thought, well, I really like this.

I reached out to my wedding photographer, who was still in business at the time, and asked if he ever needed a helper, that I was just interested in kind of observing. He said sure, come along and carry my bags. I can't pay you, but you can come along. So I did that for a little while while I was still working in health care. He agreed to kind of teach and mentor me and hired me for some jobs under his studio for that first year, which was great because I could focus on just learning technique and not really have to muddy the waters too much with the business side of things.

I phased out of that, went out on my own, and just networked, met a lot of great vendors and other photographers, and really just kind of self taught from learning, doing, reading, YouTube, you name it, books. I mostly photograph weddings, but in the last number of years I've taken an interest in corporate events. I've done a few bar and bat mitzvahs. I like the variety to mix it up, and fortunately I've been able to continue this as a full time job for a number of years now.

I actually ended up losing my job. The imaging center that I worked for for over ten years — they were like a family to me — ended up going out of business. I was pretty devastated. But with the cost of day care, I was working a lot to pay for that, and I thought, you know, I've got a good amount of weddings on for the year. Why don't I just stay home and let's see where this photography thing goes? And I never had to go back to health care. What was really devastating at the time was a blessing in disguise.

In terms of how the industry has changed — there's a lot more vendors out there, a lot more competition. I've always tried to deliver classic, clean images, properly colored, properly exposed, not a lot of editing and filters. I think those clients who are looking for that find me.

I'm seeing an increase in the age of my couples the last few years. I call them my senior couples, retirement age and up, and I love seeing it because they get really excited and they don't stress about the small stuff. Content creation is also definitely new. I'm seeing couples sometimes opting out of a videographer completely and going for a content creator. That's probably the biggest change that comes to the top of my mind and I think it's probably here to stay.

I'm the worst with managing my website, to be honest. I get a lot of clients by word-of-mouth. I like to talk to people on the phone or do a FaceTime. I'm just not a super techy person. Once it's there and it's like, this is a landing place, this is how they can get in touch with me, I've really just kind of left it at that. I realize there's so much more to the business than that.

So I wanted to touch base on the reason you decided to say yes when I reached out to you about the case study.

You're incredibly smart and I just admire all the different things that you know how to do. It's very impressive. And I think especially for females, anything tech related, it's just like, well, that's really cool. What you were sharing was really beautiful. I just like all of the colors. It caught my attention. And I trust Jen, so it really didn't take any convincing.

I know that something like this does require you to be vulnerable. And from personally knowing you, I know that you don't share a lot of personal aspects of your life on the Internet. You are a perfect case study because you have been in business for a long time, you haven't really tracked what happens with the traffic aspect of your website, and you're not technical. My whole goal with Clemelopy — and I love Taylor Swift, the teal and orange was very much inspired by that — was to make it feel inviting and exciting and not intimidating, because a lot of these UXs are designed to look really techy, and that can be really intimidating to people.

Tell me what you've seen in your own business that has made you decide that now is the time to start optimizing for generative engines.

It just seems to be the way that people are finding their information. I heard about ChatGPT from my kids, probably a year ago. I was like, what is this that you're using? And it was really amazing. I find that I go to that more than Google now. If that's what clients are using to find their professionals, sign me up. Sounds like I need to get with the times.

Now let's look at your results. Your analytics hadn't actually been working on your website for a long time, so there were no measurements. We've been tracking now since February thirteenth. Today is the twentieth. In that time, you actually had a total of seventy five users. Of that, sixty were direct. You had seven organic social, meaning that somebody found you on social and clicked through to your website. And then you had eight organic search, meaning somebody went on Google, typed something in, found your name, and clicked on it. But you had zero AI search traffic.

I pulled your search traffic from Google just to see the keywords that people were typing in to find you. The most popular one was just Dana Goodson with one click but eleven impressions, and then Dana Goodson Photography with ten impressions and one click. Everything else where you showed an impression was Amelia Island Catholic Church, Casa Monica wedding — a lot of venues are what was showing up when it related to how you were showing up in search engines.

When we go over and look at your Share of Model baseline, you actually have a pretty good baseline. It's not great, but it's good. It's not starting from zero. Your share of model was nineteen percent. Of those queries, you own nineteen percent of the share of model. That means when someone is asking those questions you've set as a preset list, it comes back and you show up nineteen percent of the time.

Looking at the platform breakdown: ChatGPT had you at fifty percent. For Claude, it's zero percent — not surprising, because Claude is really good with coding and that sort of thing, so most people doing general searches are using ChatGPT. Perplexity is seven percent, also not surprising. And then you have a citation rate of thirteen percent, meaning that when your business is recommended, it is showing a link to your website.

We also had Dana pull the Orchard Audit, which looks across six different categories to give you a score based on what it finds on your website. It gave you a B — a sixty nine out of a hundred. Your website isn't a huge, many-paged site, so when it's analyzing the information you do have, there's not as much to analyze. It needs work on a few different pages.

Your top issues were authority, AI readability, clarity, and structure. And your top technical issues were that you didn't link to things internally — you're not using your web pages as a way to link to other of your web pages. There's also no schema. And your content came back as vague — no clear proof of outcomes, not enough specific information. In the photography world, a lot of people won't put prices on their website because it varies so much, or they don't want to automatically turn someone off with a price tag. And that can come across to AIs as a lack of clarity.

The nice thing about doing the case study is that you get my guidance along with it.

Do you think that this journey is going to result in positive outcomes for you this time next year?

Yes, I do. I think it only gets better from here. Ideally, I would just like to see an increase in qualified leads that are good matches. Because it takes time when you get emails and you wanna respond to them, and I don't use autoresponders — it's me. I don't have an assistant. Anything that can save me time and let them get a lot of that information and be pretty close to making a decision before even reaching out would be ideal to me.

That's very realistic. And I've heard that frustration among a lot of service based business owners. If we can make it very clear from wherever they find you, especially in AI engines, what that expectation is, then it would reduce the people who automatically know that you're not within their budget.

So the last thing I wanted to talk about is our next steps. We're going to get on a separate call and go through the Orchard Builder on each page on your website. That will provide you with very detailed information on what you need to do to improve. And then every month we'll have a check-in like this one — where we talk about what you've done to optimize, if you've seen any improvements, maybe what you're finding difficult along the way, and just kind of having those check-ins throughout the year.

The Orchard Ecosystem Framework has nine elements to it. It walks through this idea of an ecosystem based on a Clementine Orchard and how each piece of the puzzle fits together to create this entire ecosystem. When you run the Orchard Builder on your home page, you'll come back with nine different sections — roots, soil, trunk, branches, leaves, and so on. Under each one, it's going to give you a detailed explanation of what's working well and what needs to be optimized, with specifics. And that's why I've included Schema Studio — so all you have to do is paste in your link, and it will tell you exactly what to copy and paste and how to implement it into your site.

When you optimize for generative engines, there's an automatic benefit because it also optimizes for search engines. Once you optimize for GEO, all of those same things apply to the indexing language, and it will automatically increase your SEO as well. But it doesn't work the other way around, which is interesting. Generative engines are looking for clarity in language, in actual human language, versus just an indexing keyword or definition.

I'm really looking forward to this journey. I hope you are too.

I am too. Congratulations. I'm very proud of what you've created and how it grows.

Well, thank you so much for your time and being open and vulnerable to us, and we'll see you next month.

Alright everyone, that is a wrap on this case study episode. You just heard Dana's starting point — month one of twelve. Over the next year, we'll be checking in to see how her AI visibility evolves as she implements the Orchard Ecosystem Framework and optimizes her website for AI search. If you wanna follow along with Dana's journey, make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss an update. And if you wanna watch the video version, you can find it over on our YouTube channel — just search Clemelopy and find the playlist Case Studies: Dana Goodson Photography.

If you wanna see your own business featured in a future case study, head over to clemelopy.com/case-studies to learn more and apply. Thank you so much for listening. And until next time, keep growing forward.

The Canopy is brought to you by Clemelopy, helping small businesses grow their visibility in AI powered search. Learn more at clemelopy.com.