Most people will look for a photographer in their area. Usually, after asking for a referral from friends or family, if they can’t find one, they go online, typing in something like “(Subject) Photographer (Area)”.
Whoever floats at the top of these search results, will have a good chance of booking that potential client. That’s why, as photographers, we feel the importance of being found on top of the search results all the time.
How well are you ranking for the search terms potential clients use to search for a photographer in their area? Are you featured right there at the top or buried down on a search results page that nobody ever takes the time to click through to? (Let’s be honest, how often do you make it to page two or three on Google?)
If you want to improve in this direction, you’ll have to remember that search engines evaluate your website constantly. So you will need to work on optimizing your website just the same. This is often referred to as Search Engine Optimization or in short: SEO.
In this article, I sum up the most important things to keep in mind when working on your website. If you want to improve your ranking and get more interested visitors to your website, follow these photographer SEO tips:
1. Stick to only one website
To decide that they want to work with you, visitors only need one website where they can clearly see what you have to offer. You don’t have to work on a website, a separate portfolio, a blog and another website somewhere else. Keep it simple and focus on making your website relevant, beautiful and to the point. This will also help your SEO, since people will mention you throughout the web using only one link, making that link seem clearly more important to Google than others.
2. Start regularly posting on your blog
This is probably the most important one of all the photographer SEO tips posted here. If you don’t have a blog setup on your website yet, make a priority from starting one and publishing blog posts on a regular basis. Google loves these regular updates that keep your website fresh, up to date and interesting to visitors. Plus, you’ll attract more and better clients and grow your reputation.
If you have a website on a platform like Squarespace or WordPress, an option to add a blog to your website is already built in and easy to set up. Make sure you add a link to your blog to your website’s main menu, to help visitors find it easily.
3. Don’t stress over using keywords
Search engines analyze the words users type in when looking for a photographer and compare it with what shows on your website. Although these keywords are important, this matching process and determining if your website is a relevant reference for the people’s searches will focus more on semantic fields instead of simple keywords (those words users type in Google).
The search engines will want you to write content that feels more natural. Instead of using a keyword such as “wedding photography (location)” multiple times throughout a page, you should use more relevant words, such as “for a wedding in (location), search a photographer who”, “your wedding photographs in this gorgeous park in (location)” or “photos on your wedding day”. This doesn’t mean you will have to stop using keywords, but rather that you shouldn’t obsess that much about it. Instead, write from the heart and as detailed as possible, about the real needs of your audience.
4. Insert social media buttons
On social networks like Facebook or Instagram, users are very active and interact all the time. The more people talk about your services on those networks, the search engines will take it as a signal that your business is important and people are interested in it. This will increase your odds of having your website displayed among the first search results.
While you don’t need to spend days promoting your business on social networks, you should give your website visitors more instruments to reach your social accounts. You’ll notice that there are many SEO tools on Squarespace, WordPress or other similar services, that you can download and use to easily insert social media buttons throughout your website. Some are profile buttons, that send your visitors directly to your social media accounts. Others are sharing buttons, that let visitors directly share your content on their accounts. You should use them with confidence.
5. Keep it simple
Just like you, Google wants the best experience for your visitors. So you need to make your website look good, with a clear structure, allowing pages to load fast and for people to easily find the information they need. For instance, it shouldn’t take more than two or three clicks to access any of your website’s main pages such as booking sessions and finding out more about you as a photographer. In a nutshell, you will have to keep your website simple and intuitive.
Try to refrain from making notification messages pop-up on the screen. Do not display ads that cover other elements of your website, forcing visitors to close them in order to continue navigation. And try not to add special effects on menus and buttons – all these could make your website look cool, but they can also annoy your visitors, not to mention that they will make pages load slower, and affect your ranking as mentioned before.
6. Tweak your page titles
The title you give to a page – like the title of a blog post or a page on your website – is the title that will show up in the search results as the direct link to your website. Ideally, they should contain a keyword and your business name (like “Wedding Photography by MyBusinessName”, but with no more than 70 characters in length – if they are longer than that, they won’t be fully displayed in the search results and will look bad. There are some tools out there to help you with this process, such as The Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress, but it can also be as simple as naming your blog posts and page titles something relevant when you create them.
For example, I named the title of this blog post “Photographer SEO tips” on purpose, since I know my post will be extremely relevant to people searching for that term. They will be more likely to click through if that very keyword is at the beginning of the title.
7. Craft SEO-friendly URLs
A URL is basically the address of a website, page or blog post, such as www.yourphotographywebsite.com/aboutme. SEO-friendly URLs are simple, intuitive, and developed around a significant keyword for that page. Their role is to tell your readers (because Google displays them in the search results under the page title) and the crawlers what a page is about. You have probably noticed on some websites URLs in a format like this one: http://www.mywebsite.com/index.php?cat=301&mode=tst&var=83hh. Avoid such links as much as you can.
Instead, pick lean, meaningful and SEO-friendly formats like http://www.myphotography.com/services/. Did you see the url of this blog post? It has the keyword I want to rank for, Photographer SEO tips, as the second part of the URL, with nothing else added. It will be more inviting, easier to notice, and will help your pages rank higher in the search results. The platform your website is built on, where you log in to edit pages and add blog posts, has a special setting from where you can select the format of the URL. You should be able to choose between several different formats and once you have selected one, all your website URLs will automatically have that format.
8. Take a look at your photos
Every once in a while, have a good look at your photos. I don’t mean to look at your photos and admire them (though you can do that too), but rather to analyze how optimized they are. Optimization for search engines doesn’t refer just to text content, but also to images. As a photographer, you probably have many photographs on your website, not just on the portfolio section. So you have even more reasons to tweak your photographs.
The image optimization should begin before you upload the images on your website. The filenames must have descriptive and relevant titles, while their size shouldn’t exceed 150kb. Once you have added them to your website library, make sure you fill in all those fields for title, URL, ALT text and captions, introducing significant keywords. Google looks at all of these fields to see if your website is relevant to the person searching.
9. Go mobile
More and more people surf the web from their mobile phones. If your website isn’t optimized for mobile use, it will display the information in a poor format, annoying, and difficult to navigate. Again, this will make you lose business so you can’t afford to ignore mobile friendliness.
Access this page to test how mobile friendly your website is. If you get the OK, no need to worry about it. Chances are it already is, because website themes are following this trend, being optimized for mobile from the beginning. If not, you will receive some recommendations of what you need to improve. Follow those steps until you get a positive result.
Alternatively, you could work with a web developer to create a dedicated mobile website from scratch. When you have one, search engines will check if users navigate from mobiles and automatically redirect them to your mobile website.
10. Focus on Local SEO
Local SEO is generally about using geographic cues with your keywords. Like initially mentioned, people look for photographers from their living area. If you’re not spreading clues about the area where you are doing your business, you risk drawing in traffic without relevance, that won’t gain you clients. Just like with the slow page loading, if people click on your website, notice you’re living far away from them, and leave the website fast, the search engine will, again, think your content is not relevant.
Your goal is not just to drive traffic from search engines, you want the most relevant traffic you can get. You want people who land on your pages to spend as much time as possible. Therefore, the first thing you should do is to register your business through the Google Business service. By doing so, you are officially letting Google know that you exist as a business. When creating your Google Business profile, you will be asked to provide many geographical details that will allow the search engine to suggest your website to its users, based on the geographical details it gathers about those users.
Another essential aspect of local SEO is to create a consistent contact profile that will show up everywhere online. Your contact details must be the same on your website, on your Facebook profile, on your Instagram account and everywhere else. Consistency is the key with this type of optimization.
11. Build quality links
The number of links from other websites to your website is another important indicator for search engines about the popularity and utility of your website. Of course, having other users posting links to your website on their social accounts, websites or blog posts isn’t enough. Ideally, those links should come from websites that have a higher rank in search engines (meaning they are considered authoritative) and that also have some relevance to your business.
For instance, it’s one thing if your website is mentioned on a small blog with gift-giving guides and a totally different thing if you’re mentioned on the website of a major event planning company or on the one of a highly popular photographer. The second link is way more valuable. In order to gain such valuable links, there’s no better way than to reach out and build solid relationships with the people behind those websites. It’s a process that takes time and should happen naturally – if you force things or just exchange links, Google might notice and penalize your website.
12. Don’t cross the black line
Getting your website listed on the first page on search engines can be achieved in different ways. Some of these ways are considered shortcuts, helping you to rank higher and faster, without necessarily „deserving” it – by that, I mean without meeting all the criteria that search engines consider relevant. These shortcuts are named black-hat SEO techniques.
A few examples include posting low-quality content, overuse of keywords, hiding rich-keyword fragments in white fonts, making deals with other websites to exchange links and so on. Google condemns these tactics and will punish you harshly if it catches you. As tempting as it might be to speed things up, don’t force it because you risk having your website completely excluded from the search results. Following the photographer SEO tips in this blog article will be sufficient.
I know it might seem like a lot. It certainly feels overwhelming and intimidating. But instead of obsessing over technical terms, your main goal should be to constantly improve the experience of people who visit your website. Whatever you want to change, ask yourself: is this going to help my clients? Will it make things clearer for them? Will it make my website more intuitive and easier to access? Will it make content and photographs easier to browse and understand?
Search engines are your friends, not your enemies. If they ask you all of the above, while it might seem like a pain, ultimately, it’s in your clients’ best interest. You’re on the same team here.