5 quick ways improve seo photographers marketing

If you are a professional photographer and you have a photography website, then you know how important it is to get your website ranking at the top of Google. Claiming the top spot can help you drive more customers to your photography services so you can make more money and reach your goals.

You will need to use every tool at your disposal to grow your photography business. Whether you are based in a small town or a large city, you will face increasing competition among other photographers and options available to your customers. One of these tools that you need to use is optimizing your content for search engines.

I can tell you from personal experience that ranking high in search engines is tough because photography SEO can be time-consuming, plus you need to focus on other channels like social media, all while you grow your business.

There are a number of ranking factors that you should think about when optimizing your photography website for search engines and people. We will cover advanced SEO tips that you can use to boost your rankings in search results, but today we are going to jump into on-page SEO tips that you can apply even if you don’t have a background in marketing like:

  1. Carefully structure your photography website.
  2. Conduct thorough keyword research.
  3. Plan & produce the right type of content for your site.
  4. Optimize metadata on every page of your website.
  5. Optimize every image on your site.

Why Is SEO Important For Photography?

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You’re probably wondering why photography SEO is essential in the first place. After all, it’s not like you’re a marketer, so why would your clients care? Well, truth be told they probably won’t, but the truth is that your audience is looking for a photographer in Google and other search engines.

Whether someone is looking for a wedding photographer or photography for their child’s graduation party, you need to get found whenever someone searches for photography services.

It is vital to get all of these on-page SEO tips right if you want to outrank your competition and drive more customers to your site.

Even though you are a photographer, the truth is that you won’t get any new clients if your website ranks too far down on organic search results. That’s why you should be focusing on your SEO so that you actually get a steady stream of prospects through your photography website.

That’s why we will cover some of the best SEO tips that you can use to reach potential clients in search engines while saving time and energy today!

1. Build Your Photography Website Structure Carefully

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Google and other search engines do a great job organizing information across the internet, and Search Engine Optimization is focused on making it easier for search engines to find, crawl, and show relevant information in search results.

How a website is structured has just as much (if not more than) influence as the keywords that you use on your site, your off-site SEO strategies, and other SEO ranking factors.

One of the critical things to remember when building your photography website is that you have to organize your website in a way that makes it easy for humans and machines to understand your photography content.

When your pages are correctly structured using the proper headings, it will be easier for humans to navigate around and also more straightforward for Google’s algorithm to analyze. Structuring your website in a clear and direct manner makes it easier for Google to rank your content, and it helps your audience engage with your brand.

  • Create top-level pages like Home, About, Portfolio, Locations, and Contact pages. Each of these pages is called your “Parent Pages” that will serve as the highest level of your website’s hierarchy.
  • Link different pages together to help people click-through your content. This is called Internal Linking content, and it can help Google understand your content and will reduce your bounce rate.
  • Each page on your site should have a central theme, and you should make this apparent to Google and human readers with title tags, on-site formatting, and great call-to-actions.

It’s more important for your website to be well-structured than it is to be designed to look pretty. This is why you’ll need to organize information across your website to get the most out of your SEO strategy.

2. Find The Right Keywords For Your Photography Website

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-IMAGE- https://www.pexels.com/photo/girl-writing-on-a-black-keyboard-6469/
Search engines like Google and Bing use keywords to understand what each page on your website. You will need to use the right keywords in your pages to get found by Google based on the needs of your target audience.

You will need to find keywords about the photography services that you offer, along with content that speaks to why you are the best photographer for your future clients.

If you are struggling to find the right keywords for your photography business, then just know that you are not alone. Many photographers struggle to figure out which keywords they should be targeting on each page. Here are a few tips that you can use to find the right keywords for each page on your website:

  • Generate a list of relevant keywords around your services, location, and needs of your customers.
  • Check Keyword Volume and Competition in SEMrush, Ahrefs, and Google’s Keyword Tool.
  • Research to understand what keywords your competition is focused on.
  • Identify 5-7 core keywords to use on different pages of your site. Each page on your website should have a unique set of keywords.

Keyword research can be a bit overwhelming, but when you approach keyword research, just think about what your target audience is looking for when then turn to Google. Keywords are signals that Google uses to determine how and when to rank content based on what people are searching for.

You should use keywords in your content to get noticed in the search engine and meet the needs of your customers.

3. Plan Content For Your Photography Business

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Keyword research is key as we just covered in the previous point. But it’s not gonna do you any good if you don’t utilize it. That being the case, you should plan ahead if you’re trying to optimize your website.

After you complete the keyword research process, you can use the knowledge that you’ve just obtained to create a master list of the keywords that get the most traffic within your niche.

Almost all photographers have used content marketing at some point. The most common types of content marketing that many photographers use are making slick looking social media posts, creating promotional videos on YouTube, and writing blog posts.

Unfortunately, while photographers start out strong, most will burn out and get overwhelmed so they will stop their content marketing efforts.

While content marketing in photography isn’t right for everyone, and it can take a lot of time and resources to pull off correctly, you should always have some plan for how you produce content to promote your photography business. Photography is a visual medium, and you can use content marketing to see a number of benefits like:

  • Help customers learn about your product and service.
  • Generate interest around your photography style.
  • Build trust with potential clients as they see your brand and build a relationship with you.
  • Drive traffic to your site and close more sales.

The first step of planning content for your website is to think about what your customers are looking for, the photography services that you offer, and the amount of time and resources that you can commit to content marketing.

When you have the list down, it will be easier to optimize your content for these keywords. You can even use it as a guide for your future blog posts — which is another thing that can boost your SEO in the long-term — to ensure that you never run out of ideas. Never again will you have to play the guessing game when picking out a new article title.

4. Make Sure Metadata Is Right For Your Website

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The metadata that you use on your website can make or break its organic ranking. It’s a widely known fact in the SEO world that metadata is one of the critical things that the algorithm looks at when trying to comprehend what your website is all about. Think of it as the first impression except with the algorithm rather than humans.

Meta Title is essential because it is the first thing that Google and other search engines read on your site. Your meta title showed in SERPs and displayed on the browser of your customers.

Meta Description is a 155 character snippet that summarizes each page on your website. This information appears in Google and other search engines, and this little snippet can determine whether or not someone clicks on your website.

Just like a real-life first impression, the metadata is essential for your website. Metadata is the umbrella term that is used to describe various aspects of your website.

This includes the titles of your articles and pages, their respective descriptions, all your headings, and even the URL structure of certain links. Plugins like Yoast can help you gauge the effectiveness of your metadata when it comes to targeting specific keywords.

5. Optimize All Images On Your Photography Website

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Optimizing the images on your website is another thing that you can do to improve your organic ranking and SEO.

Website speed and web page SEO are heavily influenced by the amount of time it takes each page to load. If you want to rank in Google and other search engines, then you need to have a website that loads quickly, even if you have high-quality photos.

Like most photographers, you likely have high-resolution photos that you want to show off.

This is important for most websites, but it becomes even more crucial for photographers seeing as there are significantly more photos on their portfolios than you’d see on a collection of say a writer or marketer.

The first thing that you should do is reduce the sizes of the images so that they don’t take as long to load. Be sure that the names and alt text of your images are also SEO optimized so that your pages rank higher up in organic results.

Every single image that you upload should have an alt description, as this will make it much easier to be seen in searches.

Remember, images are what you rely on to make a living, so optimizing them to work with your website instead of against it is paramount to your success.

Improve Your Photography SEO Strategy Today!

As you can see, SEO doesn’t have to be rocket science. You can actually make use of some simple tips that will improve your organic ranking quickly so that you can get more potential clients rushing in towards your photography business.

We hope that the tips listed in this article help you out. If they did, be sure to share it with your fellow photographers so that they, too, can overcome the odds and rank well in the algorithm despite not being in a text-based line of work such as writing. That’s all for today and happy snapping!

About the Author: Chris

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Chis is the Lead Strategist at StrategyBeam with over 19 years of marketing know-how up his sleeve. He loves transforming business marketing campaigns into success stories by boosting efficiencies across all campaigns. When not strategizing, he can be found laughing at the monkeys at the zoo.

One Comment

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    SEO San Jose February 24, 2021 at 5:11 am - Reply

    That’s really nice post. I appreciate your skills. Thanks for sharing.

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