Ever wondered how do you get your photography business ranked higher on Google? I’m going to help you with that! That’s called SEO.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Basically, SEO is how you present your content on your website so that search engines, like Google, find you. The better your SEO, the higher your ranking is on Google. The higher your ranking, the more people are going to see your site and be able to easily find you.
SEO Tips For Photographers
How it works is through key-wording. So when you’re trying to get on Google, you’re picking keywords and keyword strings (which are multiple keywords together) in how you think people will search, and then updating your content to reflect those words. Working the words in a way that makes sense is what makes good SEO. So you’re not just throwing these keywords jumbled all over the place. You’re writing and using the words in a conversation or in your articles. You’re naming your images in a way that are useful, but still show what you’re trying to have people find you for.
SEO is important for your business because even when you have word of mouth and all these other channels working for you, people still search websites when they’re looking to hire a business. If you can be found because someone searched a venue and saw your photo, they might not have found you otherwise. They might have talked to ten different friends, and still wanted to research for themselves. You’re coming up in a search engine result, you’re getting yourself in front of that many more perspective clients. It can only help you book more business.
THINGS THAT CAN HURT YOUR SEO:
Keyword stuffing means using the same keyword over and over again. So using the same word forty times in one post is bad. Link farms are also really bad.
Link farms are when sites buy links from other places. Having too many outgoing links and not enough coming into you make you look like you’re selling links and that you’re not an authentic business. So even if you’re not a link farm, you could make Google think you are, so you need to be careful.
Not writing enough content can also hurt your rankings. Fifty words is not going to cut it in a post. Google likes content. Photos are one thing and they’re nice, but search engines don’t read photos the way that they read text. If you have a website that’s dependent just on photos, it might be beautiful, but people aren’t going to find you.
8 TIPS FOR GOOD SEO:
1. Make Sure Your Title Tag Is Updated.
You’re going to want to look at your title tag on your website as being one of the most important things to update. This title tag is up in your title bar at the top. You can change that as your meta-title. Most people use their business name as their title and that’s a waste. If someone is searching for you by your business name, they already know who you are. You really don’t need that to be in your title. Here’s what mine looks like:
You’re going to want to put a geographic keyword as your title. So, the city that you live, the type of photography that you want to shoot, then variations of photography, photographers, photographer. Titles are super important. If you look at a lot of different people, you’ll see YourName Photography as the title and that’s it. It’s not helping, at all. That’s a key piece in your website that you can leverage to get ranking better. I don’t mention my business name at all in my title. It’s like Edmonton Banff Canmore Lake Louise Wedding Photography.
2. Make sure to name all your photos.
You’re going to want to name all of your photos in a way that makes sense that uses your keywords. So say you live in San Francisco and you shoot weddings. You’re going to want to have San Francisco Wedding Photographer and then the venue as the name of your image. You’re also going to want to use the alt attributes or alt tags to also explain what that photo is. That way, you’re showing up in image searches when people are looking for San Francisco wedding photographer, Golden Gate Bridge and your photo comes up, you have a better chance of someone contacting you if they’re seeing your photos that way.
I’ll go and rename my images in Bridge before I upload them to my blog. So for me, it would be something like Edmonton Wedding Photographer Hotel McDonald Wedding Getting Ready 1, 2, 3, 4, 5… My images will kind of explain where I am, the venue and what’s happening or portraits. It’s very specific. I don’t use the couples’ names or the date or any of that sort of stuff. I name my images with the venue, geographical location and then some type of photography, photographer, photos, pictures or any variations of those words.
3. You need to link a little bit within your page.
Link deep from your main page, link to some of your blog posts. While it’s popular to link to all of the vendors involved in a wedding, I actually don’t like to do that. I will list them all, but I don’t like to link out to all of them because if I have hundreds of outbound links to other people’s sites and not getting those links back, it can look bad, in terms of Google might think I’m a link farm. I only really link out if I feel like it is something super important.
4. Use headers within your post.
The best way to get good SEO is to rewrite your posts to use keywords. You’re also going to want to use the H1, H2, H3 text. These are headers, like you’d see in a newspaper. Using headers let’s people and search engines know what is important, so using these tags in your pages and posts can help identify keywords that you’d like to emphasize.
5. Getting links from other sites will help you immensely.
Part of the reason why I’m submitting a lot of things is to get links from all of these other wedding blogs, back to my site. The more fresh content you have, the more you update your site, the better you are. If people are sharing your site by linking, then it helps your SEO. But if they’re sharing on Facebook or something like that, I’m not sure if that really makes a difference, but at least it is getting seen by more people through sharing.
6. Content is a must-have for good SEO.
Lots of text, keywords for your locations, talking about the types of work that you do, really good navigation and a site layout that makes sense for people to get around in. I love WordPress sites. They’re pretty much built for good SEO. I also use the Yoast plugin to help with SEO. There’s lots of other sites that work well, but they’re not optimized as well to be found. You want a platform that lets you add alt attributes, that lets you control your metadata, your keywords, your title, all of that stuff is super important. Alt tags, or alt attributes, was first meant to describe an image for the visually impaired, but it’s also a great way to keyword to describe your images (example alt tag “bride & groom embracing in front of Chateau Lake Louise on wedding day”) It can still be descriptive but use your keywords you want to be found for.
7. Your post title has a lot of power to help SEO.
When posting featured galleries and weddings, use the location name instead of just the couples’ names for the title. People are going to be searching for venue locations, not for couples’ names. Here’s an example title from my blog: CHATEAU LOUIS WEDDING | REBECCA & RYAN | EDMONTON WEDDING PHOTOGRAPHY Notice how I have two different locations there – Chateau Louis and Edmonton. This gallery will now pop up if anyone searches for either of those locations.
8. KEYWORDS:
Besides location and venues, you should also keyword other vendors. For example, if you photographed a bouquet from a certain florist, I would tag it, wedding bouquet, Jack’s flowers, bride, red, blue green. Because sometimes if people are looking for other vendors, your work will pop up there, as well. If you have worked with a wedding planner, you can work their name into the keywording so you’ll show up for that, too, and they’ll see your photos. Don’t keyword for vendors you haven’t worked with. It’s a little bit tacky. But if you have worked with certain vendors, you’re taking photos of their work, so list the item, like wedding cake, and then whatever the baker’s name is and the location and colors. It gives you more options to show up.
Want more information? Head on over to the BP4U store and check out How To Make 6 Figures in Your Wedding Photography Business. ENV Photography is amazing at business and she has so many ideas (we pulled these ideas from that guide). Even if you’re not a wedding photographer – you will get ideas for your portrait business! I love her ideas on using contests to grow your business and so much more!
