Although a major part of a photography business is your skill with a camera and eye for detail, there are many other skills and practices you need to master. You need excellent confidence and the ability to communicate with clients for example.
In the digital world, a vital tool to boost the visibility of your photography business is SEO. As you will see below this is a process that hopefully allows you to rank highly on Google and make your photography services easier to find.
What is SEO?
- SEO is Search Engine Optimization and is the process of using keywords and altering your online content so that it can be found easier on search engines like Google.
- Google sends digital spiders to websites known as crawlers and it indexes your pages and content. By strategically using keywords relating to your business the crawlers will notice this and your page can appear higher in search results.
- You might specialize in wedding photography for example and are based in Essex. A suitable keyphrase that customers might search for could be “wedding photographers Essex”. You would use SEO to optimize your website content in relation to that phrase so when people search for it, your business ranks on the first page.
- This is an entire industry and SEO is one of the primary methods of promotion for businesses with a website. If you can rank for keywords relating to your photography services you can gain a huge advantage over your competitors.
Basic SEO Tips for Photography Businesses
SEO isn’t something you can implement overnight and it can be incredibly complex but there are some simple steps you can take to give you the best SEO for photographers.
Research keywords for your niche
The starting point is keywords and you can’t implement any photography SEO strategy without them.
You must first create a list of suitable keywords that customers are likely to search for on Google. This can seem daunting but just put yourself in their shoes and think about what they may type.
To make this easier think about what niche of photography you cover and your local areas. Perhaps you are a wedding photographer in South London? Maybe you take portraits and do events photography in Essex?
By thinking like this you immediately have some key phrases! You can then use tools like Google Keyword Planner to do further research and find keywords that don’t have as much competition.
Make sure all web content is SEO optimized
You now have a fantastic list of keywords that customers are likely to search for to find your photography business.
From here you must optimize your web content to reflect those keywords. This includes your website pages, blog articles and more. Some basic optimization tips include:
– Include the keyword in the META title and description tags of each web page
– Use keywords at several points throughout written content like blog articles
– Try and use keywords in headings and subheadings
There are entire guides on website SEO and you could also benefit from some tools and plugins like YOAST SEO, Rank Math, and SEM Rush. An SEO agency like ClickSlice can also help optimize your content professionally.
Optimize your photos for the web
- As a photographer you will have a huge collection of large RAW images that can be 25MB or more. Don’t attempt to upload these files directly to your web pages as in most instances browsers can’t display RAW files but more importantly the loading times will be horrendous!
- Google can penalize websites that have slow loading times and it also gives your customers a miserable experience.
- Your images should be optimized instead and converted to web-ready file types with compression like JPEG or PNG. There are tools like Tinypng that you can use to convert files so they retain their quality but don’t put too much strain on servers and the user’s internet connection.
