Photographer's Guide to Simplified SEO: Unlocking Search Engine Success

Jan 26

Mastering SEO Made Incredibly Simple: Empowering Photographers with Effective and Easy to Understand SEO Steps

Navigating the intricate world of SEO can feel like a daunting task, especially for photographers looking to simply increase their website searchability and enhance their marketing efforts. However, fear not! I’m here to demystify the complexities and break them down into four simple ways to optimize your photographer's website. By implementing these strategies, you'll be well on your way to boosting your online visibility, attracting your ideal clients, and achieving the growth you’re working toward.

For many years, SEO felt like a scary term meant to make me feel overwhelmed and definitely triggered by a “flight” response whenever I was asked to do it properly for my photography website. I spent money on an “expert” who made me feel even more overwhelmed and left my website pretty much the same, so it all left me feeling a little jaded. That was until I started to understand it myself. And like most things, understanding it and educating yourself about it is the first step to feeling comfortable and empowered through it. So let's dive in and unlock the power of SEO together!

Step One

Keyword Research

Before you start making a million good-intentioned changes to your website, it’s best to feel prepared and ready with real and effective keywords. For a photographer like yourself, this means identifying the specific words and phrases that your target audience is using when searching for your type of photography services. By understanding these keywords, you can optimize your website and content to attract more relevant traffic.
Start by brainstorming a list of keywords related to your photography service, such as "family photographer," "family portraits," "child photography," "maternity photography," "newborn photography," and so on. Use tools like Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, or Moz Keyword Explorer to expand your list and discover additional relevant keywords.
Consider the location aspect as well. If you operate in a specific area, include location-based keywords such as "family photographer in Your Location" or "family photography services [city/region]." This helps you target local clients who are searching for family photography services in their area. It’s important here to evaluate the search volume and competition level for each keyword. Look for keywords with a good balance of search volume (indicating demand) and manageable competition (indicating the possibility of ranking higher in search results). For example, if you are in a heavily saturated city, it may be beneficial to focus some of your pages on a more localized area. If you are in a very small town without a large audience for photography, consider focusing on big cities you could serve within accessible distance. Some keywords will inevitably be easier to rank high on while others will be in higher demand.
Once you have your list of targeted keywords, incorporate them naturally into your website's content, including your page titles, headings, image alt tags, and meta descriptions. However, remember to prioritize creating high-quality and engaging content that provides value to your audience. We will talk more about all of this in the next Steps.

Step Two

Optimizing Your Website

I’m sure you’ve heard this one before but while it truly is the core of what makes SEO so powerful for your business, it can also feel like a big “how” screaming inside your head. So let’s break this down for your photography website in the simplest way possible.

One crucial aspect is properly titling your images. Instead of leaving them with default file names like "IMG_1234," give each image a descriptive title that includes relevant keywords. This helps search engines understand what your images are about. Image titles are crucial for helping Google read the purpose of your website, and its relevancy to potential searchers, and opens up more pathways for your content to be found. A strategic approach to image titling is understanding the purpose of the web page and titling each image with the same goal in mind. For example, if the page is a family photography info page make sure all the images and their titles are all mentioning “family photography in your location: your business name: and additional helpful keywords like “studio, lifestyle, budget-friendly, etc.” When your images and page purpose are in alignment, it increases the chances of your page reaching top billing for “Your Location Family Photography”
Now, image titling is not to be confused with the next crucial SEO aspect for optimizing your website which is Descriptive alt-text. Alt text provides text-based descriptions that assist search engines in understanding the content of your images. When titling your image you want to focus on searchability but when describing your image you want to speak in natural terms truly explaining what is in the image as if you were describing it to someone who cannot see it. Here you can still use relevant keywords but don’t do keyword stuffing. Back to our example of a family photography page. Imagine you have an image like this one…

**Image Title could be:** *Durham Family Photography | Hanna Hill Photography | Lifestyle outdoor family portraiture*

**Alt-text would be:** Father holds infant daughter in a Durham country field at sunset during lifestyle family photo session.

Additionally, consider resizing and compressing your images to improve website loading speed, as this is an important factor for both user experience and SEO. As a photographer myself, I know this one can be hard because the quality of the image may suffer if it’s too compressed. The best solution I have for this is to think of the quantity on your web page. If you want to share a huge hero banner image with sharp precision at the top consider limiting the rest of the page to smaller or fewer images. If you want to share several images resized for web resolution, do that on a page with no large image banner. This is also why curating your portfolio pages is incredibly helpful so you don’t overwhelm the viewer and can improve your loading speed for SEO. My favorite resource for image resizing is JPEGmini, though I will say saving through Lightroom or Photoshop into folders for high resolution and web size can be helpful and efficient personal workflow in the long term.
You also want to make sure you optimize your website's overall structure and content with relevant keywords, meta tags, and engaging, user-friendly text. Simply put, write on your website pages! Engage your audience with more than just images because Google can only read, it can’t see your images, so it can’t gauge the style and relevance when you only have 20 images on a page. Image titling will, of course, help these pages, but having relevant written content on every page is essential. Some helpful content ideas for a photography page would be “What to expect working with Your Location photographer” “My values as a photographer” “The photography experience with Your Location photographer Described,” etc.
- You also want to consider using proper Heading and Paragraph format for your content. An H1 header/title should be on every page but only once. This is your one chance to describe the purpose of that particular page in a few words. Back to our family photography example, a great H1 for that would be “Durham, England Family Lifestyle Photography” H2, H3, and H4 headers can all be used sparingly on the page, but keep in mind similar opportunities to use it for keywords and terms that are in alignment for the overall goal of that particular website page. Use paragraph text for all other forms of writing.
On top of the page content, you also want to make sure your meta tags and page descriptions internally are optimized with helpful descriptions. These will be what shows in a Google search description. Meta tags are snippets of code that provide information to search engines about your web page's content. The two most important meta tags are the title tag and the meta description. They can both be found on the internal parts of your web page. The title tag appears as the clickable headline in search results, so it's essential to make it concise and engaging, and include relevant keywords related to the page's content. The ideal length for a title tag is around 50-60 characters. The meta description is a brief summary that appears below the title tag in search results. It should accurately describe the page's content, entice users to click through to your website, and also contain relevant keywords. Aim for a length of 150-160 characters for the meta description.

Step Three

Increasing Your Credibility & Authority

This is the step that most of us miss out on. We assume that optimizing our website is enough and typically leave it at that. But in reality, this is usually the basics and in order to truly reach high rankings on certain search terms and with Google, in general, we have to get a bit more complex. Again, I’m going to simplify this process for you from photographer to photographer.

Let’s first discuss Credibility. The easiest and simplest way to increase your credibility is to fix broken links and encourage backlinks to your website. Both of these will tell Google that, firstly, you are a real website with a real human attached to its contents and, secondly, that you are liked by other websites enough to be backlinked from their page. It’s like creating a nice complicated web of approval and credibility. Fixing broken links is often one of the first steps SEO experts will help you with after optimizing your website. This is done through URL mapping and can also be learned by you! If you need additional support or links to learn more, reach out to me and I’d be happy to chat more. Backlinks can be done passively or actively, but are directly related to the next point I want to make which is Authority.
So now we understand how to appear credible and authentic to Google, but now we want to rise in the rankings on different search terms and that often comes with increasing our Authority on the topic or service we are discussing on our website. This is when blogging becomes the essential route to increased SEO. Blogging is essentially creating expert content from your website that then tells Google you are an authority on the topic and should elevate to that position across relevant search queries. Let’s stick with our same example of a family photographer. Some great blog ideas for me would be “How to have a relaxed family session” “What to wear to your outdoor lifestyle family session” and “Favorite locations in Durham, England to schedule your family photography session” All of these are showing my keywords relevant to my service but open up opportunities for my expert knowledge to be searched and increase my authority.
Now, let’s return to backlinks for a moment. A great way to get others to link your website to theirs is by creating content that is relevant not only to your audience but also to theirs. This can be done actively by sharing your blogs and pages to search engines like Pinterest or guest blogging on another blog. Or it can be done passively by creating quality evergreen content and waiting for others to naturally include it on their website because it’s just that helpful.
Step Four
Tracking and Setting Tangible Goals
It’s important to be realistic and focused when it comes to SEO. If you don’t spend the time tracking it or setting micro goals around it, you will likely feel defeated. So the last and very crucial step is simply monitoring your SEO and website traffic. To get started, sign up for a free Google Analytics account and install the tracking code on your website. Once set up, you can access various reports that show information like the number of visitors, where they come from, which pages they visit, and how long they stay on your site.
Understanding this data can help you set realistic SEO goals as a beginner. Start by focusing on key metrics like the number of visitors and the sources driving traffic (e.g. organic search, social media, referrals). Next, analyze which pages perform well and which ones need improvement. If some pages have high bounce rates (visitors leaving after viewing only one page), work on making them more engaging and relevant to your audience. Also, monitor keyword performance. Identify the keywords that bring the most traffic and try to optimize your content further for those terms.
From there, you can tangibly create goals that aim to increase these numbers over time. For example, my goal for the next 6 months is to increase traffic to my website from social media, specifically for family photography inquiries by 1,000 more viewers. In order to accomplish this goal, I will post 5x a week on relevant topics to family photography in my area and direct people to my website with incentives and engaging content. Then, you track that goal by documenting where you started and how it increases or changes each month, adapting as needed to meet your 6-month goal.

So there you have it! If you’re a photographer who would like to optimize their photographer website for SEO, hopefully, these four easy steps have helped set you on the right track. If you need more help, download my 12 Step SEO Checklist designed specifically for photographers - by photographer. Turn those curious searchers into website visitors - and then? Into new client sessions!