With wedding photography, standing out online isn’t just about having a stunning portfolio. Before couples can view your work and hire you, they must find it. The first point of research is often Google, making search engine optimization (SEO) key for your site and online marketing efforts.
This guide provides the essential information you need to establish a strong search presence and differentiate yourself from your local competitors and other wedding photographers.
1. Understand SEO Basics
SEO is about optimizing your site for search engines so that it performs well and its pages rank higher in search results.
It’s about understanding what your potential clients are searching for, like “wedding photographer kansas city” or “best bridal photographer near me”, and adjusting your website’s content to meet those needs.
SEO typically involves:
- Keyword Research: Collecting data to understand how users search. Analyzing that data to find keyword opportunities for site content.
- On-Page Optimization: Ensuring your pages strategically target keywords when necessary and meet certain relevancy benchmarks.
- Technical SEO: Fixing any technical problems like broken links or bad redirects. Improving site speed by reducing image sizes or removing unneeded code.
- Local SEO: Focusing efforts on search results related to local terms like “wedding photographer near me”. Ensuring your Google Business Profile is configured correctly and you have other quality local listings.
- Off-Page SEO: Doing what you can to improve your online presence outside your site. Contributing to communities and employing brand reputation strategies.
SEO is a vast and complex field, but the main idea is to optimize your site as effectively as possible, while strategically targeting SERP real estate. Once you understand the basics, you can delve into more detailed tactics and strive for greater successes.
Related: SEO Basics Guide
2. Perform Keyword Research
Identifying keyword opportunities is the first step in most SEO efforts. You can find what queries people are searching for using these popular research tools:
- Google Keyword Planner: A free option that’s great when getting started with SEO. Keyword Planner will show you the search volume and other basic metrics for search terms.
- Moz Keyword Explorer: You can research up to 10 queries a month using this tool with a free Moz account. Nice for starter research and more detailed data than Keyword Planner offers.
- Ahrefs: A professional SEO tool that provides much richer metrics, such as keyword difficulty and traffic potential.
- Semrush: Another popular professional keyword research option. Plenty of detail for serious SEO campaigns. Best for broader search engine marketing efforts.
Using these tools, you can discover how often certain queries get used or how difficult it will be to rank for them.
3. Use On-Page SEO Strategies
On-page SEO involves optimizing your webpage’s content so it has a better chance at showing up well in search engines. This includes selecting a target keyword and employing specific tactics to enhance relevancy signals, such as incorporating keywords into the title tag and header tags.
Quick On-Page Optimization Checklist
Optimize these key elements of the page to improve your on-page SEO:
- Title Tag: This is the headline for your page in search results. Include your target keyword at the front and make it appealing. Limit the title to 60 characters so the entire title fits in the listing.
- Meta Description: The snippet describing your page in search results. Aim for 110-160 characters in length and use keywords.
- H1: Typically, this is the main header tag of the page. Use keyword targeting and strive to make it engaging; however, the right approach will depend on the page.
- Header Tags: Continue using keywords in your subheaders when possible, but don’t overdo it. Use keywords when natural, when they provide context.
- Body Copy: Use keywords throughout the text. This should happen organically. Keyword research and Google Search Console insights can reveal additional opportunities to fulfill users’ search intent. Apply any insights you find.
- Alt Text: This is big for wedding photographers! Alt text is the description for images on the web. Ensure that all your images have alt text and include relevant keywords when it makes sense.
Your main goal should be to create keyword-targeted pages for terms relevant to your photography site. Consider a potential client’s search experience as they transition from a search engine to your site. Create the best experience and strategically use keywords to help your chances.
4. Fix Technical SEO Issues
Technical SEO is about ensuring your website is technically sound for search engines. By focusing on this, you can identify any hidden issues with your site that may hinder its potential.
Popular tools for discovering technical errors
- Ahrefs Site Audit: This tool automatically identifies errors, warnings, and other notable SEO information about your site. Free, with upgrades available for additional features and broader efforts.
- Screaming Frog: Emulates a search engine crawler and provides a report on technical details. You’ll need to manually review the data, but you can crawl up to 500 pages for free at any time.
- Google Search Console: Google’s main SEO tool. While its technical reporting isn’t the best, it reports errors known to Google, such as missing pages. It’s free, and every site owner should have their domain configured.
These tools can simplify your technical first aid and help your site achieve exceptional health and prime condition, ready for tough competition in search results.
5. Optimize Images for the Web
As a wedding photographer, your website will likely be image-heavy. Although featuring the highest-quality versions of your portfolio photos would be nice, it wouldn’t necessarily create the best experience.
Page speed plays a significant role in SEO, as Google is committed to improving speed and making the web faster. (Quick searches mean more ad impressions. ?) Therefore, making your site faster has significant SEO benefits, and large images greatly contribute to slow load times.
We recommend converting your site’s images to WebP, a high-quality and efficient file format. See our other resources for additional help:
Tools like Ahrefs Site Audit can identify large images that are slowing down your site. Remember to include descriptive alt text with keywords for each image when possible.
6. Organize Your Website Structure
If search engine bots and users can easily navigate your site, they will have an easier time surfacing relevant results. Use these techniques to improve your site structure:
- Include Simple Navigation: Create a clean, straightforward navigation menu with essential categories like “Portfolio”, “Services”, “About”, and “Contact”. This clarity provides a straightforward user experience, making it easier for search engines to crawl and index your site. Ensure each section is easily accessible from any page, facilitating smooth navigation.
- Well-Organized Portfolio Sections: Structure your portfolio into distinct categories based on wedding themes or photography styles (e.g., “Beach Weddings”, “Vintage-Themed Weddings”). This organization helps visitors find exactly what they’re looking for and assists search engines in understanding and categorizing your content.
- SEO-Friendly URL Structure: Implement clear and descriptive URLs for each page. For instance, use “/rustic-wedding-photography” instead of non-descriptive, numerical URLs or long URLs targeting too many keywords. Try navigating your site using just the URL bar. It can help you organize and design an efficient structure.
- Strategic Internal Linking: Use internal linking wisely to guide visitors to relevant content within your site. This keeps users engaged longer and helps search engines discover new pages and understand the relationships between different content on your site, boosting your overall SEO.
- Redirect Pages: Sometimes, you need to move or delete a page. That’s OK! Implement 301 redirects to direct users and search engines to the right page.
With any structural change, you might notice a fluctuation in rankings, but that’s a natural part of the process. If you restructure well, your efforts should be rewarded in the long run.
7. Utilize Local SEO Techniques
For wedding photographers, local SEO is vital. This involves claiming and optimizing your Google Business Profile listing, ensuring your business’s Name, Address, and Phone number (NAP) are consistent across the web, and utilizing local listings and directories.
We highly recommend using Moz Local for initial efforts. For a small cost, it will create listings for your business across relevant local directories. This saves a ton of time.
Don’t forget to include your business name, address, and phone number on your contact page! While a form may be nice, many users expect to find this information when researching new sites. As a bonus, it helps your local SEO.
8. Create Site Content
While optimizing your site is critical for your SEO foundation, you’ll likely need additional content to increase your presence in search listings.
Think of it this way: If you’re a farmer, you can take care of a few crops just fine, but they only need so much maintenance. To increase your search presence, you’ll need to expand the farm or create additional content.
This is known as content marketing, or creating content for clients needs and interests to attract and support an audience. With a content campaign, you can target additional keywords that your main portfolio might not cover.
Some key content considerations:
- Blogs are a popular method for content marketing, as posts can be highly optimized and require a relatively low level of investment (LOE).
- Social media doesn’t cut it because the posts are limited and can’t be fully optimized for Google. Your website should be the primary destination for your SEO efforts.
- Don’t overdo it. While you can use ChatGPT to mass-produce somewhat relevant content, it is unlikely to perform well. Keep your target audience in mind and make sure your quality shines.
While content marketing isn’t essential for wedding photography SEO, it can significantly support promotional efforts and pay long-term dividends.
9. Monitor Your Results
While it may be fun to go off on an ego trip and assume every choice you make will be repaid tenfold, that’s not reality. SEO requires ongoing monitoring to identify new opportunities and highlight key strategic considerations.
Essential SEO monitoring tools:
- Google Search Console: Understand how Google perceives your site. Monitor search impressions, clicks, CTR, average ranking, and other valuable metrics.
- Google Analytics: The highly popular and free analytics platform, a go-to for most sites on the web. Understand your search traffic and user session behavior.
Depending on your budget and needs, you can also monitor tools like Ahrefs Site Explorer to get additional data on your site’s appearance in search results.
10. Maintain Your Content
SEO is not a set-it-and-forget-it endeavor. Consistency drives traffic. Regularly revisit your site’s content and strategize how to improve and expand it.
This usually comes down to these tasks:
- Update old content: Are there ways you can refresh or improve the keyword targeting on older pages? These will send freshness signals to Google, letting it know your pages are worth reconsideration.
- Re-optimize pages: Just because you optimized a page for a certain keyword doesn’t mean it will be the phrase it performs best for. Examine the Performance report in Search Console and adjust your pages as needed so they’re additionally relevant and helpful.
- Retire unneeded pages: Did a previous marketing effort not produce quality results? Did you over-categorize your wedding photos, resulting in too many navigation options? Add some redirects! Clean things up and restrategize.
Keep your site updated. Google prefers fresh results, so don’t be hesitant about regularly updating pages to provide value.
Bottom Line
Investing time and resources into SEO can yield significant long-term benefits. With consistent efforts, you can drive free, organic traffic to your photography site and passively attract new clients.
