There are probably thousands of online resources available to photographers of all skill levels, but not all of them are easily searchable with a tool like Google. You may show off your wedding photography skills, introduce yourself to new clients, and outline your pricing structures all through a website.
It’s really important for wedding photographers to stand out from the crowd. On the whole, many people will want to use photographers who are local to them and that’s where good SEO can help to make a difference.
You and your website will be more searchable if you take the time to optimise it. If you’re a photographer for weddings, you probably want to be discovered by future brides.
With this in mind, what can you do to improve your wedding photography SEO and increase your visibility?
10 Basic SEO Tips For Wedding Photographers
1. Choose a Platform
This is where you need to begin. Pick the best venue to exhibit your finest photographs and fine-tune it to perfection. There is no Flash allowed, and the code must be optimised for search engines. Whether or not a website is “mobile friendly,” meaning it renders properly on mobile devices like phones and tablets, is now a ranking factor. As important as it is to have a beautiful site, you should equally prioritise performance.
WordPress is an excellent option because it is cost-free, has a large selection of both free and paid themes, and is very customizable.
Make sure your pages load quickly, your site looks good on mobile as well as desktop, and it displays your work the way you want it to be displayed.
2. Put in the Right Plugins
Plugins are critical since they let you change crucial details like page names and descriptions. You can allow search engines like Bing or Google choose the meta descriptions for your pages if you keep the default settings in place. You’d rather make the call as the owner of a website for wedding photographers, right? Adjust the names and summaries of your web pages and blog articles.
Make the description interesting and appealing so that people will want to click on it when they see it in Google’s search results. Be sure to pick a catchy title as well; depending on the nature of your post, you can use Google to research similar topics and see what other people have titled their posts.
3. Selecting Appropriate Photography Search Terms
Your keywords should be the primary subjects or terms you use. The keywords are what you want people to type into a search engine to find a specific page. They should be the most sought after, thus while creating content for a blog, consider the queries that readers will use to reach your article. It helps in boosting direct and organic traffic to your wedding website.
Make sure that your homepage’s title, description, and introduction all reflect the fact that you are a wedding photographer in New York. It’s important to rank high in results for the phrase “New York wedding photographer” when people conduct such searches.
4. Title for a Photographer’s Website
The average length of a page’s title is 60 characters, or the equivalent of two seconds of pitch time. The page title should reflect the content of the page and, if at all possible, include your brand name. Make sure it’s interesting and helpful to the person doing the searching.
5. The Page Description as a Way To entice
The text that appears under the blue “See More” link in search engine results is known as the page description or meta description. You have just over a tweet’s worth of time to make your pitch; use Twitter as inspiration, but don’t abbreviate terms too much.
To put it another way, explain what your page is about. Give an account of the information presented there and the topic at hand. Make sure it fits the topic of the page and convinces the reader to continue.
6. Content is the King of Photography SEO
Just because a picture is worth a thousand words doesn’t mean you should leave it at that. It’s recommended that you always include a caption with your photos. Add some descriptive text, keeping in mind that you, the photographer, know the subject matter best.
The images will be more discoverable on the internet if you include a line or two of text explaining them, providing some context, and discussing the venue or place in general.
As an example, if you’re a wedding photographer and you’ve recently photographed a wedding at venue XYZ, you can increase your exposure by including details about the location of the ceremony and reception in your image captions. They may be planning a wedding there and, upon viewing your portfolio, may decide to hire you to photograph their special day.
7. SEO-friendly URLs
The best web addresses are short, to-the-point, and simple to type and remember. Including a date or other element that increases the complexity and length of urls is unnecessary. When creating your content, think of urls as page names; if you can’t easily remember them, neither can search engines.
8. Improve the Quality of your Images
If you’re a wedding photographer hoping to attract clients, optimising your images could help. Keep the file size to a minimum by using Photoshop to reduce it to a few hundred kilobytes (kb).
Run the helpful WordPress plugin WP Smush to further reduce image file sizes and load times. You likely have thousands of photographs; make the most of them by giving them descriptive titles and using alt tags to increase their discoverability in Google Image Search.
9. Speed
In addition to users, search engines also care about how quickly a website loads. If you want to increase conversion rates, you should prioritise reducing WordPress load times and making sure your site loads in a flash. If you use WordPress, you should install the W3 Total Cache plugin.
10. Internal links
If you have a wedding you shot on your site that you mention in a blog post, link to that wedding, link to your about page, and connect to your contact information. Include links to relevant internal pages in the content you upload to aid people in navigating your site.
Get moving and check off all these boxes; they’re easy and quick to execute, and you should keep them in mind the next time you sit down to compose a blog post.