Creating a beautiful portfolio website to showcase your products, services, or content to your established clients is an excellent start. But because you’re running a small business, you need an avenue to grow and acquire new clients.
New users around the world discover new content, such as yours, through search engines. This is why photographers and creatives need an SEO guide.
What is SEO in Photography?
Before moving ahead with the best SEO for photographer tips and strategies, let’s first go through what SEO means for photographers.
For someone who’s experienced in photography, SEO might prove to be a foreign concept, but it is one every photographer must know if they want their work to be showcased to a larger audience.
So, what does SEO mean for photographers? It is the method site owners use to become discoverable and obtain a high ranking in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP).
Now, for photographers, it’s more important to be focused on local SEO. For example, if you’re a real estate photographer in Los Angeles, you would want your work and services to be featured in that particular area.
When a potential client searches for keywords such as “Real estate photographers in Los Angeles”, your profile or website needs to be the first thing they see.
Why should you be ranking higher in search rankings? Well, People generally do not look past the first search result page to get to what they want.
Based on recent SEO statistics, the #1 ranked result in Google gets approximately 27.6% of all clicks, which is huge.
Website SEO is vitally important for growing businesses. In what follows, we explain what SEO means for photographers and creatives.
We also explain how you can use the built-in SEO tools in Pixpa to have Google automatically include your site in their rankings.
SEO For Photographers: Essential Tips Every Photographers Must Know
Now that we are about to explain all the top SEO for photographer tips, you need to always remember that SEO is a marathon and not a sprint.
If you carry out all your SEO duties well, you will be rewarded. However, do not expect to get results the very first time, and most importantly, do not get discouraged.
With that being said, here are some of the SEO tips for photographers:
- Finding the Right Photography Keyword
- Adding Page Titles, Headings, Tags & Page Descriptions
- Image Optimization for SEO: Use Alt text
- Use Page Hierarchy for Seamless User Experiences
- Using Images within a Blog Post
- Improve Your URL Structure
- Your Photography Website Must be Mobile-Friendly
- Analyzing Site Performance Metrics
- Let Social Media Drive Traffic to Your Website
- Increase Visibility With Local SEO
- Add an SSL Security Layer
- Build Quality Backlinks
1. Finding the Right Photography Keywords
Photographers and creatives need to learn SEO skills to differentiate themselves from the millions of competitors vying for the same niche and presentation of content to the public.
If you have an image-heavy website, you need context to stand out and be ranked highly by search engines. Hence, you must follow organic SEO best practices - methods that do not require you to pay Google for every click made on a link to your website.
The first step in photography SEO is to find all the keywords that are relevant to your business. These are the phrases that people type into a keypad or speak into Google’s voice search when they’re looking for something online.
Keywords depend on the industry you’re in, your target audience, and the market environment. Here’s an excellent reference for using Google’s Keyword Planner to find your relevant photography SEO keywords.
You can create and publish money pages using the most searched for keywords in your niche. These will provide you with the highest ROI.
There are both paid and free tools available that can help you with relevant keywords. Tools such as Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, Answer The Public, and Google Trends help provide you with a list of keywords relevant to your niche.
The next step is to check how often they are searched for every month. The higher the search volume, the more popular and competitive the keyword is.
It is always important to check the competition. For a new website, ranking for keywords that have high competition is difficult.
The sweet spot is to look out for keywords that offer a fine balance of search volume and difficulty (low to medium).
You can narrow down keywords according to the niche you’re in by using long-tail keywords.
For example, ‘wildlife travel photography’. In this phrase, ‘travel photography’ is a generic keyword, but by adding ‘Wildlife’, you can target more niche-specific keywords.
Use the Keyword Planner to identify the most searched for terms in your niche. Alternatively, you can study the keywords used by competitors. Make sure that you use both broad search terms as well as some unique words that accurately describe your brand personality.
Include keywords throughout the content on your website - domain names, headers, footers, and on-page content. You should also add keyword synonyms that match your target audience, your niche segment, and your brand.
2. Adding Page Titles, Headings, Tags & Page Descriptions
Search engines give priority to effective page titles for SEO rankings. Every page must have a header and a small description that precisely describes what the page is meant for.
These headers and meta descriptions will appear as snippets on a search result page. The page title will show up in your browser tab. Use the keywords you searched for earlier to make meaningful statements.
If you are a portrait photographer, your home page description could sound something like this: ‘Portrait photographer based in Newport, Oregon. Specialist in Portfolios, B&W, Family Portraiture. This snippet would appear next to your H1 header on a Google keyword result page.
A Meta Description would ideally be up to 155 characters long. The H1 header ought to be up to 70 characters in length. Here’s a useful guide to help you add SEO titles and snippets to your webpages.
Here are other best practices you need to consider when creating titles and headings:
- Include CTA’s: Call to action serves as a method through which interested users can further interact with your photography website. Include a clear CTA such as “Shop photo prints” or “ Sign up for our newsletter” after your title or description.
- Avoid Keyword Stuffing: Avoid repeating exact keywords in body text. This can sound forced and will negatively impact your SEO performance. When including keywords, they must naturally flow in your writing.
3. Image Optimization for SEO: Use Alt text
Search engines cannot read or interpret pictures on their own. To optimize visual content, photographers and creatives need to add text with relevant Alt text, Alt titles, and Captions to make their images searchable. Learn how to add metadata for your Pixpa gallery images and webpages here.
- Group together similar images when uploading them to galleries, so that users can access files faster and in a natural order.
- Never use generic image names such as 'DS003.jpg'. Instead, use the image theme to create the name, for example, 'nightfall.jpg'.
- Use long-tail keywords for image captions and tags for better image SEO.
Image optimization for SEO includes uploading smaller pixel sizes for faster browser load times and a responsive UI. Make bigger sizes available only when a user is interested in buying digital downloads or prints.
For JPEG images, the ideal web page optimized image size is 75% of the original. Photographers may often capture camera images in RAW format. But RAW files are too big and slow to load in a browser for an optimum user experience.
In comparison, JPEG formats are lighter and quicker to load. Digital formats captured in JPEG make for easy corrections for issues such as vignetting, distortion, and chromatic aberration.
Even where RAW captures more details, we recommend using free online RAW to JPEG converters before you upload images to your website.
Use mobile-responsive image resolutions with proportional width-to-height ratios as far as possible. This will help pages resolve better to mobile, smartphone, and tablet screens.
In fact, nowadays resizing is very easy, and you can even do it for free using the image resizer from imageresize.org.
4. Use Page Hierarchy for Seamless User Experiences
SEO optimized web pages for photographers have minimal repeated content. Do not worry about white space. A minimalist web page draws user attention to the things that matter.
Organize images and content in well-defined page categories and use simple, meaningful website menu items.
Whether your homepage uses a full-screen image, moving slides, or a grid layout, users pay maximum attention when everything is categorized and organized.
This allows the user to navigate between pages without getting confused and leads to faster load times on mobiles, tablets, and notebooks.
You can achieve maximum impact when your pages and menus are arranged in a hierarchy. This means that you arrange your images inside galleries and albums.
Pixpa allows you to create galleries within albums by default. It also provides an in-built hierarchical menu that can be easily customized or modified when required.
5. Using Images within a Blog Post
As a visual artist, you can understand how colors and patterns affect human psychology to build an atmosphere and create a story. So choose blog images that convey the desired intent.
Some of your blogs may require a pictorial explanation. Use your knowledge of photo editing apps to redesign images into infographics.
Use witty illustrations to support the arguments you make. Check out this detailed guide from Visme for more information: How to Make an Infographic.
Adding appropriate images to your blog posts enhances comprehension exponentially.
6. Improve Your URL Structure
Creating an SEO friendly URL structure is key to boosting your SEO rankings and aiding with overall user experience.
Having a clear, structured, and organized URL helps search engines understand your page better. A readable URL helps you remember the link more than a URL with just characters and numbers.
When structuring URLs, always remember to include the right target keywords and ensure that they’re relevant to the content you wish to include.
Make sure to include hyphens in the URL to help search engines see them as word separators and help search engines and users understand the contents of the page better.
Let’s look at an example of a poorly structured URL:
The first URL showcases nothing of value to the user. There is no insight into the content for both users and search engines.
Now, here’s an example of a well-optimized URL:
In this example, you can see a clear URL structure. In short, you are aware of what the content entails once you click the link.
7. Your Photography Website Must be Mobile-Friendly
A very important SEO tip for photographers is to make sure your photography website or portfolio is optimized for mobile.
Your photography website must be visually appealing and accessible on all devices. In this day and age, having mobile-friendly devices is key because the majority of search traffic is through mobile devices.
Begin by analyzing your website speed to ensure it is mobile-friendly. You can do this by going to Google PageSpeed Insights.
It shows you all the key data regarding your website speed and identifies areas of improvement.
Now, websites that are optimized for mobile need to load in under 3 seconds. This is the standard benchmark.
Now, ensure the images are optimized for the mobile experience. These images are to be compressed into small files to help reduce loading times. Also, you have to take into account the image types as well.
Having a responsive design or template can solve these issues. Website builders such as Pixpa offer their users a large library of responsive pre-templates.
Responsive templates ensure that your images resize and reposition automatically to fit different screens. A big plus point if you’re someone who’s not proficient in web design.
Photographers! Start showcasing your work today. Create Your Website
8. Analyzing Site Performance Metrics
As a platform owner interested in growth and visibility, you should monitor your site search performance regularly.
You can observe search metrics in several ways. Google Analytics (GA4) is one of the most reliable tools for gaining marketing insights, audience profiles, browsing behavior, analyzing websites, and so on. It is also free for use and therefore quite popular.
To start with Google Analytics, you need to create a Google account and log in. Your Google email and password will be exclusive to your website. Nobody else can access this data.
Pixpa allows you to link Google Analytics with your webpage by pasting in your Analytics-generated user code.
9. Let Social Media Drive Traffic to Your Website
Social media is a massive marketing tool on its own. Well over 63% of the world’s population is on social media.
Whatever your portfolio goals, more than a few members of your target audience can be located on a social network.
No matter which platform you use, ensure that at least one of them allows you to create an official business page.
Although social media content is not directly ranked by search engines for SEO, social pages can generate interest and engagement for your work and, in turn, drive traffic to your professional website.
If you’re a photographer or artist uploading your photos on social media, ensure that you make some form of copyright claim over your images. Preferably, use a watercolor scheme to protect your pictures or use minimal resolutions.
Pixpa enables you to integrate social media handles within your website instantly. You can also allow social media sharing directly from your client galleries, update site changes across Facebook and Google, and add Instagram snippets from your social stream.
10. Increase visibility with Local SEO
If you run a local photography business, then you need to add additional geo-tagged keywords in your content.
For example, a wedding photographer may use phrases such as ‘Wedding photographer in Philadelphia’ or ‘Wedding Photography near Easton’.
Add content links to sites that review local businesses, such as Yelp. Also, add links in your contact info to Google Maps. These additions will ensure better audience targeting for local businesses.
If you own a physical studio/office, Pixpa lets you add your location to Google Maps. You should pin your location on a map block on a Contact page. Add business information to every footer on your website for professional impact.
11. Add an SSL Security Layer
Google has officially admitted that you get higher SEO points for making your site more secure. URLs starting with https:// are more secure than those with http://.
The former has a distinct advantage when you’re sending data from your servers to your website.
Accepting payments from eCommerce stores is protected by a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption. This means that data cannot be decrypted by a hacker even if the person has intercepted your signal.
If a user visits a site that is SSL secured, a padlock symbol appears before the site’s URL in the browser address bar.
12. Build Quality Backlinks
Building high-quality links is another strategy photographers can use to boost their SEO efforts.
Going local is the best way to gain backlinks. Get listed in local directories, vendor lists, or partner with local venues for backlinks.
Let’s take a look at some of the best backlink strategies:
Guest Posts
Get in touch with other photography blogs, magazines, or websites that are part of your photography niche.
Write an article or provide valuable information through quotes. You can either provide a link to your website in the body of content or include an author bio with a link to your website.
Interviews
Contact other photography sites, such as gear reviews, tutorial sites, or online news outlets, for interviews related to your line of work or business. This can guarantee high-quality DR backlinks and increased online visibility.
Photography Tutorials
If you’re a seasoned photographer, consider creating in-depth, valuable tutorials in your area of expertise. This not only helps grow your audience but also allows you can reach out to photography education sites and feature your content.
Collaborations
By partnering with other members in the community, such as models, makeup artists, or clients, your work gets a chance to be featured along with a backlink.
Participating in Local Events
By being involved in the local community events, you can gain mentions on the event website or even local news outlets. This is a great way to earn positive publicity.
Setting up Indexing on your Domain and Web Pages
1. How Google Search works
Google fetches its search results by sending search bots to scrub your site for keywords used in the search query.
It may use links on your page to further search for keywords within those linked pages. This process is called ‘crawling’ a website in SEO.
Crawling helps create a database or index of queries. Whenever a user performs a search, the engine looks up this database to find matching results. SEO rules or algorithms are then applied to rank and display the search results.
2. Adding a Sitemap
Before getting a Search Engine to crawl and index your website, you need to create a sitemap.
A sitemap is like a website schematic that tells search engines how your content is structured. It also tells search bots how different page elements are linked together to create a more user-friendly resource.
Submitting a sitemap is recommended for photographers and visual artists who may have thousands of videos or images with different file sizes on their websites.
Adding a sitemap means that you embed a file called ‘sitemap.xml’ within your page’s HTML code (the coding language in which content appears on your browser).
Videos, images, and GIF files will need to display attributes such as run time, age-appropriateness, type, license, and so on for more intuitive browsing experiences.
A sitemap is automatically created and updated whenever you publish your pages on Pixpa. You can also choose to have Google not crawl your site, either as a whole or particular pages at a time.
This can be useful when your portfolio site is under construction or when you haven’t yet added safety precautions protecting copyright.
3. Getting Google to Crawl Your Website
To get ranked on Google, you have to be visible to it first. When you want Google to crawl your photography website for the first time, you must first verify that you are the domain owner of your site.
There are several ways to do this, but the most common method is via Google Search Console.
To start with Google Search Console, you must have:
- A Google email account.
- Browse to Search Console and log in with your Google account.
- Select whether you want to verify your site ownership via your domain or a URL prefix.
- Use the first option if you own a web domain on a hosting site such as GoDaddy or Namecheap.
Once you input your site URL and click on ‘Continue’, you will be given a unique code.
Simply copy Google’s one-line script and paste it as an external script as described here. It can take from a few hours to days for Google to process your crawl request. Once that is done, you can monitor your search performance on the Console dashboard.
Bing users can learn how to have their website crawled here.
When you add new images/galleries/blogs, search engines don’t automatically update their database for new content. You can have search engines re-crawl your website to add SEO points.
4. Writing Powerful Copy for Your Website
Search engines are designed to pick up cues about site quality from pieces of content that you write on pages on your site.
As a photographer, you may find it easier to showcase photos rather than string up appealing text. However, there are just a few simple rules that you ought to follow to produce great website copy.
To write effective website copy and blogs, you need to consider Google’s E-E-A-T framework. This approach has been introduced to provide SEO value, analyse the quality of content, and match your intent with user search intent.
E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. Let’s look at this concept in detail:
First, Experience. When writing copy or blogs, you need to highlight your experiences. For instance, if you’re writing a blog about photography lighting, you need to bring in your personal experiences, challenges, and outcomes.
Second, Expertise. Show readers your knowledge in the field by providing quality data and insights via credible sources.
Always remember to tick this box off you need to give information in such a way that it shows your deep understanding of the subject.
Third is Authority. Now this is all about linking to high DR (Domain Authority) sites, placing your valuable opinions on discussion/forums, mentioning experts in the field, and earning coverage and mentions from other reputable websites.
Fourth is Trustworthiness, this stage is all about ensuring your content is accurate and useful to readers. You need to be transparent about your content, provide information about the author, and lay out necessary contact details.
Having a high E-E-A-T score means that your content is accurate and valuable to readers, which makes a positive impact on your search rankings, leading to your content being featured on Google's AI Overview, Featured Snippet, and more.
5. Place Keywords in a Natural Flow
When writing content, place keywords strategically in a way that seems natural. Keywords should appear in context and order.
Don’t ever overuse keywords. Ditto for Call-to-Action (links to a store/asking a user to perform an action) buttons.
Think about what your potential customers or those who want to hire you are looking for. Then write what you would say to them.
Be relevant and to-the-point. But there’s no harm in letting a little passion creep through.
6. Blog regularly for SEO
Apart from penning down your thoughts and conveying your personality, blogs serve a fundamental purpose in SEO - to answer the questions that your target audience is asking.
Focus your blog content on providing answers and solutions to these questions and issues.
Cover as many aspects within a single blog as are necessary to make a structured blog post. Add links to answers for questions that are incidental or are so long to answer that they divert attention from the main issue.
Remember that the more relevant and useful your blog post, the more likely it is that people will enjoy reading it. That means that they will spend more time on that page - a critical search ranking factor in SEO.
Some photographers and illustrators find it more natural to publish photo blogs or image blogs. If you’re creating a purely visual blog, make sure that you name the images correctly.
For example, travel photographers can name restaurants, resorts, beaches, nature trails, etc. To differentiate photographs, add aperture, focal length, ISO values, time of day, and so on.
Also, consider adding a brief text to describe the ideas and knowledge you used to hone down on an image.
Portrait photographers, for example, can explain why particular lighting was chosen. Illustrators can list out the pens and colors they used.
SEO blogs should have H1 & H2 headers with keywords as a rule. Your opening sentence should contain the main blog keyword. At least one H2 (subheading) tag should contain a related keyword.
What should be my ideal blog keyword density? The number of times you can use a keyword (keyword density) should ideally remain between 1-3%, but it all depends on the context.
If you have a product or service to sell, ensure that you include a Call to Action in the closing statement.
7. Get your Website Listed in Business Directories
You can’t run a photography or design business without listing yourself in digital directories. Such a listing adds legitimacy to your website.
It is recommended that you complete as much information as possible, including a website, pictures, opening hours, FAQs, tags, and keywords, as all of this will help in search results.
Search engines like Google and Bing will refer to your business objects with reviews and feedback that you receive from a directory.
Importantly, for SEO, business listings provide a safe source of backlinks that refer visitors to your site. Here is a list of reliable online directories you can put yourself in.
Always remember to include the most important information in your business profile and maintain NAP (Name, Address, Phone number) consistency:
- Name (legal name preferred for business entities).
- Location/City/Country.
- Contact Information.
- Business Type, e.g., commercial photographer, graphic designer, etc.
- Local Business search tags/phrases.
- Value Proposition (Awards, Specialties, Education, Projects).
Make sure to find and eliminate NAP inconsistencies between your website and other sites listing your business. You can also opt to outsource directory submissions if you feel this task is taking your considerable time.
8. Use Content Delivery Networks (CDN) for Faster, More Secure Page Downloads
On certain older web hosting platforms, such as WordPress, you can increase the speed of web pages by letting local servers (part of a CDN) store and transmit your website data.
This may sometimes prevent hackers from accessing your website by loading user data from a secure node nearest to the site visitor's geographical location. This leads to safer and more reliable User Experiences and has a positive effect on SEO.
CDN implementations can be tricky, and unless you're a Networking professional, best left to experts. Otherwise, there's a good chance it can even hurt your SEO.
DIY platforms such as Squarespace and Pixpa handle CDN for you at the backend.By following SEO best practices, these applications automatically do the CDN grunt work for you, leaving you free to focus on your art.
9. Building Link Juice
Having another website link to your page is an internet vote in your favor. How much weight that vote carries, however, depends upon the SEO strength of the referring website.
If you are considered an authority on a particular subject matter, search engines will give you a higher preference within search results.
Now, when you link to someone else’s page, you are sending a recommendation to visitors to check out the linked page. Because you’re considered an authority, your vote will have a higher value than most.
A search engine will penalize your site by removing it from search rankings or dropping your SEO points if you link too often to pages with low domain authority.
These could be empty websites dedicated solely to depositing backlinks and acting to trick search engines into counting these votes as valid. Such techniques will harm your ranking.
The main aim of sharing links is to recommend reliable resources to site visitors. It makes sense for wedding photographers to refer people to portrait photographers within a region and receive professional recommendations in return.
It helps to hit up people on Facebook/Instagram/Twitter, meet colleagues at chatroom conventions, email experts to review your portfolio, etc. Politely ask for references for your web profile. These are all web versions of business networking and significantly impact your site’s SEO reputation.
When sharing links, use relevant keywords for the referring hyperlink. Apply similar words and vary link text (anchor text) for maximum SEO votes.
One important aspect of link building is that you should also link pages within your website to each other. This way, you spread ‘link juice’ within your platform.
The Analytics dashboard lets you instantly check how many people visited your site, the time they spent, and whether they clicked on any other links within your web page.
You can analyze website traffic by source and referrals. If you really wish to market your business website, you can even create charts and reports by examining demography, geographic location, interests (other than your site), and more.
SEO for Photographers: Power Tips
- Give equal emphasis to both on-page SEO (titles, tags, sitemaps, copy, blogging) and off-page SEO (social media, backlinks).
- Use internal links to increase time spent on your site, and lower Click-through rates and bounce rates.
- Regularly perform SEO audits of your website by using Google Analytics, Search Console, Screaming Frog, and many other Free online SEO audit tools.
- Even if you aim to create a lean, minimalist website design, use a few essential keywords on your pages to get the most out of your SEO.
- Keep adding new blog pages, meta-tagged images, and make sure your content is fresh and useful. Use FAQs to help your audience.
- Keyword stuffing, duplicate content, and using the same keywords everywhere are going to be penalized by search engines.
- Use 301 redirects: If you have just redesigned your website, old pages whose content has now been moved may have earned some SEO juice over time. You can reroute queries going to the old link to your new page and carry forward SEO value.
- Ensure that your hosting platform's uptime remains above 99.9%.
- Study SEO tactics adopted by your competition - the topics & keywords they use. Don’t copy them, but be inspired to give voice to your brand and niche.
- Don’t be afraid to change an SEO initiative that is not showing results.
Attention Photographers! Get Started with SEO Today.
How high your site gets ranked on any search engine is a function of the user experience that you deliver, the authority that you wield as an expert, and the influencers who vouch for you.
However, Search Engine Optimization is a continuously evolving area. Google updates its search algorithms every year. Other engines may act similarly.
SEO strategy is not a one-time task to be completed and forgotten. You need to monitor and keep up with changing trends continuously.
Get started with delivering great website experiences by applying these principles to your portfolio website. If you still haven’t made one or are looking for a new digital home, Pixpa offers a fully automated SEO platform designed for photographers and creatives.
FAQ
What is SEO for photographers?
Carrying out SEO for photographers involves optimizing your photography website and content so it ranks high on search engines like Google. The purpose is to rank your portfolio or photography website on the first page of Google, which results in increased organic traffic and online presence.
How do I choose the right keywords for my photography website?
Begin with what your potential clients might search (eg, “wedding photographer in Los Angeles”). Use tools like Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, Answer the Public, and so on to find relevant, high-traffic keywords.
Does image alt text really matter for SEO?
Yes, search engines can’t see images. Therefore, alt text and file names help them understand the content better. Make use of descriptive keywords, for example, “wedding-photoshoot-austin.jpg”.
How can I improve my local SEO as a photographer?
Here are a few strategies to help with local SEO:
- Create a Google Business Profile.
- Add your business address and city to your website.
- Get listed on local directories like Yelp or Justdial.
- Encourage clients to leave reviews.
Should I start a blog on my photography site?
Yes, blogging helps target more keywords that are part of your niche, tells Google your website is active, and highlights your expertise in the field. Look for content that is educational, such as photoshoot tips, tutorials, or publish behind-the-scenes content.
Will SEO help me book more clients?
Yes, if done right. Higher search rankings drive more targeted visitors to your site, which increases the chances of inquiries and bookings.
How long does it take to see SEO results?
SEO is a long-term strategy. You might see small improvements in 1-2 months, but significant results usually take 3-6 months or more. Therefore, it is important to trust the process and stick with your strategies.
Do platforms like Pixpa support SEO?
Yes. Pixpa, for example, has built-in SEO tools that make it easy to update meta tags, alt text, and friendly URLs - especially helpful for photographers with no tech background.
Can I do SEO myself, or should I hire someone?
You can start on your own with basic SEO. As your business grows, you can consider hiring an expert to scale your results further.
