Finding clients through word-of-mouth and a beautiful Instagram feed are both great, free ways to market your business. Did you know there’s a third option that doesn’t cost a dime? SEO, or search engine optimization, drives organic traffic to your site without paying for ads. With websites full of beautiful images, utilizing SEO for wedding photographers is especially important. Don’t be fooled into thinking that your site’s organic traffic isn’t as important as your other marketing channels.
With proper SEO, your website can be one of your most valuable lead generation tools. But how can you take your website from living in the depths of the internet to being on page 1 in Google? You need to optimize your website for search. Put plainly, you need to implement these SEO for wedding photographers tips.
What Exactly is SEO for Wedding Photographers?
Google and other search engines have “bots” that search every inch of your website. Those bots factor in things like the words you write, the alt text on your images, and the headlines you use to rank your page. Then, those same bots compare your content to other blogs about the same topic online.
For example, let’s say you’re a wedding photographer in New York City. Search engine bots will compare your entire site—every page, every post—to other wedding blogs. Your post about a wedding in Central Park will compete with other websites that mention both weddings and Central Park. Those two topics will cover a LOT of websites and even more pages on the internet.
Don’t panic! The bots will compare your content with the other blogs they find and sort you by ranking what they deem to be the most credible information. To sum it up, the higher you rank, the earlier you’ll appear in search results. These SEO tips will enhance your website and boost your rank to get you to that sweet, sweet first page of Google results.
1. Create Great SEO Content
Content is only content if it’s useful. Otherwise, why is it on your website? Here are a few things to watch out for when creating content for your site.
Avoid duplicate content. Be sure to create original content and never plagiarize content from other sites. If you have multiple URLs pointing to the same page, have your web developer set up a 301 redirect (more on this below) so that you only have 1 URL representing each page.
Optimize your images. This sounds complicated, but I promise it’s not! Just remember that Google bots will evaluate your images as well as your site. When you save images for your website, give them specific names that describe what is pictured. For example, after shooting a bohemian wedding in Cincinnati, you’d name those files “bohemian-cincinnati-ohio-wedding-nameofcouple.jpg.” The alt text for one of those images could be, “Cincinnati wedding bridal portrait.” Think about what your ideal client may be googling and include that language as much as possible.
Write. Then, write more. Beautiful blog posts filled with phenomenal photography but no words will never rank. Add at least 300 words to every blog post you publish to ensure they can rank! Keep it simple and describe what’s happening in the images or how you shot them. Within those 300 words, be sure to include keywords about your location and phrases like wedding, wedding photographer, brides, etc.
2. Check Your Links Regularly
As a user of the internet, there are few things that are more annoying than ending up on a 404 Error page. This flaw won’t only bother your readers, it’s also bad for the crawling bots we mentioned earlier.
While it may seem like nothing, these broken links signal to Google bots that you’re not keeping up with your website—making you seem less credible. Luckily, this problem is easy to solve!
Google Webmaster Tools can detect broken internal and external links on your site. Once you’ve found the broken links, go update them in your content management system.
3. Check Your Site Speed—Then Fix It
Google bots penalize slow sites. In such an image-heavy industry, that can be a tough pill to swallow. There is a balance to showcasing your work in the highest quality and keeping your users in mind—they don’t want to wait 10 minutes for a webpage to load.
The average speed for a website to load is 5 seconds. The faster it loads, the happier those bots will be. Improve your site load time by cutting down on the size of a page. Do this by resizing images prior to uploading them to your site using a program like Adobe Lightroom.
4. Make Your Content Sharable
Social signals have become increasingly important to Google as they infer your site’s popularity. For example, Google is going to think a site is more credible if tons of people are sharing articles from that site.
As newly anointed experts at SEO for wedding photographers, you are at an enormous advantage! Why? You’ve got an amazing photography community - aka couples who want to share their wedding day with the world. The easiest way to increase your shareability is to add social sharing buttons to your blog posts. Then, promote your content on your own social media accounts for your clients to see. Viola!
5. Get Mobile-Friendly
How much time do you spend on your phone? If you’re like me, quite a lot. If your site isn’t mobile-friendly, you’ll need to look into your options to make it happen. Check whether your site is mobile-friendly on Google Webmaster Tools—seriously, this tool handles it all.
6. Use Titles And Headings Properly
After you know which SEO keyword you’re going to focus on, make sure it’s in the title—the closer it can be to the beginning, the better. For example, if your keyword is “Over-the-Rhine Wedding” you’ll want that phrase to be at the beginning of your title and used throughout your headings. Not only do bots look at titles and headings, they are smart enough to read surrounding text to see if it relates. So the more descriptive you can be about your keyword, the better.
7. Build Backlinks To Your Site
This can be the most time-consuming SEO tip for wedding photographers. It’s also one of the most impactful. The more sites that point to your website, the more credible your site appears to Google.
Having wedding-related sites pointing to your website is crucial. Google trusts what other websites have to say about yours, especially if they are already high-traffic sites. The more websites you can have pointing back to yours, the better your SEO ranking will be. Say hello to the front page of Google’s results!
Here are some easy and credible ways to build backlinks:
Get your business listing in local directories
Sign up for a business listing in wedding vendor directories— Junebug Weddings is a great place to start.
Make visually interesting Pinterest pins that link to your blog
Sign up for a Google Local Business Page even if you’re a destination photographer
SEO for wedding photographers can seem intimidating, but if you follow these simple steps it can really pay off. Hosting sites like Squarespace and Wix now make it super user-friendly for you to change things like alt text yourself.