SEO For Wedding Photographers Explained

Learn SEO

You can build your wedding photography business online presence hassle free with the help of social media. While this sound good remember that the main purpose of Facebook and the others is to socialize and when it comes to translating viewers into revenue Google remains king.

Let’s start by saying: SEO for wedding photographers, or optimizing your wedding website portfolio for search engines, it’s a tough art to master, now being harder than ever with a even darker future to come.

Our business model has the main source of funneling clients, the internet.

Shure, you can try opening a physical shop in your town with a big sign that says “Toader Photography – World Famous Wedding Photographer” hoping to attract future brides and grooms (like I did) but the fact remains, if you want more clients, you got to conquer the internet.

THE BASICS

The most important aspect of ranking high in google search results is the content and after that, surprise – more content. From my point of view, the challenge (apart from having great imagery, DOH !) is to write unique content that is both appealing to search engines and people. The second most important aspect is the technical part of your website and link building.

Now, that I got your attention, let’s break it down into chapters.

CREATE AWESOME WRITEN CONTENT

Seo For Wedding Photographers — Content Is King

Create Content For Wedding Galleries

Sound impossible, you want to rank for “Wedding Photographer” search related terms and it’s definitely weird to name every gallery on your website starting with those words. Remember that google is smart, LIS (Latent Semantic Indexing) is the part of the algorithm, that identifies semantically related terms, to make it simple, words and phrases that are related to our wedding photography business.

My goal is to write at least 150 words, a unique story with details of the wedding. I will write about the groom and the bride, how I met them, about the venue, content that appeal both to search engines and people. Yes, I will include the wedding photographer keyword as part of the story and I will usually write the title with the location of the wedding together with the name of the groom and bride.

Be creative, use a complex and sophisticated vocabulary without common words and phrases and remember: google hates the oblivious (the sky is blue), bring something new to the table.

Create A Blog With Articles Related To Wedding Photography

This is the place to get really creative and write more than 1000 words per articles, this is big, share your passion with your readers, future clients and why not, other wedding photographers. I write about SEO, articles like this one, street photography, wedding photography in general and other related terms.

SEO FOR WEDDING PHOTOGRAPHERS TECHNICAL FAQ

This is big, without content you will never rank.

SEO for wedding photographers without technical perfection its like power without control. Yes, I consider the content to be the brute force and the technical part of the website the steering wheel.

Keyword Research

Before I decide to write anything I open KWFinder and Google Search Console to find keyword opportunities.

Being a wedding photographer for 11 years and doing SEO for about 10 my eye is well formed, nevertheless I will do my homework before starting anything. Research your keyword, and use it inside the paragraph and h tags. Probably you already know about the Yoast plugin, write there the focused keyword and see instantly how well the article its optimised.

Flawless Permalink Structure

This is something oblivious !

Your links should be pristine, perfect, immaculate – yourwebsite.com/awesome-keyword/.

Kill The Duplicate Content

A lot of photographers use tags, this is bad practice. I can’t find a real case scenario for using tags on a wedding photographer website, unless the website has a lot of content (hundred of unique articles) and the use of tags structures the navigation.

I personally don’t use tags, any tag added will generate duplicate content, there is no value added and it will dilute the ranking power of your website.

Duplicate content or similar content can be found when you repeat over and over words on multiple pages or when you try to manipulate deliberately the search engine, don’t be like that.

Master And Conquer Internal Linking

A page that has the link everywhere on the website (menu item ?) will rank better than a page that is well buried and hard to find.

Don’t Forget Your Local Search Ranking

Google My Business, its a very powerful tool that can boost your organic search result and it’s free. What you are waiting for, make sure you fill all the empty spaces.

Image Optimization

I’m against compressing the hell of my JPEG files, because I’m a good person and because my main purpose is to showcase the images in the purest form, I keep them at 90% quality in most case scenarios. I have seen some weird extremes, you don’t want to show pixelated images to your potential clients, or do you ?

That being said a big portion of my images have a title in the ALT tag explaining Google what that image is about.