15 Essential SEO Tips to Boost Your Photography Website in 2024

A professional website is an important component of a photography business. It serves as a valuable marketing tool to showcase your work and attract potential clients. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) may be new to many professional photographers. However, learning the best practices of SEO will help photographers get the most of their professional websites.

What is SEO?

In simple terms, SEO means the process of improving your website to increase its visibility in search engines such as Google and Microsoft Bing. The better the visibility of your website, the more likely people will find your website when searching for products or services you sell.

Why is SEO Important?

More and more people are using the internet to look for products and services even for local providers, for example, new born photographer or in studio photo session for family portrait. Having a good online presence is pivotal to the success of any modern photography business. Unlike buying advertising on search engines like Google or social media sites such as Facebook, SEO is free and can help grow the bottom line of your business.

15 Best SEO Tips for Photographers

Although some people might choose to hire consultants, you can also learn the basics of SEO and apply the following best practices to work on your own.

1. Define Your SEO Keywords

The first step is to do keyword research. Compile a list of keywords that your potential clients might use to search on Google when they are looking for your business.  For example, a newly engaged couple might search for wedding photographers by keywords such as best rated wedding photographer in northern Chicago. Include as many relevant keywords and phrases that they might search for. The better the keywords match the search query, the higher you will rank and the more clicks you will get. SEO tools like Semrush and Aherfs can also help you find the best SEO keywords.

2. Have a Mobile Responsive Website Design

Google prioritizes mobile-friendly sites in its rankings, so you should provide your clients with the best browsing experience, whether on a large or small screen. You can use responsive website design, which changes the layout of your site to best fit the screen size that your viewer is looking at. Zno Website™ is a responsive website builder that ensures your site look great on all devices. No coding or design skills needed, you can easily edit your mobile pages with a smart grid and customized elements.

3. Improve SEO Title and Meta Description

In addition to including keywords on your web pages, you can also put them in your SEO title and meta description. Search robots will read your metadata for indexing and ranking. If all the pages of your website have informative metadata, your pages are likely to rank higher in search results. Try to put your keywords at the front of the title to make it easier for search robots to crawl your keywords and increase the click-through rate of your site.

You can improve SEO by adding site descriptions to your website and individual page settings through Zno Website™. Think about what your clients are searching for and add keywords that encourage them to click through to your photography site.

4. Use Brand Matched Subdomain

To improve your website’s SEO, it’s recommended that you use a custom subdomain. It will help to improve your website’s ranking on search engines, increasing your exposure and organic traffic. You can replace your default URLs with a personalized subdomain that matches your studio’s name or brand. Your subdomain should be short and easy to remember. Avoid long or complex names that may confuse your visitors. Take Zno Website™ as an example, if your studio name is Tracy’s Photography, then you can set your website’s subdomain as tracysphotography, then your share link will be tracysphotography.mypixweb.com/.

5. Optimize URL Structure

In addition to customizing your subdomain, you can also change the URL slugs of your website pages to improve SEO. Google’s site crawlers can easily find and index your content with a user-friendly URL structure. Keep your URLs short and clean to enhance your client experiences.

6. Optimize Photos on Your Website

Adding descriptive titles and alt text to your images is also a great way to improve your SEO. This helps search engines understand the content of the photos, thus increasing the chances of appearing in search results.

For image SEO, you also need to pay attention to the size of your images. When images are too large, they will slow down your page speed and harm visitor experience. This makes them more likely to leave your sit. A good loading speed for a web page should be under 3 seconds, and you can achieve this by compressing your images. You can also easily monitor your site speed using Google’s free SEO tool, PageSpeed Insights.

7. Provide Useful Content

It’s worth mentioning that any page that includes text will also help boost SEO. Therefore, you can create some useful content for your visitors, like engaging blog posts, tutorials, or behind-the-scenes stories. Make sure your content is well-written, and answers your visitors’ questions. It will encourage your visitors to spend more time on your website. High-quality and relevant content tends to rank higher on search engines and helps build your brand, resulting in even more organic traffic.

8. Add Internal Links

Internal links are links that connect pages within your website. Adding internal links helps guide your customers to more relevant content. However, every time you link to the same internal link, try to change the anchor text to make it look more natural, and keep it relevant. Avoid using the same keyword too much, which might be bad for your SEO!

9. Add Outbound Links

Outbound links are links from your website to other websites. It turns out that adding outbound links is also helpful for SEO. You can add links to your website that are related to your photography business, such as photography industry resources, equipment reviews, or photography tips.

10. Add Backlinks

Backlinks are links from other websites to your website. Backlinks act as endorsements and can significantly boost your search engine rankings. An important principle about backlinks is – Quality over Quantity. Backlinks from high-authority, and relevant websites can be effective in helping you rank higher on search engines. So how do you get valuable backlinks? An effective way is to share your expertise on a well-known photography blog site. By writing guest posts you can establish your authority and get more useful backlinks. In addition, you can also post comments on knowledge sharing sites such as Quora or Reddit to answer questions, share advice, and remember to add a link to your website.

11. Update Your Photography Website Regularly

Search engines favor active sites. So keep your website fresh by regularly adding new content or updating your existing pages. 

12. Use Google Search Console

Google Search Console is a free service to help you understand the search keywords that users use when they visit your website and track the rankings based on those terms. You can monitor the performance of your website by using this free tool. Don’t forget to create an XML Sitemap for your photography site. This helps search engines index your site more efficiently.

13. Use Social Media

Many photographers may only focus on the SEO of their photography websites, but they don’t realize that content on social media platforms can also improve SEO. Share your content on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and Pinterest to drive traffic to your site. In addition, remember to engage with your audience and respond to comments on your social media accounts.

14. Add Testimonials and Client Reviews

Adding testimonials and client reviews to your photography website can also help enhance your website’s SEO. Reviews of your business from past customers are great additions to boost rankings. Invite your clients to share their positive reviews!

15. Utilize Local SEO

If you want more local traffic, you should put your photography business on Google Maps by using Google My Business, which can help you appear in local search results and be reachable to more local customers.

About Zno Website™

Zno Website™ provides photographers with the essential tools to boost their website’s SEO. You can use brand-matched subdomain, optimize your SEO titles and meta descriptions with this powerful website builder. Sign up for a free account and elevate your photography website ranking today!