Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the key parts of digital marketing for wedding photographers.
It is, essentially, a process of optimizing a website’s content, structure, and other elements to increase its chances of ranking high in Google search results.
When talking about SEO for wedding photographers specifically, this process involves various strategies and techniques that aim to increase the chances of your website appearing on the first search page when couples search for wedding services.
SEO for wedding photographers can be completed by completing several actions, such as:
- Keyword optimization
- Improving website navigation and structure
- Focusing on local SEO
- Focusing on high-quality content
- Link building
Still, this alone isn’t enough.
Here are 15 tactics for improving your wedding photographer’s SEO:
Key Takeaways
- SEO for wedding photographers is crucial as it helps their website rank higher in search engine result pages.
- The best way to make your website SEO-optimized is to strategically incorporate relevant keywords in your content.
- Other parts of your website should also be optimized, such as titles, headings, meta tags, and images.
What is SEO for wedding photographers?
It is a practice to rank your business website of wedding photography on Google and other SERPs to get more business and increase revenue.
SEO is one of the main advertising tactics that can help you increase your reach an profit.
How can wedding photography SEO help your business?
Performing Wedding Photography SEO would rank your website on the first page of Google for those who search for the service.
These people are your potential clients who plan to hire a wedding photographer. Here is a quick guide that provides wedding photography SEO tips.
1. Choose relevant keywords in SEO for wedding photographers
- Keyword types: Choosing the right keywords enables you to rank your wedding photography business on SERPs for potential clients. When starting a new website, you must choose long-tail keywords for ranking. For example “hire best wedding photographers in Los Angeles”. You can also target broad keywords like “wedding photographers” for an established website.
- Search Intent: The chosen keywords must be based on an intent to target your clients. The intent is what your client might look for in the search engine. It could be a contact, list, or even a question. Based on search intent, you can rank your website at the top of the results.
- Keyword Usage: Do not overuse the keywords because SERPs often assume irrelevant placement as a spam website. The keywords should be 4-5 in number (this might depend on the word count) and embedded into a sentence that should sound meaningful and grammatically correct. Forced placement of keywords might confuse the reader to increase the bounce rate of your website.
2. Optimize website titles and descriptions
Choose an appropriate title, heading, and sub-headings for your wedding photographer website.
You should add a series of headings underneath the main title of your page (home page, service page, contact page, blog posts, etc.). Adding up to 3 or 4 headings can increase the readability of the content and improve the rankings on SERP.
It is advisable to:
- Choose a 50-60 word length title.
- Use a number in the title and add positive sentiment to it.
- Add 3-4 headings (H1, H2, h2, and h3).
- Optimize the title, headings, subheadings, and normal text with keywords.
- Use simple language.
- Add images and videos that showcase your work.
- Relevant CTA.
3. Use alt tags for images
As SEO for wedding photographers is all about visuals, you need to optimize your images to rank them. Images rank in Google Images and pop up sometimes in text-based searches.
- Choose the adequate size images 100-310 KB. Images up to 500 KB decrease website loading speed and bounce back the visitors.
- Compress images using the right tool that does not compromise the quality.
- Create a URL structure for your images that match the meaning of the content.
- Add personalized and high-quality images in PNG and JPEG format.
- Use Alt Tag with target keywords.
- Add relevant names to the folders and sub-folders of all the images.
- Describe the images according to their placement with text.
- Add images to the sitemap for better search engine crawling.
- Pair up on-page SEO-like meta and structured data with images.
- Make your images mobile-friendly.
4. Include local keywords in website content
You can brainstorm the keywords based on location (country, state, city, etc.), wedding types, budget, contact, and questions that point out the best ones in the town.
The keywords can also include your brand name and destination weddings for ranking. There are popular keyword tools that you can use to add high-SEO keywords depending on their search volume, and density, such as Mangools or Ahrefs.
5. Claim and optimize Google My Business listing
If your wedding photography business operates only in a specific location, you must add your office address to the Google My Business listing.
Search results of your listing will show up with address, contact information, business hours, and reviews on your brand query. You can add images, services, and website URLs as a part of the information.
Getting good reviews from your clients enables you to get more business from Google.
6. Use header tags effectively
The addition of a header and other relevant tags with keyword optimization boosts your website’srankings.
- Header Tags: The heading tag H1 and subheading tags H2-H6 should be used on every page. You must consider using a single H1 and several H2-H6 tags per page for better ranking.
- Title Tag: You should never forget to add a relevant title tag to help SERPs rank your website for the search query. The title tag should explain everything about your wedding photography business in 10-70 characters as in the snippet in SERPs.
- Meta Tag: Meta Tags are short descriptions of your web page in 135-160 characters. The tag should explain and entice users to click on the link.
- Alt Tag: Describe your wedding photography images to help SERPs recognize and rank your website.
7. Create unique, high-quality content
Your website should have enough content that showcases your expertise as a wedding photographer, proof of work (portfolio), and knowledge.
SEO-optimized Website essentials:
- Home Page
- Sales Page
- Service Page
- Landing Page
- Contact Page
- Blog Posts (4-5)
- Case Studies
Since wedding photography is a business that is all about “visuals”, you need to add loads of images on every page to entice the visitor.
Each page should be optimized with SEO-right keywords, meta description, and tags. It should portray your work in the best possible combination of images with the correct content.
You can even add videos on the page or links to YouTube for instant bookings.
- The home page should be optimized with your main target keyword and contain links to all other pages of the website.
- The sales page contains content to convince the visitor to choose your service.
- The service page lists all your services clearly with a call-to-action button.
- The landing page should have all the important information about your business, as well as a call-to-action button.
- The contact page contains your email, business phone, and WhatsApp support. It should include all the links to your social presence like Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, etc.
- Blog posts may educate the visitors like “how to choose the right photographer for your wedding”, “best photography ideas for your next destination wedding”, etc.
- A case study can be a representation of a story with real couple names struggling to find the best wedding photographer but luckily found your business online.
8. Use internal and external links
Internal Links
Each of your blog posts, service page, sales page, the home page, and even contact page must be interlinked multiple times on your website.
Interlinking is a practice to add links to the same website in the content for better conversions. Interlinking keywords enable you to explain your services better.
You can place interlinking keywords as the title of images or below them. These keywords are placed in a manner that appears to occur organically.
For example, your destination wedding photography blog post about Isla Mujeres Island in Mexico may link to your destination wedding portfolio.
Backlinks in SEO for wedding photographers
External links or Backlinks are the direct links that lead to your website from third-party websites is one of the best SEO tips for wedding photographers.
These websites must not be spammy websites that may push down your ranking.
Getting Backlinks from a website with higher domain authority helps your website to “seem more trustworthy” to Google.
You can go for do-follow or no-follow backlinks.
Getting more such Backlinks would increase your rankings on the search engine.
Another benefit of getting backlinks from a photography website is that you are likely to get a conversion from wedding photographer leads to clients.
The same visitors of the back-linking website may visit your page/post with higher chances of conversion.
However, you are likely to pay for back-linking services as websites run paid programs for promotions.
9. Promote the website on social media
Promoting websites on social media is among the most important SEO tips for wedding photographers.
Adding the link to a website in Instagram bio, Facebook, and Twitter is a good way.
Another method is to post with a website link in the caption. It will increase the domain authority of your wedding photography website and give you more business.
Check out our guide to Wedding Photographer Marketing to learn about other marketing channels you can use to grow.
10. Encourage customer reviews and ratings
Putting out direct testimonials on your website with your client names enables your business to gain trust. Customer ratings and detailed reviews on Google My Business listing push your website to rank higher and gain more visibility.
11. Create and submit a sitemap to search engines
For Google to rank your website, it needs to deploy crawlers upon it and index it. Google indexing is a process that may take a few days to finish. You must not delay but manually submit the sitemap to Google for quick indexing.
12. Use responsive design for mobile users
Approximately 4.7 Billion People access the Internet on their mobile phones.As such, it is necessary to make your business website mobile-friendly.
Websites developed on cross-platform systems offer a great user experience for mobile users. Large image sizes may reduce the chances of having a mobile-friendly website due to slow loading speed.
It is important for a website to work similarly on desktop and mobile at the same speed.
Fixing broken links is another way to increase your site’s speed and make it mobile-friendly.
You can check whether your website is mobile-friendly or not on Google Search Console.
This is also important during email marketing campaigns, as most people read their mail on their mobile phones, as well.
13. Set up and verify Google Search Console
Google Console can easily help you monitor, troubleshoot, and check backlinks for your wedding photography website. It enables your website to rank on Google and other SERPs.
Maintaining the security of your website saves your business and facilitates quick indexing. It protects visitors’ data as well.
Collecting cookies and user information on an unsafe website may create problems for you and the user. Your website can make a bad name in the market and may lose ranking.
You can protect your website from such attacks by using:
- Encryption tools
- Antivirus
- An SSL certificate
Nowadays, websites display the absence of SSL certificates as soon as you visit them. You can notice that by looking at the https or http at the beginning of every link.
Another way is that your system showcases an unsecured website and asks you to rethink navigation to it. Most users protect their privacy and bounce back to look for other websites.
14. Use structured data to improve search visibility
URL
Using the right URL can help your site rank better compared to other wedding photography websites.
A complicated URL with mere numbers and characters would not clearly explain anything about the destination page.
SEO Optimized URLs with proper structure and keywords rank higher on SERPs as a measure of relevance against the search query.
You must try to add a target keyword related to wedding photography in the URL alongside your brand name.
In the case of photography blog posts, eliminate dates in the URL to reduce the complexity.
URL should be:
- Short and simple.
- Using hyphens.
- Contain lowercase letters.
- Keywords.
Increase Page Speed
You must increase the loading speed of your website to rank and obtain conversions. High-loading speed websites rank higher on SERPs.
Adding loads of images with large file sizes is the main factor in decreasing website loading speed.
Usually, photography websites have slow loading speeds due to large chunks of images.
Most visitors tend to bounce back from such websites and relocate to other fast-loading results.
The factors that increase the page speed are:
- Image Optimization.
- GZIP Compression.
- Enable Cache.
- CSS, JavaScript, and HTML code update/reduction.
You must check your site speed from time to time using various tools for better optimization and ranking on SERPs.
15. Monitor and track website traffic and rankings.
Perform an SEO Audit
You must regularly perform wedding photography SEO audits for your website to rank better on SERPs.
An audit shows you the places where your website lacks and needs improvement.
SEO audit may sound like a time-consuming task, but it is a quick process that conducts an evaluation of the website if done by an expert.
The SEO audit displays an SEO Audit score to help you understand the contributing factors. The score should be as high as possible. Improving the reasons for low scores may increase them further during the second evaluation.
You can choose us to perform a free SEO audit to understand your website’s performance on SERPs and find out the room for improvisation in our detailed report.
Check rankings
The best way to measure your success in SEO for wedding photography is to track your website’s current ranking. There are two ways to check your ranking.
- If you are confident enough and maintain a record of past ranking and conversions, you may simply scroll down on search result pages to find your website.
- Another way is to use a ranking measurement tool that displays the page of your website’s ranking on Google.
Conclusion
These are 15 SEO tips for wedding photographers that help your website attain Google ranking with consistency and patience.
Our aim is to break down difficult concepts and strategies before their execution in front of you.
We are a Digital marketing consulting firm providing web design, CRO (conversion rate optimization), and SEO (search engine optimization) services that meet your business goals.
Contact us for a free marketing plan to boost your wedding photography business and make more revenue.