SEo for wedding photographers
Get your website ready to attract the next client
SEO and content marketing is just as important as knowing how to shoot in manual.
Just like manual mode, SEO can be technical but it really doesn’t have to be once you are familiar with the basics.
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SEO tips for wedding photographers
I know, I know. In a perfect world, clients would book us based on how f*****g incredible our photos are. Unfortunately, the real world doesn’t exactly work like that. Wedding photographers who work on their SEO and rank high on Google for their main keywords tend to have an easier time booking weddings.
I mean, how often do you really scroll down to page 4?
My SEO progress from April 2023 to July 2024
When I started working on my SEO at the end of 2021 I received about 2-3 clicks from Google a day. As of July 2024, I get about 175 clicks a day from Google and an additional 50-70 from other sources, like Instagram and Facebook.
With SEO, I was able to nearly double my income between 2022 and 2023, and book destination weddings and elopements thousands of miles from where I am based.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for search engine optimization, but it might as well be GO, for Google optimization, as most searches on the internet are done on Google.
SEO means to improve your website’s visibility, so you get clicks whenever potential clients search for the services you provide, the products you sell, or are looking for information on something you’re an expert on.
We can divide SEO into two parts. On-page SEO and off-page SEO. On-page SEO is everything you can control on your own site. Off-page SEO is everything that happens off your site that still affects your rankings. Backlinks are the most important part of off-page SEO.
Strictly speaking, SEO is all about generating clicks and getting your website as high up as possible in the rankings. Content marketing, web design, and copywriting are all about getting those clicks to convert into leads. More on that later. 👇
SEO for wedding photographers
SEO for wedding photographers is different than general SEO. Most of us are working locally or within a service area. Local SEO is all about optimizing your website for searches made within and about your city, state, or service area.
Blog ideas for wedding photographers
This means you should mostly focus on writing blog content about wedding related topics in your area. Ideally, you should target searches that potential clients make before they search for a photographer. Here are a blog title few examples.
The best bridal salons in Phoenix, AZ
My favorite wedding venues in Tampa, FL
Where to take engagement photos in New York City
Your website, SEO and content marketing
SEO and website content should be the biggest part of every wedding photographers marketing strategy in addition to social media and vendor relationships, for example.
Your website is your biggest asset. Social media channels can change (hello Elon) or algorithms can suddenly work against you (hello Insta reels.) Relationships with vendors might change, or you might suddenly need to move to another city, as was my case. But you will always have your website with full control!
Organic search drives most of web traffic today. 53% of all web traffic is through organic search, whereas only 15% is driven by pay-per-click ads.
What is content marketing?
For the sake of simplicity I’ll put content marketing, copywriting, and web design into the same category. They should all work together to get people to fill out the contact form on your website and inquire about your services. Getting people to reach out should be the ultimate goal of your website!
Content marketing is creating and publishing relevant and valuable content to grow and engage your target audience. This is not limited to your website and blog, but also social media.
Publishing content blindly without SEO doesn’t work
The most valuable content for wedding photographers in my opinion are guides and articles that discuss topics brides and grooms search for before they search for a wedding photographer.
A wedding venue guide is a great example. Most newly engaged couples search for a venue first, so it makes sense to create content about venues to get on their radar before they look for a photographer.
If you want to get even further ahead, write a comprehensive blog post about where to propose in your city!
What are keywords?
Keywords are the words and sentences users type into Google. Film Wedding Photographer is an example of a keyword. Keywords can be divided into short and long-tail keywords, short keywords are one or two words whereas long-tail keywords are indeed, longer. Over 95% of searches of Google contain 4 or more words which is what we as wedding photographers should mostly be targeting.
Wedding photography SEO keywords
The most important keyword for wedding photographers is the what you do and where you do it keyword. This should be the H1 title heading on your home page.
An example of that would be San Francisco Wedding Photographer.
Google has gotten much better at understanding related terms that mean the same thing. So you can also have your H1 be Wedding Photographer in San Francisco.
Keyword density
Keyword density refers to the ratio of your keyword in relation to the word count on your page. Back in the 90s, search engines would rank pages based on how often the keyword would show up on a page. Just write best wedding photographer a million times and show up as number one.
As you can imagine, that was easy to manipulate. Google has repeatedly mentioned that keyword density is not a ranking factor anymore. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t consider it, as you can get a penalty and lose your rankings if you overuse your keyword, which is called keyword stuffing.
As a general rule of thumb, use your keyword about 1-2% of the time in your copy and write naturally. Google has very sophisticated engines to understand what your page is about, you don’t have to repeat it a million times.
Keyword research
Also known as topic research, which is a better way to describe it, as you’re never really writing about just one thing. Before you do any content writing, you should do a bit of research to see what previously written articles about the topic cover.
This means Google somewhat expects you to cover the same or more topics. A critical part of doing keyword research is to figure out if the keyword, or related keywords have any search volume.
How to know if it’s worth writing about
There’s barely any point in spending hours writing an article if there aren’t any people searching for it, right? My go-to tool for keyword research is actually just googling the keyword, and seeing what shows up, and looking at the related searches and people also ask sections.
Keywords Everywhere is also a fantastic tool to estimate search volume. It is a Chrome browser extension and costs about $10-$20 a year based on how much you use it. Google Search Console also has a section on search volume but you can only use it for keywords you already rank for.
How can I improve my seo?
Let’s discuss on-page SEO for now, that’s everything you control on your domain. We’ll leave the off-page stuff for the backlinks chapter.
Here are a few steps you can take to get you started.
Make your images smaller
Many photographers upload gigantic images to their websites that only slow down the user experience. Nobody needs images that are 4 megabytes, especially when most people use their phones to perform searches. Make sure to properly resize and compress your images before adding them to your website. I use Shortpixel to compress my images.
Set up a Google business profile
We’ll dive deeper into this later, but having a fully optimized Google business profile is one of the best ways you can increase your visibility for local searches.
Design with a phone in mind
Not only are most searches performed on mobile, but Google also now uses a mobile user agent to crawl and scan your content. Phones are slower to load large pages so keep your content as simple as possible.
Fix broken links
Keep an eye out for any broken internal and outbound links on your website as you add and update your content. The Google gods are not to happy to see multiple broken links leading to the 404 page. Here is a broken link tool to help you find broken outbound links. You can use Google Search Console to find broken internal links.
Keep your headings organized
Headings are super important when it comes to on-page SEO. They are one of the strongest signals you can send to Google to let it know what the page is about, and what search queries it should rank it for. Only use the H1 heading at the top and only once per page — make it a simple and descriptive title for the page, Wedding venues in Brooklyn, NY for example. Do not use headings for decorative text. The H2 headings should all compliment the H1 heading — Outdoor venues in Brooklyn, for example.
Create a pricing page
If you don’t have one already, make one. Even if you just include your starting and average prices. Pricing pages can rank for keywords like wedding packages near me or x city wedding price. Not only that, but pricing pages can also show up in the people also ask and related searches sections for other wedding related searches.
Don’t cannibalize your keywords
Keyword cannibalization is when you have multiple pages on your website that target the same keyword or topic. Wedding photographers often shoot at the same venue and then have multiple blog posts for those weddings. The problem with this is Google has no idea what to show when someone searches for that venue as you have 4 different pages that mention the venue. So none of them end up ranking because Google is like…??? Make sure you only have one page for each keyword. If you still want to have multiple blogs for the same venue, create a main page for the venue where you discuss the best aspects of the venue, the starting prices, what’s included and more. Then link from that page to the blog galleries, but make sure to leave the venue name out of the title of the individual blog galleries. Here’s an example of a venue page.
Keep your site neat
What I mean by this is that you should keep an eye out for duplicate pages, pages you might have started and never finished, tag archives, pricing guides that are hidden and more. Make sure to either delete them or give them a noindex tag.
Google Business Profile
Creating a Google Business Profile is one of the best steps to take to immediately improve your SEO rankings for your local market. If you haven’t signed up or claimed your business, do it now!
By creating, verifying, and maintaining your profile you are essentially telling Google that you are a real business, and that you’re open for business. Here are just a few of the benefits of having a Google Business Profile.
It’s absolutely free!
Your business can be seen in the local map pack
It generally improves your rankings for local wedding keywords
It’s the best place to get and answer reviews from clients
You can receive leads and messages through your profile
Use the update feature to link to new blogs and pages on your website
Clarify better to Google exactly which services you provide
Reviews on Google
Reviews are one of the best features of having a Google Business Profile. The profile can even source reviews from other websites, like The Knot, and display it on your profile along with your Google reviews. I highly recommend that you get as many positive reviews as possible from past clients and that you answer every single review. Getting and answering reviews is another signal that you are in business and that Google should show your website for the relevant keywords.
Google updates
This is a highly under-utilized feature. Creating updates on your profile also sends signals that you’re open for business and that you’re a thriving business. It’s super simple to create an update. Every time you create a new blog or shoot a new session — create an update, include a sentence or two about it and link to the most relevant page on your site, easy!
Google Search Console
Once you’re steadily creating content for your site, you need something to track your progress. That’s where Google Search Console comes in. After you’ve signed up and verified your website you can easily tell what your organic traffic is, what pages are most popular, and what search queries or keywords people use to find your pages.
It can also tell you if you have any issues with your website or if your site has a manual action penalty, which is something that would need your immediate attention.
Within search console you can make requests for Google to index your pages. This is super helpful if you have a new site as Google doesn’t crawl newer sites as frequently as others. This ensures your new blog post gets indexed asap!
Last but not least, within the links section of GSC, you can see all the backlinks that Google is using to rank your site. Backlink tools from sites like Ahrefs are powerful to look at where your competitors are getting their links from but search console is more accurate for your own site.
Backlinks
Backlinks are, as what the name suggests, links pointing back to your website. They’re also called inbound links. They are the number one factor why certain pages get to the top of the search engine results pages.
Let’s go back to the 90s for second when search engines were in their infancy. They ranked pages based on how often the exact keyword appeared on a page. Obviously, this was manipulated and was soon not a ranking factor. Backlinks soon took over as the main ranking factor for search engines. Google’s original name was actually Backrub, as they were introducing a new way to organize search results.
DIfferent kinds of backlinks and which ones are most valuable
Generally speaking, the more backlinks you have pointing to your page, the better you’ll do in the rankings. Backlinks are like a stamp of approval from one site to another.
But not all links are created equal. Blog post and forum comment links, directory links, Pinterest links, and similar links are not worth much on their own but should be included to make up a natural link profile.
The best kinds of links to get are contextual backlinks within a sentence, you’ve already seen many of them while reading this page. Other examples of this can be photo credit links, under a photo between paragraphs.
Building links to your site can be time consuming but it is definitely worth it.
Here are some easy tips to help you get started.
Sign up for all the major business directories and include a link.
There are also photography directories to sign up for.
Make sure your social profiles all have a link to your site, not a link in bio site.
Create content that is worth linking to.
Authority
As much I don’t like this word, it is what’s used to describe a website’s trust factor with Google. The more links you get from authoritative websites, the more your own authority increases.
The only way to get authority is to get links, and when you have authority, everything you publish gets indexed faster, and typically you start ranking higher for more competitive keywords.
Link building takes time, here’s an example. I wrote one of my wedding venue guides in July 2022. Between July 2022 and June 2023 I focused heavily on building links and 11 months later, it finally made it to the top spots for the relevant keywords in the area.
Prefer to listen? Here’s podcast episode I was on with Carolina Guzik of The Tog Republic. It’s all about backlinks and authority.
The graph shows the blog post’s average position for multiple local wedding venue keywords. Unfortunately, Google Search Console does not show results further back than 16 months.
Why Authority is important for SEO
Without authority, you won’t get anywhere. Websites with a low authority score have a very hard time ranking for anything but the most obscure topics.
You can write the best article on the topic of your choice but without authority, Google will most likely not rank it.
Authority kind of snowballs when you have it. With authority, what you write gets ranked higher, which means more people see it — and some of those folks will link back to your content if the writing is good and informative — giving you more authority.
SEO is a long game
it can take a while to work
but when it does
it works for a long time
One of the best reasons why SEO is the best marketing strategy for wedding photographers is because of how long the content lives. Instagram posts and TikToks die in a few days while a well written blog post can rank and generate leads for years.
Book a consulting call
Here you can schedule an hour-long consult call. You can use this call to get a website audit, explore SEO and backlink opportunities, and get help building a content marketing strategy.
After the call, I will send you a recap of the call, highlighting the actions you should take.
Please shoot me a message at kari@karibjorn.com if you have any questions.
