10 Basic SEO Tips for Wedding Photographers

The web contains hundreds, if not thousands, of services for photographers, professionals, experts and amateurs both, but not all can be easily found via Google. Having a website is a great way to showcase your work to potential clients, you can share weddings you have captured, tell them about yourself and the packages you offer.

Having an optimised website makes you and your website to be easily found. If you are a wedding photographer based in Manchester then you want brides looking for a wedding photographer in Manchester to find you.

SEO Tips for Wedding Photographers

If you want to optimize your wedding photography website and make it a success then follow these 10 steps.

1. Choose the Right Platform

This should be your starting point. Choose the correct platform for showing off your most excellent works of photography work and ensure it is optimized. This includes search engine friendly code, so no Flash websites! Mobile friendly ensuring it looks and works well on all devices, including tablets and phones, this now impacts search rankings. You also want to ensure your site loads quickly, speed is key.

WordPress is a great choice, it is free, there are thousands of free and premium themes to choose from, and easily customisable.

Whatever you choose or are using, ensure your pages load quickly, your website looks and works great on your mobile as well as desktop and it showcases your work they way you want.

2. Use the Right Plugins

Plugins are very much essential and allow you to edit important things such as page titles and descriptions. You can leave defaults in place and you can choose to let Bing or Google decide what your page descriptions would be. As a wedding photographer website owner you would rather be the one to decide, am I right? Edit your page and blog posts titles and descriptions.

Make sure your description grabs users attention when looking at results on Google, making it engaging and catchy so users want to click. Ensure your title stands out too, depending on what you are posting search on google to see what others have used as their title for ideas and see what stands out to you.

3. Choosing Your Photography Keywords

Keywords are your focus topics and words. They are the terms you want a given page to appear for in a search. They should be the most likely to be looked up, so when writing a blog post think about what users will be searching to find your post.

If you are a wedding photographer in New York, then make sure you focus on this on your homepage, in the title, description and your introduction. When someone searches ‘New York wedding photographer’ you want to be found.

4. Creating a Photographers Page Title

A page title usually consist of 60 characters and 2-second long pitch. In the page title you should mention the main page theme and where possible your brand. Ensure it grabs the searchers attention and also answers what they maybe looking for.

5. Pitching Your Page With a Page Description

A page (or meta) description is the text below the blue link in search results. This is your chance to give a 10 second pitch, it’s a little over a tweet length, so think like twitter, but do not shorten words. Simply put, elaborate on your page title. Talk about the contents of the page and what the main subject is. Ensure it relates to what the page is about and why they should click through and read.

6. Content is the King of Photography SEO

As much as a single photo is worth a thousand words, don’t just upload a photo on your website and leave it hanging. It it a good idea to always caption your photographs. Add a few words bearing in mind that you are the creator of the photograph, you best describe it. So add a paragraph or two of text and explain the photos throw in a few details and talk about the venue and location in general, making them easier to be found on the information superhighway.

Adding information about the venue and where the shot was taken allows you to be found for other search terms, such as weddings at XYZ venue, you may have shot a recent wedding there and show up in the results. They maybe getting a married at that venue and suddenly see your work and that you have shot there, and may ask you to capture their wedding day.

7. SEO-Friendly URL’s

Web addresses should be simple, straight to the point and easy to follow. You do not need a date or anything of the sort which adds to both the complexity and length of your urls. Think of urls as your page titles, if you can’t remember them, search engines won’t either.

8. Optimize your Photos

Given you are a wedding photographer who wants to be found, it may be a good idea to optimize your photos a little. You don’t want to upload a huge file onto your site for everyone to download so crunch it in Photoshop to just a few hundred kb or less. Also run WP Smush, a useful WordPress plugin that will further enhance the speed of photo loading. Don’t forget to include useful file name titles and alt tag descriptions, have your photos found on Google Image search, you have thousands of photos, so get the best out of them and promote yourself with them.

9. Need for Speed

Website loading times are important for not only users but also search engines. Improve WordPress load times for better user experience, ensuring your web page loads in lighting speed creates better user experiences and lead to higher conversion rates. W3 Total Cache is a great plugin for WordPress that will help improve your site loading time.

10. Internal Links

Link between pages on your site, if you write a blog post and talk about a wedding you shot that is on your site, then link to if, link to your about page, link to how people get in touch. Help users get around your site by including links in posts you upload to related page on your site.

Take action and ensure you have these steps covered, they are simple and quick things to implement, next time you write a blog post think about these little steps.

WordPress Plugins you should be Using

If your website is running off WordPress then ensure you have these plugins in use, you can download for free and are easy to set up.

• Yoast – SEO Plugin
• WP Smush – Keep image quality high, but file size low
• W3 Total Cache – Helps to speed up page load times