Now that you know the basics for marketing your photography business, we can move to more specific areas of marketing and learn the SEO basics for your photography business! You may be thinking:
“What is SEO and how does it work?”
“How do I use SEO for my photography business?”
or
“Is SEO really that important to growing my photography business?”
Today I’m going to teach you those SEO basics you need to know for your photography business, and answer those questions for you!
What is SEO?
Communication is everything in life. You communicate with your clients, family, friends, peers, and others. Without communication, life would not make sense! Interestingly, the necessity for communication actually extends into the search engine world, as well.
SEO is an acronym for search engine optimization. With there being billions of websites out there today, your job is to find a way to stand out from the crowd. SEO becomes your answer to that problem because it focuses on doing just that. SEO will help your site communicate clearly and show search engines that you have valuable content.
Your website actually communicates with search engines! Crazy, right? Your site tells what your page is about! In turn, the search engines take this information and determines if your site is what users want. The better that communication goes, the more likely your site will rank higher in the search results.
How To: SEO for Your Business
When you optimize your site by having quality content, your site ranking in the search results will get higher and higher. This works amazing for blog-based websites, too!
First off, BLOGGING. Blogging is one of the easiest ways to work on SEO. Blogs are a great way to help your site gain traction and can help you create content that can boost your site’s ranking!
And, I created a FREE BLOG CHEAT SHEET with 20 blog ideas for the busy photographer who wants to build their business but needs a little extra help!
Below are the pieces on your site that will communicate to search engines you have quality content:
Keywords: Keywords are the focus of your post, and typically what people would be typing into their search bar. For example, if someone wants to know the best locations for bridals in Utah, they may look up just that: “Best Locations for Bridals in Utah.” These words will become your keywords. You want to use phrases that people are looking up, otherwise your site might get overlooked.
Do your research on keywords specific to your business for your site. When you do this, you find out where users are. As a result, this allows you to be there! I have said before that marketers are all about figuring out where their target audience is. You will be able to reach that audience if you learn what they are wanting.
Another important thing to do is to make sure your site is keyword dense! You can do this by creating blogs/content on your site. Therefore, you are increasing the number of keywords on your site. So, the more keywords are found on your page, the better.
Text Length: To show that your site has enough content to be of worth to a viewer, it’s suggested that posts be over 300 words. However, make sure that any content you create is quality! It’ll not do your site good if you have bad content. You will be lower in the search results due to poor quality content.
Headers: Headers help breakdown what your post is about. It’s another way that search engines analyze your site. They look at these headers and get an overall feel for what the content is about. So, it’s important to have clear headings that relate back to your keywords.
Alt Text: With your photography business, you will want to be sure and share your photos! Alt Text will be the description of the photos you share your site. Put keywords into these descriptions, as it will help your photos rank higher in the image results. Just as you want your posts to show up on the search results, you want your photos to show up for image searches!
If you notice on the google results image above, Anna’s images also came up! This is because Anna used keywords in the alt text so they would be searchable. Below is an example of our alt text on WordPress containing keywords (highlighted):
External Links: These are links that lead you to other credible sites! Search engines see this as a great thing! Your site becomes more trustworthy. Share related content that you love! Just remember that the focus is to keep users on your site, so don’t have too many links that would lead them away from it.
Internal Links: These are hyperlinks that lead you to other portions of your site. This helps your audience to stay on your site longer, and make your site easier to navigate. You can use the links to lead them to other blogs you have written, your contact information page, related photoshoots, prices, etc.
SEO is Worth It!
So, if you want your site to be found, SEO is crucial! You’re literally increasing your chances of being seen when you optimize your site.
When you apply these SEO basics for your photography business, your site will rank higher, making your business visible! As a result, your business will grow and the effort will be so worth it!
Here’s another reminder to take advantage of the FREE BLOG CHEAT SHEET above with 20 blog ideas for photographers specifically.
Let us know how this has worked for you! Email us here!
