Building a website is easy, getting found online is the hard part. If you’re struggling to get your photography website off the ground then it’s time to speak to an SEO agency. Skilled SEO Brisbane services design campaigns that boosts your website in Google’s eyes and ensures you’ve always got a steady stream of visitors. If you aren’t ready to invest in professional SEO services, there’s plenty you can do on your own. In this article, we’ll go over our top 6 SEO tips for photographers and how they can make an impact on your website’s performance.
Choose the Right Keywords
Every SEO campaign begins with keyword research. It doesn’t matter if you’re launching a photography blog, a portfolio or a large-scale stock image website, keywords are the key to SEO success. Keywords work because Google reads every word on your website and tries to match that text to the things people are searching for. If you can fill your website with the keywords and phrases your customers are actually using, you’ll show up higher in Google’s search results.
Choosing the right keywords can be a challenge. There are plenty of free tools like Google Trends and Keyword Planner that can help you research and choose the keywords that are most important to your clients. The secret here is to put yourself in your clients’ shoes and try to figure out how they search, which keywords they use, and what they’re looking for.
Optimize Your Images
One of the biggest SEO challenges facing photographers is images. If you’re reading this then chances are you’ve got a website that’s filled with high-quality pictures. That’s great in terms of offering value to your website visitors, but it can be a serious drag on your SEO results.
One of the most important parts of SEO is the user experience on your website, and the faster it loads the better. High-quality images have large file sizes that can dramatically slow down your load times and impact your SEO rankings. Images can be optimized by lowering the file size. That can be achieved by resizing your images to the actual size that appears on the page and by converting them to lightweight formats like webp. You might lose a little clarity, but the SEO results will be worth it.
Use Alt Tags
Google’s job is to provide search results that are highly relevant to the person performing the search. It does this using AI-powered robots that read through the content on your website and store that information in a central database. Except these robots don’t have eyes. Instead, they read through the HTML code that makes up your website, which means they can’t see or understand images.
That’s where alt tags come in. Whenever you upload an image to your website, you’ll have the chance to add an alt tag. An alt tag is a text description that will be displayed if the image itself fails to load, and it’s this text description that Google’s robots can read. Adding alt tags to your images can dramatically improve Google’s understanding of your website, increasing your search rankings and helping connect you with your target audience.
Work On Your Backlink Campaign
Google looks at dozens of different factors to figure out where to rank your website when someone performs a search. One of the most important factors are the links that come into your website (commonly referred to as backlinks) from external sources.
To keep it simple we can say that Google sees each backlink as a vote of confidence that the content on your website is valuable and relevant. There are a few ways you can increase the number of backlinks that point to your website, but the most common is called outreach link building. Outreach link building involves reaching out to other websites and asking them to place your link on their site. This is often done by writing an article or blog for their website that includes a link to your own. This process is time-consuming, but it can be a serious boost to your SEO campaign.
Create Valuable Content
Clients come to your website for a reason. Maybe they’re looking for photography services, maybe they’re after some stock imagery, or maybe they’re just looking for tips from a professional. Whatever the case, it’s your job to provide valuable content that helps your site visitors in some way.
Google’s algorithm has gotten very sophisticated and it’s now capable of discerning between low and high-value content. The higher value your content is, the better you’ll perform in search rankings. “Valuable content” looks a little different for every brand. In general though, content is valuable if it’s helpful, informational, and relevant to the person who’s browsing your site. You can boost the amount of valuable content on your website through strategies like blogging. Regular blogging allows you to target one or two main keywords at a time and provide information that’s relevant to your visitors.
Take Advantage of SEO Plugins
SEO is a big topic and there’s lots to learn. If you have the marketing budget then it’s probably worth investing in help from a professional SEO agency. If you don’t have the scale for that, you can still tackle some SEO work yourself. There are now thousands of guides online that can help you with things like optimizing your images and HTML code, improving the speed of your website, and producing valuable content.
SEO plugins are some of the best tools in your arsenal when it comes to making those optimizations. Content management systems like WordPress allow you to install third-party plugins that offer additional functionalities. SEO plugins such as Yoast are a great resource for photographers that want to improve their search rankings without paying for professional services. Installing the Yoast plugin in your website will give you helpful information about your website experience and offer tips on things you can do to improve your SEO results.
