Photography SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is all about assisting your photography business to gain a high position in Google’s (and the remaining search engines) SERPs to ensure that potential customers can easily discover you. And why should I be thinking about rankings? The answer is very simple…
Based on Advanced Web Ranking, the top listing in Google’s search results gets 31% of the traffic, in comparison to 16% for the second position, and also the traffic only degrades from that point.
The websites listed on the first Internet search results page, create 92% of all traffic from the average search. When moving from the first page to two, the traffic came from 95%, and also by 78% and 58% of those following pages.
Like a photographer you have to attract completely new leads to your site and turn them into clients. Your best opportunity to do so is to make the most of FREE traffic through well-known search engines like Google, Yahoo! and also Bing. A concentrated SEO campaign can help your photography business:
SEO isn't a… nice to obtain strategy anymore, it’s essential. It’s probably the most cost-effective, future-proof and long-term ventures you may make. All (at least most of) your competition is doing SEO for his or her photography sites. You can’t overlook the fact that individuals are mainly searching on the internet and simply hope that your photography's status and word of mouth suggestions are fantastic enough to stay competitive. An average photographer using an SEO optimized site and well captioned/keyworded pictures may take business away from you. So, let’s obtain the ball rolling!
Domain Name - Allow it to be Brandable
Register an excellent domain name, in case you don’t have one already and expand it for several years ahead of time (this is regarded by Google as an extra signal of trustworthiness). Your domain name needs to be short, memorable and will include your brand name and/or appropriate keywords for the photography business.
Some really good suggestions are:
A not so good instance would be:
mike-best-wedding-photographer-india.co.in
The very small (if any) SEO assist you receive from this keyword stuffed along with hyphenated domain is not compared to the absolutely no branding value.
A single Domain/Website is sufficient
Many photographers (amongst other specialists) make multiple websites over which link each one of these websites to the main one wishing that this can help their SEO. By doing this, a person spread your resources (thus money) out directly into various websites that actually work a lot more like a “barrier” for the link equity to achieve your money website.
You will find cases though (i.e. when you wish to market a particular event) where you can create a separate website (microsite) for branding factors. But in most all cases, it’s better to concentrate on one website only and make investments your entire marketing budget generally there.
Content Marketing - Set up a Blog
You might or might not have heard the words, “Content is King“ but it’s something each and every photographer must take advantage of by making a blog that will help establish the photography brand and get more and/or better customers. Discuss your experience about the way you shot these lovely landscapes, the tale behind those wedding galleries, current event or even travel thoughts, new photo gear demonstrations etc. Read here How to Get More Traffic With Content Marketing
For simplicity and optimum SEO benefit put your blog within a subfolder (ie mikephotography.com/blog/) and not within a subdomain (ie blog.mikephotography.com) or perhaps worse under a completely different domain (i.e. mikeblog.com).
Setup Google Search Console & Analytics
These two FREE Google tools are actually powerful and detailed enough to maintain you covered offering some fantastic insights to your site’s SEO and overall health, that it’s not possible to ignore.
Google Search Console (ex Webmaster Tools) enables you to monitor and also manage your website’s position in Google search results. You might find invaluable info for just about any manual or even (some) of the algorithmic penalties might have received, find recommendations for title along with meta description tags, mobile usability challenges, quantity of pages indexed by Google, crawling problems, insights about what individuals are looking for when they’re reaching your website, post your sitemap etc.
Check here what Matt Cutts Discussed about Webmaster Tools
Google Analytics - If you don't take some advanced reports (Heatmaps, scroll-maps, mouse tracking and so on.) This analytics tool is essential and can’t be focused on SEO and not utilize it. You need to link it to Google Search Console, Adwords (if you run any ppc) and also allows the internal website search tracking (to find out what folks are searching for on your website) to take the most from it.
Check Video here
Keyword Research
In recent years and particularly following the arrival of the Hummingbird algorithm during the summer time of 2013, search engines “understood” that determining keywords alone wasn't enough, instead, they needed to know how the data were related, each in the same website and through the web. This is where the most crucial change within the search scenery occurs: a progression from your common keywords towards the increasingly important entities. Words turn out to be concepts and search engines develop into real learning machines.
That doesn't imply that the “classic” keyword research isn't needed any more. Locating the most lucrative keywords to support your SEO attempts continues to be important. I strongly suggest studying everything you need to learn about keyword research for the photography website.
Look at your Website’s “robots.txt” File
The “robots.txt” file is placed in the website’s root (ie mikephotography.com/robots.txt) and it is a tool enabling you to restrict search engines from crawling particular pages or even parts of the site. This file can be utilized to block all search engines crawling as the website is under development prior to being launched. Probably the most common errors made is forgetting to make the website crawl able again following the website is launched.
Motivate User Engagement On Social network
Although Google doesn’t directly issue social influence as well as interactions into the ranking algorithm, this is absolutely no reason not to consider social channels or decrease your social marketing attempts.
There's two kinds of social media buttons:
Don't use Flash & Components
Adobe Flash utilized to be “cool” not any longer. Apple’s lack of support regarding Flash on iOS devices and also the massive changes on HTML5 and CSS3 are two significant reasons to prevent Flash technology. Despite the fact that Google has made important improvements in Flash indexing you are able to attain better results by utilizing among the numerous quality, fully responsive as well as mobile friendly WordPress themes to make some really functional and beautiful websites.
Exactly the same is applicable to iFrame HTML tags. Google can technically crawl and also index content/links in iframes, however It’s best to keep from utilizing iframes on main pages that you would like to rank highly in SERP's, as the content in those frames doesn’t strengthen your SEO. Rather, fill high-priority pages along with useful, completely unique content and save iFrames for other pages.
Stay away from Anything “Annoying”
Time is money. Having said that, boring intros that can't be skipped whatsoever (or are hard to find how you can enter in the main website), intrusive ads, splash/intro pages, popup, flash animated graphics, slide shows etc are simply blocking the user from directly opening your main content. Aside from poor user experience you might obtain a Google penalty.
Mobile Friendliness
It was 21st April 2015 while Google released an algorithmic update to demote sites that aren't mobile friendly. Based on data from Smart Insights, non-mobile friendly pages have decreased around 5 places since Google’s Mobile Update. When you think about that 67% of clicks proceed to the first 3 results you can observe simply how much business have been hit. If you are once 1st, 2nd or 3rd without a mobile website you’re going to lose lots of clicks. Companies that were once on the first page might be pushed back to for 2nd and so forth.
Page Loading Speed Optimization
Based on numerous studies (and according to your personal experience) visitors leave websites in a lot higher numbers whenever pages take longer to load. With this shrinking attention spans, an extra delay in your web page loading may be worth 1000 dollars of business loss.
You should use Page Speed Insights from Google or Pingdom Website Speed Test. All are great tools that assess your website’s speed and offers recommendations for speeding up.
Stay away from Duplicate Content - Canonical URLs
Canonicalization is usually a well-known problem (along with a really bad one) particularly on e-commerce websites. That does mean that the photography website cannot have problems with canonicalization issues. Probably the most common issues are having the www and the non-www versions of the website showing on SERPs.
And if you believe www.mikephotography.com & mikephotography.com are the two sides of the exact same coin, well… they are! They are regarded as similar websites by Google and therefore are “penalized” for duplicated content.
The strategy for that is quite simple. You are able to:
Well Organized & Significant Permalinks
Often (by default in lots of platforms) the structure of the URIs will be really ugly and SEO unfriendly. Maybe you have seen anything such as this?
http://www.mikephotography.com/index.php?cat=201&mode=test&var=dnejhytr
I bet you've. If it occurs to your photography website you need to act immediately. Not only as these URLs luck any type of optimized content (keywords) but there aren't great from a user experience perspective.
A clear, well shown, SEO friendly and significant URL is much more inviting, gets noticed so it helps your business achieve greater rankings in search engines.
Don't Undervalue Local SEO
Ensure your brand name, physical address & telephone number (local landline ideally) (NAP) are included on each and every page of the website. Your own rankings in the search engines are set in part through the degree to which NAP details are consistent on several websites, including your own website as well as your Google Business listing. If inconsistencies are located, your rank will be much lower than when the data is replicated exactly in most locations.
Simply because ensuring complete NAP consistency is essential to enhancing your local SEO for photographers, think about asking your web marketing agency to handle this critical work for you. They are trained to locate and also standardize your information and translate it into the format that Google favors.
Build High Quality Links Back To Your Site
Obtaining links through quality, authoritative and also relevant to the photography business website is still one of the leading SEO factors. Link building (or getting) is maybe the toughest (yet most effective) facet of SEO as these links regarded as votes of confidence through Google making your site achieve greater rankings on SERPs.
