Do you want to know how you can organically grow your wedding photography business with SEO? In this article, we will discuss the best SEO strategies you can implement to help you drive more clicks, drive more traffic, gain more clients, increase revenue, and achieve long-term results with SEO for wedding photographers.
1. What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and How Does It Work?
SEO (or Search Engine Optimization) involves the process of increasing a website’s visibility on SERP to attract more organic traffic. It is essentially about improving the look and relevance of your wedding photography website for both search engines and users.
- Keyword Optimization: It’s essential to identify and use the right keywords to be able to target search queries of potential clients.
- On-Page Optimization: This would involve making direct changes to your website through headers, text, meta tags, using desired keywords, etc.
- Off-Page Optimization: The process of establishing a solid online presence. To do so, you would need to obtain high-quality backlinks from authoritative and reputable websites that support valuable content on your website. A part of off-page optimization also involves engaging on social media to establish your digital presence further.
- Technical SEO: Ensuring your wedding photography website’s key technical elements like mobile compatibility, structured data, site performance, and speed are running smoothly.
- Local SEO: This involves your wedding photography website being optimized for local search results, to ensure your website draws and attracts clients within the area.
- User Experience (UX): Your website should be user-friendly and it should invite website visitors and users to interact and explore your available services.
Want to start SEO for wedding photographers?
2. Why SEO for Wedding Photographers?
SEO is one of the most powerful marketing tools wedding photographers can utilize to find more wedding clients, which can guarantee long-term growth and success.
When SEO is executed well, it will give you improved rankings on SERP, you will gain more quality website traffic, and your wedding photography website will have boosted awareness and visibility, as well as heightened credibility and overall more revenue for your business.
By investing in SEO for wedding photographers, you will also be able to improve your digital marketing ROI, you will be able to decrease advertising costs in comparison to other marketing strategies, and you will be able to promote your wedding photography business every day, which will give you that competitive advantage over your local competitors.
3. How Will Google and Other Search Engines Rank Your Website?
Search engines like Google use complex algorithms to determine your rank on SERP, which will depend on the relevance and quality of your wedding photography website content.
What elements influence your rank on SERP?
- Relevance – Search engines use elements like keywords, content quality, and user engagement levels to asses how relevant the content of your wedding photography website is.
- Authority – Having authority on your website will greatly influence your ranking on SERP, which you can accomplish with reputable backlinks and through on-page and off-page optimization.
- Crawling and Indexing – This is when search engine web crawlers or spider bots scan and index the pages from your wedding photography website, to ensure that your web pages are accessible for search queries.
- Layout – Strategically optimizing elements of your web page layouts like headings, meta tags, and internal and external links can positively impact your ranking on SERP.
- Context – You want to ensure that the context of your wedding photography website is relevant to search queries.
- Classification – Your web page will be classified by search engines based on specific attributes and characteristics, such as keywords, user intent, and any other relevant page characteristics.
- Weighting – Consider how different elements for on-page and off-page SEO on your website will have different weights, which will depend on their importance in ranking.
Note: SEO algorithms are constantly evolving, so for your SEO efforts to not go in vain, it is critical to always stay updated with SEO best practices, and constantly adapt and apply these new strategies.
4. How do you get started with SEO for Wedding Photographers?
If you are new to SEO as a wedding photographer, you can start with the following steps when implementing SEO:
- Identify the keyword you want to focus on.
- Use the keyword on your homepage.
- Write where you conduct business and include 3-5 areas where potential wedding clients can receive your services.
- Set up your Google My Business
- Write and blog 3 of your favorite weddings
- Track your current ranking and SEO improvement.
Too busy running your wedding photography business to start an SEO campaign?
5. On-Page SEO Strategies
URL Slugs
The URL slug or website slug can be found at the end of the URL address. This serves as the identifier of the page and is a great place to include your target or primary keyword. Important to remember that your URL slug should also be user-friendly so avoid using weird characters.
Example:
- https://lulanstudio.com/los-angeles-wedding-photographer
- https://lulanstudio.com/blog/pasadena-princess-wedding
The mentioned examples use URL slugs that indicate the content of the webpage. For example, the “los-angeles-wedding-photographer” URL slug provides a clear indication to the user that this is a wedding photographer based in LA. It also suggests that they will find all the information they need on this specific page, about the wedding photographer and the services provided.
The second example has a more detailed URL slug of “blog/pasadena-princess-wedding”. It uses the target keyword of the blog post in the URL slug and provides a concise description indicating that the page is about a princess-themed wedding. A user or potential wedding photography client is more likely to click on this link over a URL slug that uses weird characters, has irrelevant keywords, or uses a chain of numbers.
How to Optimise URL Slugs for SEO?
- Describe the content of the page using your target keywords.
- Make it user-friendly.
- It should be easy to read.
- Make it concise – Consider using less than 5 words in your URL slug.
- Separate the words to improve readability.
- Use hyphens instead of underscores.
- Avoid case-sensitive issues by using lowercase characters.
- Don’t use weird or special characters like emojis.
- Avoid using numbers that may need changing or updating in the future (e.g. Publishing date)
Title Tags and Meta Descriptions
One of the first things search engines will see about your website is its title and meta description, hence why these components should be optimized for effective on-page SEO.
Both title tags and meta descriptions are HTML tags. The difference is that meta descriptions are usually a short summary of the webpage with the main purpose of convincing the user to click on the link, whereas title tags set the webpage’s title, and can be seen in browser tabs and search results.
How to optimize meta descriptions?
- Keep your meta descriptions under 160 characters
- Include your primary or target keyword
- Compose a brief and interesting meta description that highlights the main points of the webpage.
- Include a call to action to encourage click-throughs.
How to optimize title tags?
- Keep your title tag under 60 characters
- Use descriptive and keyword-rich title tags for each page
- Avoid keyword stuffing
- It should accurately describe the web page
5.1 Keyword Research
Conducting keyword research will greatly impact your SEO efforts, and how potential wedding photography clients find your business. This is because keyword research will help you better understand the top key terms being used by users in search queries, their search intent, and more importantly, which keywords are high intent.
Before selecting your keywords, there are a few factors you want to consider that will help your keyword research for SEO for wedding photographers:
- Monthly Search Volume Data – How popular or in demand is the specific keyword?
- Keyword Difficulty Data – Is it difficult for the keyword to rank high organically?
- Relevance to your business data – Is the keyword relevant to your wedding photography business?
- Search Intent – These can be informational, navigational, transactional, or commercial.
5.2 Understand Search Intent
Understanding search intent can help you select the target keywords to help your SEO for wedding photographers effectively help your website rank on search engine results pages.
- Informational Intent: This is usually when someone needs more information regarding a topic, product, or service. Informational intent search queries can include terms like “why”, “how”, “tips” and “solution”.
- Navigational Intent: This is when someone already knows what they are looking for on search queries, such as “wedding photographer for civil ceremony”.
- Commercial Intent: This is when someone already intends to make a purchase, after obtaining enough research and information about a product or service. These types of search queries can also involve research for testimonials or feedback, such as “best wedding photographer in Los Angeles x reviews”.
- Transactional Intent: This is when someone is resolved to make a purchase, or avail of a service or product, for instance, “wedding photographer for vintage style photography” or “landscape style wedding photographer in Los Angeles”.
Do you need help choosing the right keywords for your SEO for wedding photographers campaign?
5.3. Keyword Tools for Keyword Research
Now that you understand the importance of keyword research and the different types of search intent, here are some tools we recommend utilizing as part of your keyword research to help make your SEO for wedding photographers more effective.
Google Autocomplete Predictions – This feature within Google’s search engine will allow you to see real and trending search predictions based on your geographical location through their automated system.
Keyword Planner – This is a free tool on Google that can help you discover new keywords by entering terms like “wedding photographer Los Angeles” or “wedding photographer near me”. Using this tool will also provide you with data insights for each keyword, such as its high-intent, top-of-page bids, competition level, and more.
Keywords Everywhere – This is a browser extension you can use that doesn’t require you to sign up or log in. Keywords Everywhere also offers a “freemium” plan, which can give you enough data on related keywords, long-tail keywords, CPC, relevant keywords, and volume searches.
Here is an example of the search results for “wedding photographers Los Angeles” using keywords everywhere:
Related Keywords
Topical Keywords
People Also Search For
Whatsmyserp – This is another browser extension that you can use to help with your keyword research. It’s a free browser extension that can also provide you with data insight on keywords, and related keywords. An advantage of whatsmyserp is that it also offers a free search engine results page checker tool.
Here is an example of whatsmyserp results for the search query: “wedding photographers in Los Angeles”.
Related Keywords
People Also Search For
Google Related Searches – This is another feature on Google that can help with your keyword research, and it uses Google’s algorithm to generate SEO-related searches. This will further help you understand the search intent of your potential clients.
Internal and External Links
Internal Links
Internal links are relevant pages in your wedding photography website that should be useful for the website visitor and should provide additional content of useful and relevant information.
Adding internal links can help improve your website’s SEO because it will help search engines find new relevant content, and boost the authority and relevance of your web pages using specific keywords.
External Links
External links act as hyperlinks or outbound links that point the user to a different domain. These need to be relevant because they help search engines better understand the content of your web pages, and they can help boost your website’s reputation and ranking.
Best practices for internal links:
- Use plenty of internal links throughout your wedding photography website.
- Create many internal pages and write quality content.
- Only link relevant and high authority pages.
- Use anchor texts or phrases.
- Include at least 3 to 5 internal links per web page.
Best practices for external links:
- Make sure each external link opens to a new tab
- Only use external links that are relevant, and are from credible and professional sources.
- Use keyword anchor texts
- Don’t link your competitor’s website
Alt Tags
Alt tags, also known as alternative text or alt attributes, should be used to describe the appearance or function of an image that is used on a page. These should add additional context to the images being used on blog posts, and help screen reading tools to describe the images to visually impaired readers.
Including alt tags ensures that users and bots alike can understand the content of your website, which also have an impact on how your website ranks on SERP.
Best practices for alt tags:
- Describe the image being used as specifically as possible
- It should be relevant to the topic of the blog post
- Keep it under 125 characters
- Avoid keyword stuffing
- Include key terms and keywords
- Avoid including “image of” or “picture of” in your alt text.
Updating Old Blog Posts
If your wedding photography website has many old blog posts, you will need to update all of these to support your SEO efforts.
In addition, updating old blog posts will help your wedding photography website rank high on relevant searches, whilst maximizing the reach and engagement of your posts. It is also less time-consuming compared to writing new posts.
How to update blog posts?
- Update any outdated features or trends
- Check all internal and external links on your blog posts aren’t “dead” or “broken”.
- Use other infographics to promote your blog, for instance, infographics.
- Share your blog posts on social media platforms like Pinterest
Need assistance implementing on-page SEO for wedding photographers?
8. Off-Page SEO Strategies
Guest posting
Guest posting, also known as guest blogging, is a very effective strategy for link-building, to help your wedding photography business get in front of a different audience.
In addition, guest posting can also attract traffic back to your website, high-quality backlinks, and improved domain authority which all contribute towards signaling search engines that you are an industry expert.
To find guest posting opportunities, try using keywords like “write for us+wedding photographer”.
Best practices when writing guest posts:
- Follow their style of writing.
- Strictly meet the guest posting guidelines.
- Add internal links from their website.
- Proofread for grammar and spelling mistakes before publishing the guest post.
- Work on your author’s biography.
Content Marketing
Content marketing is an important off-page SEO tactic that has been referred to as the basis of all sorts of digital marketing campaigns. For content marketing to be effective, it needs to be enjoyable yet provide a solution for your target audience to read, for instance, a blog post on “wedding photography for photojournalistic style”.
Content marketing is also considered a marketing strategy that focuses on attracting and retaining your target audience, with the main purpose of driving profitable customer action.
There are many ways you can distribute your content to boost off-page signals, like the following options:
- PR
- Social Media
- Influencer Marketing
- Podcasts
- Content Syndication
- Forums
- And More.
Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is another very effective off-page optimization strategy to improve your ranking on SERP. Engaging with your target audience on social media platforms (like Facebook or LinkedIn) can help increase organic clicks, generate backlinks, establish authority, drive on-site engagement, gather insights from social media metrics, and improve your local ranking.
Before implementing social media marketing, there are a few elements to consider to ensure your social media marketing strategy is effective:
- You will need to identify what your target goals are.
- You will need to plan your content for the month on a regular basis.
- Create visual and engaging posts.
- Consistency in regular posting.
- Use of a content calendar tool to help you stay organized and on track.
- Only publish high-quality, authentic, and relevant posts.
- Partner up with influencers to promote your wedding photography business.
- Share your customer feedback (it can help convince new potential customers to trust your brand).
Video Marketing
On average, 100 million internet users watch videos online daily, and the total time spent watching videos continues to increase yearly, hence why you should consider video marketing as part of your SEO for wedding photographers campaign.
Implementing video marketing as part of SEO for wedding photographers can effectively help your wedding photography business promote your brand, products, and services, which in turn can help you increase your reach, and grab the attention of your target audience and potential new clients.
It’s important to understand that video marketing can be time-consuming if you do it yourself and you aren’t fully versed and equipped for video creation. This is because video creation will involve preproduction, production shoots, and post-production, hence why you will need to research and plan before running a video marketing campaign.
Here are some of the best practices you can apply when running a video marketing campaign:
- Plan your content production.
- Set specific goals for your video marketing.
- Decide which platforms you will use.
- Keep up with current trends for promotional videos.
- Research which keywords to use.
- Schedule and promote videos.
- Understand and analyze KPI metrics.
Join Forums
Joining forums is another off-page optimization strategy that you can implement to support your SEO efforts. Some online forum discussions you could participate in can be found on Reddit, Quora, and LinkedIn groups.
By participating in online discussions and linking relevant blog posts, you will be able to establish your expertise in the industry, which will also help build authority, resulting in more backlinks, site traffic, and more clients.
During online discussions, there are a few factors you want to consider for instance:
- Follow the platform policies
- Only add links from your website that are relevant to the topic being discussed
- Don’t spam the comment section just to get more links. This could make you lose credibility and ruin your reputation
- Don’t add links in every single answer you provide
- Provide accurate answers
Not sure how to start implementing off-page SEO strategies in your campaign?
9. Technical SEO Strategies
Apart from on-page SEO and off-page SEO, you will also need to focus on technical SEO strategies to ensure there are no technical issues or errors that may prevent your site from ranking on search engine results pages.
Optimize your website
One of the first steps to optimize your technical SEO is ensuring that search engines can effectively crawl it. Crawling is when search engine bots (or website crawlers) systematically discover content on a site, such as images, links, videos, text, and other accessible file types. If you want your pages to show up in search results, you need to make sure that they are accessible to search engines since content is exclusively found through links.
Indexing a page is the next step after crawling, and it’s the process of storing, analyzing, and organizing the content and connections between the pages on your website. Without indexing your URL, you risk your wedding photography website not being found by potential clients looking for your products and services.
Website Security
Website security is one of the many ways you can earn the trust of your clients. This is because an unsecured website can put a client’s personal information at risk of getting stolen by hackers, and as a result can drive potential clients away. When your website is not secure and lacks a “connection is secure” sign, it also implies to the website visitor that you are not using an encrypted connection, which will give your wedding photography website and business a negative reputation.
Website security is one of Google’s ranking signals, so make sure that your website uses an encrypted connection to avoid ranking lower on the SERP.
- Use HTTPS
HTTPS is a secure version of HTTP, and using HTTPS will help you protect sensitive user information from being compromised, for instance, passwords, credit card details, and other sensitive information.
How do you ensure website security?
- Only use a reliable hosting provider
- Install an SSL certificate (This will authenticate the identity of your wedding photography website and it will also establish a secure connection when clients access it)
- Keep your website updated and make sure it is the latest version
- Schedule regular website backups
Single Website Version
When optimizing website security, it is also essential that there is only one accessible version of your wedding photography site, to avoid duplicate errors and to support your technical efforts for SEO for wedding photographers
Let’s have a look at the example below:
- Example A: https://weddingphotographyla.com
- Example B: https://www.weddingphotogrpahyla.com
The examples below show different versions of a single website when in fact both would be considered as two different versions on SERP. If your website is currently experiencing this, it can confuse search engines on which version to rank, which in turn can reduce the effectiveness of your backlinking profile, and can confuse search engines on which version to rank on SERP.
Improve your page speed
Page speed can greatly affect a user’s experience on your wedding photography website if it loads too slowly, especially if you use large images and graphics.
According to Facebook, 40 percent of users or website visitors will abandon a website or webpage if it takes longer than 3 seconds, hence why optimizing your page speed to seamlessly load fast enough should be part of your technical SEO strategies.
You will also want to optimize your website’s speed for both desktop and mobile devices since many people use mobile devices to browse the internet. Improving your page speed will help a website visitor avoid a negative experience, and overall support your SEO efforts for SEO for wedding photographers.
Here are some of the best practices for page speed optimization:
- Compress all images and videos on your page.
- Minimize the use of JavaScript files.
- Use a CDN or content distribution network to allow requested files to travel less by using the nearest server.
Ensure your website is mobile-friendly
As previously mentioned, many users use their smartphones or mobile devices to browse the internet, so you want to ensure that your wedding photography site is accessible on all devices, such as desktop, mobile, and tablets. You also want to ensure that your website is mobile-friendly since Google uses mobile-first indexing.
You can check if your wedding photography
To check if your catering website is mobile-friendly and compatible with different mobile devices in the market, you can use free tools like Mobile-Friendly Test on Google Search Console.
Find and fix duplicate content issues
Fixing any duplicate content is essential to ensure that your wedding photography website doesn’t experience backlink dilution and wasted crawling spending. Failure to do so will cause problems for your site and negatively affect your SEO efforts.
To fix any duplicate content you might have on your wedding photography website, you can use tools like Semrush, which can help you identify your rank on search engines, which pages on your website are ranking for the same keyword, and it can also provide you with real-time performance reports.
Find and fix broken links
Finding and fixing broken links is also another technical SEO strategy you need to implement to support your SEO for wedding photographers efforts. When your website contains broken links (basically no longer accessible), it can negatively affect the user experience and this can be due to making changes to the URL of a page, a page being removed completely from the website, or forgetting to redirect old URLs to new ones.
A tool you can use to help find and fix broken links on your website is Google Search Console. This is also a useful tool since it can help you keep track of your site’s rank and performance on SERP. Another tool you can use to check for broken links is Ahrefs’ Broken Link Checker.
Find and fix keyword cannibalization
Finding and fixing keyword cannibalization is critical to prevent harming your SEO for wedding photographers campaign. This can happen when too many pages on your website have been optimized using the same target keyword, causing your pages to rank poorly on SERP.
How do you fix keyword cannibalization?
- Track both the ranking and performance of target keywords.
- Schedule regular content audits.
- Use a strategy for your targeted keywords.
- Use tools like spreadsheets to organize all URLs and target keywords.
- Reduce the number of times a keyword is used. (Remove the keyword completely if this is not effective).
- Continuously update and improve the content quality of your pages.
- Check if any pages cannibalize each other and why.
Does technical SEO sound too difficult?
10. Conclusion
Investing in SEO for wedding photographers is one of the most effective strategies that can help your wedding photography business organically rank high on search engine results pages.
It will help you establish a stronger online presence to increase your brand visibility, which will help lead potential clients to find your business when they search for “wedding photographers” on search engines, increase your ROI, and gain a competitive advantage over your local competitors. Once your SEO for wedding photographers campaign gains traction, you can expect your return on investment to grow exponentially!
We at YoYoFuMedia have successfully run over 1,000 SEO campaigns for our clients, which has helped them achieve their advertising goals and grow their business. If you want to achieve faster results from your marketing campaign, you can consider Google Ads for Wedding Photographers instead of SEO. To learn more about SEO or Google Ads, visit YoYoFuMedia’s page.
Too occupied with your wedding photography business to run an SEO marketing campaign? You can Schedule A Free Consultation with our friendly team of professionals and get started with your SEO for wedding photographers today!
