The Photographer's Guide to SEO

Discover how to get your photography website high in Google’s rankings

- Tom May​​​​​​​

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is both an art and science. It’s about ensuring that when people search for a relevant term online (for example, ‘portrait photographer Leigh-on-sea’), your website appears high up the results page in Google, Bing and other search engines, in a way that grabs attention and encourages click-throughs. And so for a lot of photographers, SEO is a key element in attracting new customers. “Nothing will ever beat building great relationships and gaining referrals through those and your existing clients,” says wedding photographer Mike Garrard. “But beyond that, SEO is the next most important thing for my business.”

Unfortunately, with everyone trying to do the same thing, and Google being pretty secretive about the algorithm they use to rank web pages, that’s by no means easy. So what do you need to know?

We’ll start by pointing out what SEO is not, or at least not any more. There once was a time when SEO was a dark art involving tricks like ‘keyword stuffing’, which meant visitors were often greeted by the mindless repetition of a phrase like ‘wedding photographer’ throughout a site.

Thankfully, in 2018, Google and other search engines are more sophisticated, and so nowadays the most fundamental building block of SEO is, broadly speaking, to create regular, high quality content that people will love.

“Strong, quality content that keeps visitors engaged, especially content informed by an up-to date keyword strategy, will help you move higher in search results,” says Eric Johnson, director of experience design at Chicago-based creative agency 50,000feet. “Think of the winning formula as Visitor Time Spent + High-Quality Content + Keywords.”