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For many wedding photographers, search engine optimization (SEO) is still technical jargon that they know works but are still confused about how. It is necessary, beneficial, yet something most might not be sure about venturing into or tried but couldn’t make it work to yield results. How you do SEO can either make the entire process very easy or equally complex. So it is important to get the basics right. If you are one of those who want SEO to work magic for your website but couldn’t figure out where to get started – this blog is for you. Here, we have shared useful SEO tips for wedding photographers to build a better web presence for a photography business.

What is SEO-Rich Content?

Google makes many algorithm changes every year, both known and unknown. This overall changes how the algorithm assesses web content for ranking. In simpler words, the definition of SEO-rich content changes quite frequently. Where once a blog post with overuse of keywords would have been ranked first on the search engines, now, it will most likely be penalized for keyword stuffing. So web content that abides by most of the current search engine algorithm factors and ranks well on the search engine result page (SERP) can be considered SEO-rich content.

Advanced SEO Tips For Wedding Photographers

SEO can help you increase your online reach – eventually, helping you turn web users who are actively searching for your services into customers. Given below are some of the SEO tips for wedding photographers to increase organic traffic.

1. Brainstorm New Keywords

Pitching the right keywords is a game-changer. A keyword is the backbone of any web page content, and so if you are wondering where to start, this should be your first step. It is important to invest time in brainstorming and researching the keywords you want to rank for in SERP. When analyzing which ones to choose – keyword difficulty, search volume, user intent, and competition – play a crucial role. There are several online tools such as Ubersuggest, Moz, etc., which you can use to compare these factors. Note that optimizing your content for random words is optimizing in the wrong direction.

2. Optimize Your Homepage

In the course of optimizing blog posts, many people forget that optimizing your homepage is just as important. So design and structure your homepage keeping in mind the brand voice, purpose, and most importantly, the target audience. Not only should your homepage have high-quality content but also content that appeals to your target audience. Something that tells them about your business and also answers their questions. One of the most useful SEO tips for wedding photographers is to add your most important keywords – which could also be a service you offer – as a category in the navigation menu. For instance, as a wedding photographer, you can add weddings or engagements as options.

3. Add Keywords in the Title, Subheadings, & URL

Adding your focus keyword/keyphrase in the meta title, meta desc, subheads, and the URL still accounts as a good SEO practice. As your keyword is what your content mostly talks about, it makes sense to add them in these places. And as you do that, it also boosts your SEO score. However, while adding keywords in your title and URL adds value, be careful not to overdo it.

4. Fix On-Page SEO

Fixing the on-page SEO of every new and previously published blog is another thing that improves the overall SEO score of your website. There are several elements that are a part of on-page SEO. Some of them are keyword density, keyword distribution, text length, interlinking, meta title, and meta description length. The easiest way to keep track of them if you are using WordPress is to install the Yoast plugin. This plugin will help you monitor most of these factors. However, like any automated quality check tool, we suggest using it as additional help and not as a fix-it-all.

Suggested Read: A Roadmap To Market Your Wedding Photography Business

5. Add LSI Keywords

There was a time when keywords used to be the only metric for web crawlers to understand the overall context of the content on any web page. So if you had a blog targeted for the keyword ‘elopement photography’ and had mentioned it evenly, without stuffing, throughout the article, search engines assumed that the page talks about elopement photography. Skip to now, search engines are smarter and have found better ways to assess the overall purpose and context of the content. They do so by searching for latent semantic indexing (LSI) keywords on your page.

LSI keywords are words/phrases that are semantically related to your focus keyword/keyphrase. Note that they are not synonyms but words that often go together. For example, for the keyword, ‘wedding photography’, some of the phrases that work as LSI keywords – as listed by KeySearch – are wedding photography tips, wedding photography packages, wedding photography styles, wedding photography shot list, etc. Some of the online tools you can use to find relevant LSI keywords are LSIGraph, KeySearch, and Google automated search.

6. Add Alt Attributes

When it comes to search engines, the images don’t always speak for themselves. And that’s why we need image alt attributes. Also known as alt tag, alternate text, alt text, or alt description, an alt attribute is the description of an image, and it appears on the screen if the image fails to load. It also provides an image description for visually impaired users who use screen readers to go through a web page. By adding alt text, you optimize your images for search engine crawlers, helping them index an image properly. Check if you can incorporate your keyword/keyphrase in the image alt text. However, note that search engines may penalize if you over-optimize your images, so only add keywords organically.

7. Fix Broken Links

A good link with a high SEO score can pass on the link juice to your web page. But, similarly, a broken or spammy link can hamper your SEO score. Google and other search engines encourage adding relevant internal and external links to your page for a better user experience. Now, imagine clicking on an anchor text stating “click here to avail this discount” and being led to a page displaying a 404 error. A bummer, right? So it is important to check your website every once in a while for broken links and fix them. Whether you placed a faulty link in the first place or the page that was once live is now taken down – a link can appear broken for several reasons. Here’s how you can fix a broken link.

8. Improve Your Page Load Speed

Most wedding photographers want to build a website that gives an aesthetically pleasing experience. But to be able to offer that experience, your site speed must work accordingly. Imagine a web user visiting your site but having to wait long for the page to load entirely – most users will abandon the site after a few seconds. In today’s world, where nobody has the time to wait around, website loading speed is key. It is also a primary ranking factor. So if you are thinking about how fast is fast enough for a good user experience, Semrush suggests 2-3 seconds is the threshold for most sites. You can optimize your images for the web page by resizing them.

9. Make Your Site Mobile-Friendly

We almost always have smartphones available with us. And so it’s the go-to device for most people when it comes to browsing the internet – making it necessary to also make your website mobile-friendly. This is one of the SEO tips for wedding photographers to help mobile users keep searching and not leave. Google Webmaster Tools is a good place to check whether your site is mobile-friendly or not.

10. Practice Link Building

“Google only loves you when everyone else loves you first” — this quote is from Wendy Piersall, a successful entrepreneur who emphasizes the importance of having a strong backlink profile. Backlinks not only help in building a high domain authority score but also help you rank better.

Link building is important because it increases the credibility of your website and passes trust. There are many ways to practice link building. Some of them include building relationships, writing guest posts, giving testimonials, and launching giveaway campaigns.

Suggested Read: Top 5 Wedding Collaboration Tips For Photographers

11. Track Rankings

SEO doesn’t end with just optimizing and getting your page indexed. It also requires reflection, making it one of the most important SEO tips for wedding photographers to track results – more specifically, rankings – to analyze and build tactics and strategies of how you want to approach it further. This will give you a clearer picture of what might work or what needs improvement.

Focus On User Experience

When it comes to online engagement – user experience is everything. Your website is either engaging or not – there is no middle ground. To make your viewers stay and explore, it is crucial to be on the former side. If good SEO brings more traffic to your website, a good user experience is what keeps them there. It is also essential to cut down bounce rates. So invest time in thinking about how you would want to see a web page from a user’s perspective.

Further Read: Digital Advertising For Wedding Photography – Is It Worth It?

Here at ShootDotEdit, we love sharing resourceful tips that help you grow your wedding photography business. We also help lessen your post-production workload by taking editing off your plate. Check out our price plans here.