Ultimate Guide: Best SEO for wedding photographers in 2023

SEO or search engine optimization is a process of optimizing your website content for search engines robots first to crawl your website and then, if your content matches the user's search intent, show your website on the first page.

Your search rankings position is the ultimate testament to getting your website set up the right way, from getting the right keywords in your site title to optimizing image alt text, all of which can impact how high you can rank.

Search engine robots are just machines that scan your website content by following a certain algorithm, and that process is called crawling. The algorithm was developed to, first of all, satisfy the user's search intent. The search engine is essentially a middleman between you and your potential clients.

Search engine robots look for specific things like keywords, title tags, site speed, quality, and originality of your content. The specific algorithm allows search engines to scan millions of web pages daily and deliver users the best answers to their search queries.

Your basic structure of the page looks like this:

One H1 Title Tag. Think about it as a topic of what your page is about as a whole.

If you strictly offer wedding photography services, your H1 should be centered around keywords of your niche.

Example: The Best Wedding Photographer in Tampa.

If you are a family photographer and wedding photography is only one of many services you provide, it's best to make separate pages for every service you provide.

Multiple H2: For every next block, you'll use H2 tags to give search engines a better understanding of what your website is about. H2s are essentially your sub-topics.

Wedding photography packages, services, reviews blocks -- all of that should be marked as your H2 tag.

H3s as needed. Any other headlines should be marked as H3s. It's your sub-subtopics. If you create a block on your webpage that includes subcategories for your H2, you'll use H3 tags.

A good example would be a photography services block. There, you can mention different services you offer and mark each as an H3.

Later in the blog post, we will talk in-depth about things you will need to work on in your search engine optimization process.

Search intent can be informational, navigational, commercial, or transactional. The primary goal of a Google search or any other search engine is to give us the information we are looking for, and search intent helps them understand our end goal here.

You might not understand how a bunch of words together give out the intent behind our search but take a look at the following keywords:

1. Destination weddings ideas
2. Wedding photographer near me

In the first keyword, we can speculate and say that the user is looking for pure ideas, whereas the second example clearly indicates that I am exploring the services around them.

Whenever you feel unsure about keywords and user intent, one of the quickest and most definite ways to check it is to Google your keywords. And that's exactly what we will do for two of our examples later in the blog post.

If you are looking to WIN your wedding photographer SEO strategy, follow my guide and rank on the first page within a few months.

Ahrefs is a one-stop shop for all things related to SEO. They offer keyword research tools, domain analysis, rank tracker, and content explorer, among other features.

It's best to take all the keywords you found with a basic search through Google and run numbers on them through Ahrefs.

If you want to see how to beat other wedding photographers and their websites with Ahrefs, let me know in the comments below, and I'll write a full review in the next blog post.

For today, we will take a look at keyword research tool and find out how to pick the right keywords to sell your wedding photography services online.

The first step I always do when looking for market-related keywords is checking if keywords in my industry have any local intent and search volume.

If you're starting your wedding photography business, I suggest dreaming big but staying realistic. In other words, you want to start locally and avoid competing with the big players on the market (but one day, tho!).

In order to do that, I will add my city at the end of the keyword and see what Ahrefs shows me.

We have a local search volume, and that's good. I suggest picking one main local keyword as your home page title.

Keyword difficulty is essentially a metric that reflects how hard it is to rank for it in the top 10. Typically, those are short keywords with a high monthly search volume that everyone wants to rank for.

Because everyone wants to rank for them, it can be extremely HARD to rank high. It's not impossible, but it's hard. Most photography websites that rank for those keywords have been in the business for a long time, have a bunch of backlinks, and have a high Domain Rate (DR).

If you're just starting off your business, find relevant keywords for wedding photographers with low keyword difficulty. Those are typically longer keywords with lower search volume, and they are the easiest to rank for.

Now that you're equipped with keyword ideas, we need to do our own Google search to see what's already ranking on the first page.

To get a good scope of the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors, you'll have to add the SEO Minion extension to your Chrome browser. SEO Minion will be an invaluable tool for your wedding photographer's SEO, as it can analyze technical SEO details of any web page

Let me show you.

Your main keyword should be included in the meta title and meta description and placed at the beginning of the page.

Next, pick a couple more related keywords and use them in a couple of your H2 title tags and text blocks.

Here's an important part: avoid using too many keywords on a single page. Keyword stuffing is not user-friendly and confusing to potential clients, and it's just as equally bad for your SEO efforts.

Search engines will identify that you're abusing keywords instead of providing a piece of valuable information to users. Remember, pages that are the closest to the user's intent end up in the first positions on the search engine results page.

Surfer SEO is a subscription-based software that helps to compose an incredible blog post or service page through NLP optimization.

NLP (Natural Language Processing) helps search engines puzzle together the complete message of your website. It analyzes text for relevant words to your industry to detect whether or not you can satisfy searcher's needs.

Surfer SEO is incredibly simple to use. Put in your desired keywords, location, and Surfer SEO will generate the report based on what's ALREADY ranking in the top 10. Now, it's time to check what your competitors are doing and figure out how to beat them.

Surfer SEO gives a breakdown of all the relevant keywords for wedding photography to use on the page in addition to word count, headings, paragraphs, and the number of images. Once you start creating content on Surfer, you'll notice that your content score rises.

The higher your score to the industry's top number, the higher your chances of landing the first page.

I've been using it for more than a year and can confidently say that if you pick the right keyword difficulty and optimize the page through Surfer SEO, you most likely will rank high.

Alt text of the images on your website helps search engines understand what your pictures are about. Make sure to add your SEO keywords into alt text to increase your chances of ranking.

If you are unsure about the words to use for image alt text, go to Surfer SEO and check the relevant words they provided for your page.

Optimize images.

Most photographers want to show off their photography style & skills, so they post all the high-resolution pictures on the main page. Before you know it, your website loading speed is ruining your entire SEO plan.

Don't be that photographer.

While showing your work from real weddings is the best social proof you can show off on your website (and reviews), make sure to optimize the weight of your photos. Avoid posting too many photos on the main page. All of that can affect your website's loading speed, and users will close the tab without giving your content a chance to load.

Instead, consider creating a blog post where you describe your work that wedding day and showcase your work there.

Additionally, re-name image files and put your wedding photography keywords instead of generic numbers and letters.

Once your page is up and running, use Google's PageSpeed Insights to check the speed of your website. For the best SEO results, shoot for a loading speed lower than 3 seconds.

Finally, get a Google Search Console account.

Whether you're just creating your first website or looking to improve your SEO, this is one of THE MOST important steps in your wedding photographer SEO plan.

If you just published your website, congrats! Now, you'll want to request indexing from Google. That's essentially you telling Google that you just put something out on the internet.

Once your page is indexed and no issues are detected, Google will include it in the target relevant search results.

If you just updated your own website, request indexing one more time.

If you just posted a blog post or another page, request indexing.

Let Google know that updates are happening to maximize your chances of ranking higher.

Finally, you'll have to convince Google and other search engines that you're an expert in your field. Remember, only the best answers to user's queries get a high ranking.

Unfortunately, one page won't give search engines a good impression of your expertise. Just like we, as consumers, want to see the proof before buying a product or service, Google looks for proof of a website's credibility before showing it to us.

Start feeding search engines with information on everything related to wedding day photography. That can be separate service pages and blog posts. Write about your work and educate your potential clients through information posts.

Let the internet know that in the world of wedding photography, you are a go-to expert.

We live in a very fast-paced world, and searchers make judgments very quickly. To attract clients as a wedding photographer, build a website that is easy to navigate. Make information accessible and easy to find and understand.

Make the text readable and place call-to-action buttons frequently to convert useless traffic into leads. Provide multiple ways of getting in touch with you. You aim to present a value proposition and get their contact information ASAP.

If you are unsure how to design & structure your website properly, consider hiring a web designer with SEO skills.