SEO For Photographers Made Simple
Do you have an overall SEO strategy or plan for your photography website?
Most of the photographers I talk to don’t have a plan to guide their SEO efforts, and they end up taking it one page or blog post at a time, as and when they create the content.
Why is this?
There are at least a couple of reasons:
First, it can be quite difficult (not to mention tedious) to sit down and decide in advance which keywords you’re going to optimize for and then allocate specific content to those keywords.
We may as well face it, planning and strategizing are just not fun most of the time.
Secondly, when we think about SEO, it’s tempting to focus mostly on the way it applies to specific website pages.
This is only natural, given that Google returns links to individual pages in the search results, not entire websites.
Then we have the spontaneous nature of things like blog post creation.
You do a wedding or a portrait session on a Saturday and publish a blog post about it on Monday, so it’s not exactly premeditated months in advance.
This typically leads to SEO being done on a page-by-page basis without taking the overall SEO strategy into consideration to see where the page or post fits into the bigger picture.
If you fall into this trap, it could be a huge mistake, and it might even be enough to undermine most of your optimization efforts.
Here are 5 simple ways to make sure that doesn’t happen…
#1: Understand Your Search Demand Distribution Curve
Before you can design a solid SEO plan, you first need to understand the search demand distribution curve as it applies to your business.
This is extremely important and while the phrase “search demand distribution curve” might sound geeky and technical, but it’s actually pretty simple.
Basically, each broad type of business has its own set of keywords that people would use in a Google search.
My set of keywords for the Prime Focus Lab, for example, is large and spread out. It covers a wide variety of topics with a global reach.
For a locally-based photography business, such as yourself, the curve is quite different.
Most of the keyword demand is concentrated into a small pool of keyword phrases, which drops off quickly and is followed by a narrow long tail of keywords related to fringe topics, such as photography locations and venues etc.
Rather than go into all the details, there’s a great explanation in this video from SEO expert Rand Fishkin at Moz:
As you can see from the video, your SEO strategy is going to be somewhat different to a business with a broader topic and wider reach.
#2: Avoid These Basic Optimization Mistakes
One of the biggest mistakes I see photographers making with SEO is to optimize for the same keywords on multiple pages in the hope that Google will see their website as being important for those keywords.
For example, if you’re a Memphis wedding photographer, this would be like putting the phrase “Memphis wedding photographer” on every page of the website.
Sadly, this approach doesn’t work as well as you might think, for several reasons:
- Optimization means you’re trying to tell Google what the main topic is of a page or post. Adding keywords to a page not directly related to the main topic is largely a waste of effort.
- Any given page or post should only be optimized for one major keyword phrase. Yes, your pages will show up for different keywords based on the content, but there will usually be one single focus topic.
- When you try to optimize multiple pages for the same keyword, you’re essentially putting those pages into direct competition with each other for prominence in the search results. Instead of one page winning out, the SEO value of all the affected pages is diluted.
#3: Have A Keyword Optimization Plan
The first thing to do once you’ve identified the keyword phrases you want to target is to divide those keywords into several groups:
- The primary keywords with the most search volume. For example, “{Your city} wedding photographer” or “{Your city} professional photographer”.
- Keywords that represent certain categories of topics. For example, “{Your city} wedding venues”.
- Keywords that focus on specific subjects. For example, “{Your city} botanic gardens weddings”.
It helps to assemble these into a spreadsheet so you can see the different groups of keywords at a glance.
By the way, you’re not likely to see a large monthly search volume from the Google keyword planner for most of these, but don’t let that put you off as those numbers are not too accurate anyway, and are more of a guide than anything else.
#4: Assign Content To Your Keywords
Next, you’ll want to assign specific types of content to these keywords.
The easiest way to do this, and a great way to avoid the problem of keyword cannibalization I mentioned earlier (multiple pages competing for the same keywords) is something like this:
- Home page: Focus on your broadest keyword. For example, “{Your city} professional photographer”.
- Service pages: Your service pages (i.e. those explaining what you do) will likely be split across several pages for each type of service. The main page for each one should target the most appropriate keyword for the specific service being discussed.
- Blog post categories: These are like the sections of a library and where you’ll assign keywords that have many possible sub-keywords included within them. For example, “{Your city} wedding venues” is a category containing many possible venues and locations within it.
- Blog post tags: These are the sub-topics within your categories. For example, “{Your city} botanic gardens wedding” is a specific topic you could mention in blog posts.
A simplified website SEO map you can follow to avoid making many of the common SEO mistakes, such as keyword cannibalization.
Some things to bear in mind:
Do make sure you don’t repeat the same keyword across categories and tags.
If you use WordPress for your blog, you have the option of adding archive headings and detailed descriptions for your category and tag archives, so make the best use of that as it will strengthen the SEO value of those archive pages.
If you use the Yoast SEO plugin, or your theme supports it, be sure to use the breadcrumbs feature on your posts and/or pages. This is a simple line at the top of the page which shows where that page fits into the website structure, and is important for both users and SEO.
#5: Don’t Bother Doing SEO On Anything Else!
Finally, having assigned your keywords to specific pieces of content, such as blog posts and other pages, what should you do with the rest of your content?
Unless it talks specifically about a specific topic you could target with a useful keyword, do nothing.
Yep, you don’t need to bother with SEO on such things as blog posts where you talk about a sneak peek from a session or a wedding.
There’s no need to worry about SEO on your terms of service pages, policies, contact page or anything else that wouldn’t make an effective landing page from the search engines.
By all means link from those posts and pages to other pieces of content where you did do some SEO, but there’s no need to perform SEO on every single post or page on your website.