SEO for photographers

Photography has a specific SEO problem that most industries do not: the thing you sell is the thing that makes your site slow, and search engines cannot see any of it.

A page of beautiful images is, to a crawler, a page with almost no content. Solve that and you are most of the way there. This guide goes through the rest in the order it pays off: the words to target, your images, your pages, your local presence, and the links that tell Google other people trust you.

Find the words people actually search for

Before you change anything, write down what a client would type to find you. It is almost never "photographer". It is a kind of photography plus a place: "elopement photographer Asheville", "newborn photos Columbia SC", "headshots downtown Charlotte".

Three quick ways to build that list:

• Start typing into Google and read the suggestions. "Wedding photographer in" followed by your city shows you the phrases people really use, including the neighborhoods and nearby towns.
• Read the "People also ask" box for your main phrase. Those questions ("how much does a wedding photographer cost in Denver?") make good blog posts and good FAQ answers.
• Ask your last ten clients what they searched before they found you. Their exact words are worth more than any tool.

Pick one main phrase per page. Your homepage gets your main service and city. Each other page gets its own. Two pages chasing the same phrase compete with each other, and usually neither wins.

Your images are the problem and the opportunity

Three things matter, in this order.

File size. A gallery of camera-original JPEGs will take several seconds to load on a phone, and most people will not wait. You do not need to think about this manually on a modern platform: Swiftrics converts uploads to modern formats and serves a size matched to the device, so a phone downloads a small file and a desktop the large one. Upload the best JPEG you have, up to 50 MB, and leave it alone.

File names. IMG_4471.jpg tells a search engine nothing. hollis-barn-wedding-ceremony.jpg tells it what the picture is of. On Swiftrics, the resized copies your site publishes take their file names from the alt text you write, so good alt text does both jobs.

Alt text. Describe what is in the frame, plainly, for somebody who cannot see it. "Bride and her father on the porch steps before the ceremony" is right. Keyword-stuffing it is both useless and unkind to the people alt text exists for.

Say what you photograph, in words

The most common gap on photographer sites is that they show the work and never name it.

If you shoot weddings, elopements and engagement sessions, those three phrases should appear in your text, not only in your pictures. Somebody searching for an elopement photographer needs a page with the word elopement on it.

This feels redundant when your portfolio makes it obvious. It is not obvious to the machine deciding whether to show you.

Give each kind of work its own page

One "Services" page listing weddings, families, newborns and headshots rarely ranks well for any of them, because it is a little about everything. A page per service gives each one a real chance.

Each service page needs:

• A title and heading that name the service and the place. "Family photographer in Greenville, SC", not "Families".
• A few paragraphs a client would want to read. How a session works, how long it takes, what to wear, when the gallery arrives.
• Twelve to twenty of your best images for that service, not your whole archive. A short, fast page beats a long, slow one.
• A starting price and one clear next step, such as a booking form or a phone number.

If you only do one or two kinds of work, you do not need more pages. The point is one page per thing a client searches for, not pages for their own sake.

Where you work matters more than what you charge

Photography search is overwhelmingly local and overwhelmingly specific: a service plus a place. Wedding photographer plus a city. Newborn photographer plus a suburb.

So name the places. Not a list of thirty towns, which reads as spam, but the cities and venues you genuinely work in, in the words people use for them.

Venues are the underused version of this. If you have shot at a venue more than once, a page about photographing there, with images from real sessions and something useful about the light and the timeline, will get found by every couple booking that venue. There is very little competition for those searches, because it takes actual experience to write the page.

Blog the sessions, but properly

A gallery post with twenty images and no words does nothing for you. The same post with three or four paragraphs does a lot.

Name the venue, the season, roughly what the day involved, and something you would tell a couple planning something similar. That is not filler, it is the thing prospective clients are actually reading for, and it happens to be exactly what makes the page findable.

One session post a month, written properly, will outperform a portfolio that changes silently.

Your Google Business Profile

Free, and it does a lot of work for a local service business. Fill it in completely, add recent photos you took, and keep the service area accurate.

Two things make the biggest difference after that. Choose the most specific category Google offers ("Wedding photographer" rather than "Photographer") and add the others you do as secondary categories. And ask every happy client for a review, with a direct link, within a week of delivering their gallery. Reviews that mention the kind of session and the place ("our engagement shoot at Lake Murray") help twice: future clients read them, and Google does too.

For the wider version of this, see local SEO for small business. Almost all of it applies.

Get mentioned by the people you already work with

Links from other websites still tell Google that someone trusts you. Photographers are in an unusually good position to earn them, because so much of the work involves other businesses.

• Venues and planners. Many keep a list of recommended vendors. If you have shot there a few times, ask to be on it, and send them a handful of images they can use with credit.
• Real weddings and styled shoots. Wedding blogs and local magazines publish them with a link to every vendor. One feature can be worth more than a year of directory listings.
• Fellow vendors. Florists, hair and makeup artists and caterers all need photos of their work. Share yours with credit, and they will often link back.
• Your local chamber of commerce or business association, if you are a member.

Skip anyone selling links. They do not help, and the sites that sell them are the ones Google has learned to ignore.

Prices, and the argument about them

Photographers argue about publishing prices more than most trades. The case for is the same as everywhere else: people will not enquire without a rough idea, and they will not call to ask.

A starting figure with an honest caveat is enough. "Wedding coverage starts at $2,800 for eight hours" filters out the people who were never going to book you and reassures everyone else. It also gets found, which a price behind a contact form never will.

How long it takes, and how to tell it is working

Expect a few months, not a few weeks. A new page usually takes some time just to be found and indexed, and longer to settle into a position.

Set up Google Search Console for your site. It is free, and it shows the searches your pages appear for, how often, and where you rank. Look at it once a month. If a page shows up for a phrase on page two, that page is close: a few more paragraphs, a better heading, or a link from your homepage can be enough to move it.

Do not judge a change after a week. Judge it after a season.

What not to bother with

Watermarks across the middle of your images. They do not stop theft, they make your best work look worse, and they hurt the impression the page makes.

Flash-style galleries and anything that loads its images through scripts. If a crawler cannot see the page without executing code, treat that as a page that does not exist.

Chasing "photographer near me". You cannot target it directly and you do not need to. Naming your city and your venues is how you end up in those results anyway.

The short version

Find the phrases your clients really type. Give each kind of work its own page, with the service and the place in the heading. Write real alt text, name the venues you know, and write a few paragraphs with each session. Keep your Google Business Profile complete and ask for reviews. Get mentioned by the venues and vendors you already work with.

That is a full photography SEO strategy, and none of it requires you to learn anything technical.

If you're choosing a platform, here's what a photography website should do.