As a wedding photographer, you’ve spent years perfecting your craft. You want engaged couples to see all the amazing weddings that you have shot; but just getting your work published isn’t enough. With over 600 billion photos uploaded per year to Instagram alone, how do you get noticed? That’s where SEO comes in. Search engine optimization is a way to increase the number of potential clients who find your site through Google and other search engines – basically, it helps people find your business when they look for a keyword related to what you offer. But with so many photographers out there competing for clients, how can you successfully optimize for SEO?

Optimize your website for your local area

Local SEO is important for wedding photographers because it will help you get found by prospective engaged couples in your city.

Another simple way to optimize your site for local SEO is to add a local phone number. This makes it easy for potential clients who stay within the radius of the phone number’s area code. It also lends instant credibility, as these websites will be seen as more legitimate by search engines when they have actual contact information listed on their website.

Claim your Google My Business listing

One of the easiest ways to improve your company’s visibility on Google and improve your SEO for wedding photographers is to claim and optimize your Google My Business listing.

Claiming your GMB (Google My Business) listing is fairly straightforward. If you haven’t already, go here: Google My Business. You will be asked to fill out some basic information about your business, such as address, phone number, hours of operation, and so on. Make sure that all the information you provide matches what you display on your website and other business listings like Yelp. Inconsistencies can confuse search engines and potentially lead to ranking penalties in SERPs (search engine results pages).

Add keywords to core areas of your website

The next step to improve your website’s on-page SEO for wedding photographers involves making sure all of your pages include the keywords that you selected. While there is no “keyword density” rule like there was several years ago, you still want to make sure that the right words are included in the right places:

Page Titles (H1): The H1 tag is what search engines use for a page title and should include one of your main keywords if possible.

Meta Description: This descriptive text is what shows up below your page title in a Google search result. It’s not considered as important as other items, but it can still be helpful to include a keyword here.

Image Alt Text: If you do have images on the page, it can help to incorporate one of the keywords into their alt text.

Heading Tags (H2, H3): Try to incorporate at least one subheading with an H2 or H3 tag per page and include one of your chosen keywords if possible. You may also be able to use modifiers like “best,” “guide,” or “near me.” For example, instead of just using “Wedding Venues Near Me,” you could say something like “The Best Wedding Venues Near Me in 2019 According to Wedding Photographers and Brides Alike.”

Reduce image size to help load speed

One of the biggest mistakes that wedding photographers make is using huge images. This can really slow down your page load speed, which will tank your rankings. Solve this problem either by compressing the images yourself or using a tool like TinyJPG . Either way, you want to shoot for an image size of less than 250kb, with smaller being better. You might be wondering how big your file sizes should ideally be then? The answer is: as small as possible without sacrificing the quality of your images too much. Image size and load speed shouldn’t come at the expense of image quality, after all.

Images are important for sites like this because they give potential clients a sense of what it would feel like to work with you on their wedding day. Make sure that you don’t use too many but also don’t skimp out on having enough in your portfolio so that people get an accurate idea of who you are and what kind of service they would receive if they worked with you.

Blog your past weddings

If you want to be an SEO wedding photography expert, it’s important to start a blog. Because you’re in the business of wedding photography, your blog should highlight your past wedding photos and experiences. You can use your blog to showcase your past weddings and display how you’d photograph future ones. By sharing your experiences with real weddings, you’ll show people what they could expect from hiring you as their photographer. Including keywords like venues and themes will help with SEO as well.

Get featured in wedding publications

If you can get your work into a wedding magazine or popular blog and that publication has decent SEO, you’ll get to piggyback on their reputation and will notice a surge in traffic.

While you might want to just go after the biggest publications, it’s not impossible for smaller publications to bring a great deal of traffic your way. Start by searching for keywords like “best wedding blogs” and “best wedding photographers,” then check out their websites. They should all list how many visitors they see per month (you can also look up this information using sites like Neil Patel’s Website Traffic Checker). If they’re receiving less than 1,000 monthly visitors, it’s probably not worth it. If they have more than 10,000 monthly visitors, this is an excellent opportunity for you because even if you’re only featured on one page of the blog or website — sometimes called the “vendor guide” — it could still lead 5-10% of that site’s traffic your way.

To research where else you might be able to feature your work, search keywords like “top wedding blogs” and “wedding planner app.” You can also search for keywords like “wedding photo shoot inspiration” which users may type in when looking for ideas for their own big day. Once again, pick sites with at least 10k monthly visitors.

Blog frequently asked questions

There are a lot of questions people ask when they’re looking for wedding photographers. From the initial planning stages to the big day itself and beyond, prospective clients will have lots of burning questions about wedding photography—and answering them is a valuable opportunity to establish yourself as an authority, drive traffic to your site, and book more work.

So what are these FAQs? Let’s dive in! Here are some FAQs that you might want to consider tackling:

Questions that come up during wedding planning. For example: “How far in advance should I schedule my photographer?” “Do I need two photographers?” “What should we include in our wedding budget?” And so on.

Questions that come up during the actual day of your event. Here’s where you can get more specific: “Can we take family portraits before the ceremony?” “What time should my makeup artists show up?” And so on.

Questions that come up after the event has wrapped. This is another great chance to offer advice tailored toward your clients’ next steps: “When will we receive our photos?” “How do I make sure all my guests see their pictures?” “Can you recommend places for us to print our images?” And so on.

Questions about your business and process as a whole: “Why did you become a photographer?”; “Why do you enjoy shooting weddings?”; “How many weddings have you photographed?”.

Ask your favourite vendors to add you to their recommended vendor list

The second step to gaining backlinks is asking your favorite vendors to add you to their recommended vendor list. Ask them to include you in a blog post they write on the topic of wedding photographers in the region. Having other vendors vouch for your brand can be quite powerful, especially if they are well-known and well-regarded.

Ensure your contact information is consistent on the web.

Ensuring your contact information is consistent on the web will help local search engines. To check if you’re using your business name, address, and phone number (NAP) consistently across the web, Google yourself to see what comes up. Also, you should use schema.org markup for name, address, and phone number where possible on your website and update your Google My Business listing with NAP.

SEO for wedding photographers

By now you should have a better understanding of the SEO fundamentals that make up great search optimization. There are so many variables at play, but keyword research, local SEO and mobile-friendliness are always going to be three of the most important factors when it comes to improving your rankings in Google.

Wedding photography is a highly competitive field. Brides are searching for photographers months before their wedding day. And as a wedding photographer, you need to be there—visible and ready for their business.

It takes planning, creativity and hard work to succeed at Search Engine Optimization for wedding photographers. But with these tips and tricks, you can get started on the path to reaching more couples and booking more weddings today!

If you are looking for a done for you SEO solution, get in contact with us and we would be happy to let you know about our SEO for Wedding Photographers packages.