If you’re marketing your photography or videography skills online, getting your website to the top of search results is essential as it helps you drive organic traffic. When your website is the first result users see, you will receive more click-throughs. However, you’ll first need to focus on improving your photography site’s Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
The good news is, optimizing your photography site for SEO isn’t all that difficult.
By finding a reliable web hosting plan and installing an SEO plugin, you’ll have all the tools you need to boost your visibility in SERPs. And as you publish new content, you can compress images, use target keywords, and implement SEO-friendly permalinks.
In this quick guide, I’ll share my top 5 best SEO tips for photography websites that will help you increase traffic and find new clients.
Let’s get started!
5 Best SEO Tips for Photography Websites
Follow these five SEO tips for photography websites to get your website to rank on page 1 of search engines:
1. Find a Fast Hosting Provider
Before launching your photography website, it’s important to evaluate hosting providers and choose the right web host. A hosting provider will supply your site’s server space and all the resources you need to start publishing online content.
Hosting for photo and video portfolio sites is a bit different than the average business website. This is because photo and video portfolios are typically media-heavy. So, your hosting plan should offer plenty of storage, memory, and bandwidth. This way, high-quality media files won’t strain your server resources.
With a fast and reliable server, you can improve your WordPress website’s overall SEO from the get-go. Using a better web host often leads to shorter loading times, ensuring a good user experience for your visitors. Faster-loading websites also tend to perform better in search results because page speed is one of the many factors search engines consider when ranking websites.
Here are some additional ways a good web host can boost SEO:
- Better uptime
- Content Delivery Network (CDN)
- SEO-friendly domains
One of the most high-quality web hosts is Kinsta. With 34 data centers and a 99.9% uptime guarantee, Kinsta hosting plans can provide fast, secure, and reliable support for your website:
Although you might be tempted to buy a cheaper hosting plan, you may miss out on the SEO-friendly features that Kinsta can deliver. Its high-performance CDN, server-level caching, and security settings can help you build a website that climbs to the top of search results.
Once you get your photography and videography website up and running, you’ll need to optimize your new content for search engines. As a beginner, it can be difficult to remember all the rules for designing SEO-friendly posts. To help you get started, we recommend using an SEO plugin.
2. Use an SEO Plugin
With a plugin like Yoast SEO, you can manage all your content optimizations in one place directly on your website. This one SEO plugin can help you take care of many SEO-related tasks, like canonical URLs and structured data. Furthermore, it can alert you to improvements, helping you learn how to manage SEO on your own:
Yoast SEO will analyze your on-page SEO and readability as you write new posts for your photography website. You’ll be able to see potential problems and learn how to fix them. Here’s what Yoast SEO looks like on the back-end:
You can enter your Focus Keyword in the field and it will give you a complete SEO analysis below. The Problems section tells you exactly what you need to do to improve your on-page SEO along with helpful tips..
The best part is that Yoast SEO is a free WordPress plugin. All you need to do is install and activate it on your WordPress website to access its SEO tools and audits.
3. Optimize Your Images and Videos
As we mentioned earlier, your new photography and videography website will be media-heavy. If you upload unoptimized images or videos, they could slow down your website significantly which affects SEO.
When your website is slow and unresponsive, it can also negatively impact your Core Web Vitals report. Since Core Web Vitals are some of Google’s ranking factors, you’ll need to optimize media files for these metrics. With a better page experience, Google will start making your content more visible to online users.
To avoid long loading times, you can compress images before you publish them on your photography website. The EWWW Image Optimizer plugin can automatically compress and scale pictures as you upload them. This means you don’t have to compress images before uploading, the plugin handles it for you automatically.
It’s also important to add alternative text to images. Alt text describes each photo, allowing search engine crawlers to understand its purpose in your content. It’s also essential for accessibility, helping people who use screen readers understand the content and context of your images.
After uploading an image in the WordPress Block Editor, find the Alt text section in the block settings. Here, describe the picture in a few words:
4. Target Keywords
When someone searches for content, they usually type in a few keywords to find what they’re looking for. Therefore, it’s important to use keywords in your content that have proven search demand. These phrases can put your web pages in relevant search results, driving organic traffic to your site.
To get started, you can find target keywords using Google’s Keyword Planner. Here, you can enter phrases related to your photography and videography niche. If a particular keyword is too competitive in search results, you can consider using another one:
As you write a new post, be sure to include your keyword naturally. Generally, you should feature keywords once every 200 words. Be careful not to use them too often since keyword stuffing is web spam.
As I mentioned before, if you’re using Yoast SEO, you can add your keyword as the Focus keyphrase. You’ll receive alerts if your keyphrase is too long or was used in a previous post. Yoast Premium will also detect if your keyword is properly distributed:
Along with featuring your keyword throughout the main content, here are some other areas you can include it:
- Title
- URL
- Image alt text
- Meta description
By focusing on a target keyword, you can ensure your post shows up in relevant search results. Users can then find your photography or videography website when they search for that same keyword or related keywords.
5. Update Your Permalinks
Every page on your photography or videography website will have a unique URL. It helps both search engines and visitors to understand your content. You can improve your SEO rankings and increase click-through rates by updating your permalinks.
To change the URL for a post or page, find the Permalink section in the Block Editor’s Page settings. Then, enter your new URL slug:
Here are some ways to optimize your permalinks:
- Include the target keyword
- Use simple language
- Avoid using dates or years
- Separate words with hyphens
- Keep the URL short
Ultimately, it’s best to keep your permalinks as simple as possible. In most cases, you can just use the post title but remove filler words like ‘and’ or ‘but’.
Conclusion
As you rank higher in the search results, you can gain the visibility and credibility needed to grow your photography or videography business. By taking advantage of Google’s search algorithms, you can avoid paying for expensive advertisements and scale your website organically.
To recap, here are some ways you can improve SEO on your photography and video website:
- Find a fast hosting provider.
- Use an SEO plugin like Yoast SEO.
- Optimize your images and videos.
- Target keywords.
- Update your permalinks.
If you’re still looking for the right website design, I recommend taking a look at Inspiro and our other photography and videography themes. They’re built to showcase high-resolution images and videos while delivering the fast, responsive performance that’s important for both visitors and SEO.
Do you have any questions about boosting the search rankings for your photography and video website? Ask us in the comments section below!
