There are over 224,000 photography businesses in the United States alone, with a market size of approx $11 billion. While this may sound amazing as a customer, it is quite competitive for photographers looking to attract bookings.

It is difficult to stay ahead of the competition with so many changes and trends in photography. It often gets too difficult for people to manage their photography businesses and attract more clients.

Photographers need to have a strong online presence and a website that is designed to generate inbound leads and inquiries. Driving traffic to a photography website is only half of the battle – the website must be optimized to convert that traffic into warm leads. Let’s look at the most common mistake photographers make with their websites and then dive into some website optimization tips designed to help you rank higher and generate more photography leads.

Most Common Photography Website Mistake

The general mindset that most photographers have with running their websites is they need to market their skills only. While that may sound straightforward and ideal, it isn’t always the case. A photography website should help generate inbound leads.

The average consumer isn’t going to land on a website that only consists of a portfolio and then take the initiative to contact the photographer on their own. They need direction. There needs to be calls-to-action implemented into the layout designed to convert visitors into leads.

Having a photography website that doesn’t generate the right leads is a waste of money. Let’s go over some website optimization tips for photographers, designed to help convert more leads and booking appointments.

Optimize Your Website Content

Google cannot determine what your website is about if it only contains photographs. To help Google understand what your website is about and to improve your chances of better rankings is to fill it with content that is optimized for the search engine while also providing value to your visitors.

Photography marketing is similar to other industries, but it has different elements as well. For instance, optimizing your website content with the right keywords is important but, you should consider the intent behind the keywords you use. There are several tools that you can use for this. Each page should be optimized for the particular keyword you want it to rank for.

If your photography website is build using WordPress you can use Yoast, a free plug-in that will help guide you through the different on-page optimizations needed for the best possible ranking on Google.

The quality of your content matters a lot, so hiring a good copywriter is always suggested to give you the best possible blog and page content for your users to engage with and for Google to crawl, index, and rank.

Optimize Titles and Descriptions

Achieving a good ranking on Google has a lot to do with the titles you choose for your website content – both pages and posts. Focus on writing concise, accurate, and well-written titles for your photography websites that contain your target keyword at the beginning if possible.

Google uses synonyms and other schematics to filter out its search results. Using the right descriptions will help your content stand out in the SERPs and can help you pull traffic away from listings above your website. Try to optimize the descriptions, titles, and keywords together for the best results.

The WordPress SEO plugin Yoast can help you easily optimize your descriptions, titles, and preview images of your content, giving you a good indication of how strong your on-page optimization is for each blog post and web page.

Optimize Header Tags

Header tags might not be as well-known as other optimization elements, but they are still essential. Header tags are important as they help to outline your content and briefly explain each section separately. Adding header tags makes it easier for crawlers to rank your website because it helps them understand the hierarchy of your content.

Aside from the SEO benefits, headings also help the visitor understand your content better. Most visitors will not fully read your pages and blog posts. They will scan your content, so having headings and sub-headings that give brief descriptions of what the content in each section is about allows those that skim-read the ability to understand what message you are conveying.

Optimize Your Website’s URL Structure

This is something that mostly goes unnoticed for a photography website. You should incorporate a simple URL structure for your site. This means avoid adding categories, dates, and other prefixes. If you are using Word Press you have the ability to modify the URL before publishing pages and posts.

Your photography company content will rank higher if you modify your URLs to include your keywords. For example, a page that is targeting the keyword “wedding photographer in Dallas” should have the following URL structure: yoursite.com/wedding-photographer-dallas

Add Outbound Links

Many photography websites avoid using external links because they fear users not returning to their site again. However, providing your visitors with as much information as possible – if it enhances your content – is suggested.

You can set outbound links to open in another browser window, thus increasing the chance of the user returning. It’s a good SEO practice to add outbound links as Google sees this as a sign of relevancy. It helps the search engine understand your content better.

It’s a good idea to link out to at least one authority site (Wikipedia, trusted new sources, industry experts, etc.) per page. You also want to interlink within your own content. You should have at least three to five interlinks on each page or post. This is also a good SEO practice and helps to keep visitors on your site longer.

Increased browser sessions per visit and lower bounce rates help improve your rankings. The algorithm loves websites that have long sessions with multiple page views per session.

Improve Website Speed

Users generally will not wait for more than two seconds for a website to load. Any longer than that and they are clicking the ‘back’ button and looking for an alternative option. There are a few things to consider that can have an immediate effect on your website’s speed performance.

Image Optimization: A photography website is naturally going to be image-heavy, so it’s best to use a compression plugin to help reduce the file sizes. This will result in a faster-loading website. For those with huge portfolios and large file sizes, it is a good idea to use a CDN – content delivery network – to help improve load times.

Hosting: Shared hosting is fine for some websites, but not one with a lot of image files, like a photographer’s website. Opt for high-quality hosting, such as a VPS – a virtual private server.

Plugins: The fewer plugins used the better. Too many plugins will inject too much script and code into your website header and footer, causing slower load times.

Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool can quickly give you a score – both desktop and mobile – for any URL, along with a list of suggestions to address in order to improve your speed performance.

Final Thoughts

The above-mentioned optimization tips are a great way to enhance your photography website. If you have any questions about optimizing your website for better rankings and to generate more photography leads, feel free to contact us and speak with one of our marketing experts.

Also, if you would like to learn more about the photography marketing services that our agency offers, we are more than happy to schedule a free consultation and strategy session to review your current online presence and visibility, while also addressing your marketing and business goals.

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