Why Your Photography Website Should Have a Blog
As photographers, our websites are image-heavy. I previously covered how to improve your SEO with your images, but Google indexes images differently than it indexes text, so we want to make sure we also feed the search engines some excellent, high-quality text to inform it about which keyword phrases to rank us for.
Do you need a blog? No. Should you have a blog? Absolutely. Unless you’re making multiple six figures a year with your photography, you should have a blog. The short answer is blogging is the key to great SEO and ranking up quickly in search results. It’s so important, in fact, that for my consumer photography website, my family sessions, weddings, and engagements, I don’t even have a conventional portfolio. I don’t have galleries. I only have a blog, and I blog every session.
For my commercial photography website, I do have separate portfolios, and you should too, but I am also in the process of building out the blog on that site. I didn’t previously have one because I recently merged two separate websites into one, and I’m currently rebuilding it from the ground up.
But blogging is great for so much more than SEO.
Proof of Execution
Gone are the days when websites should only show your best 20 images. Some clients will look at your portfolio and be awed by the curated selection of images, but if you’re a commercial photographer, more and more you’re being asked to produce a library of images for use on social media in addition to any hero images being used for print or billboards. Nowadays, companies need images for their email campaigns, websites, blogs, Instagram, Pinterest, and so much more. Companies need to know you can tell their story of their brand in the same way a wedding photographer tells the story of a couple.
Most of the commercial photographers I know that are making great strides right now have a blog outlining the production process, creative briefs, and execution of personal projects, as well as commissioned shoots. This gives potential clients an idea of what it’s like to work with them and some insight into their thought process, how they put together a team, and a selection of great images from each project.
I’m also hearing more and more about wedding clients who want to see a more comprehensive sample of photos from one wedding, so they get a better sense of whether or not you can produce consistent images from the beginning through the end of the day. Nobody actually wants to see 800 images from a wedding, but I think it’s completely fair that they might want to see more than your best two or three per wedding, or a gallery of images produced in a controlled environment, such as styled shoots or workshops.
Blogs give you the opportunity to go into detail about your work, which gives people a reason to stay on your website and read through the content you publish.
Improve Your Website’s Authority with Google
When you are publishing more content, and publishing on a regular basis, Google sees you as being an authority in your area of expertise, provided the content you are publishing is valuable to your audience. One way Google measures the value of that content by how long people stay on your website to read or view your content. This is referred to as your bounce rate. Literally, how long before people bounce from your site.
When you have a blog that potential clients can look at, that is rich with visuals for them to check out, is internally linked for them to see more and more related content, that’s going to improve your bounce rate and, as a result, that is going to improve your authority. In short, the more time people spend on your website, the better you’ll do in search results.
More blog posts → more to look at → better bounce rate → higher authority → better SEO
In the last six months, just from adding a number of long-tail SEO landing pages and blog posts to my website at the start of the pandemic, Blackwood Studios has moved from Page 14 in search results to the #9 position on Page 1 for “Hamilton wedding photography.” And it’s only going to get better.
Use Long-Tail Keyword Phrases for Titles
Blog posts are not only great for increasing your authority with Google, but they’re also great for creating posts centred around long-tail keyword phrases. The term “long tail” refers to the tail of a power-law curve where there are a lot of terms with few results, as opposed to the head of the curve where there are a few terms with many results.
In the last episode, I talked about how to identify the keyword phrases for the major pages of your website and how you want to use the most commonly searched for and relevant keyword phrases for each page. Those keyword phrases would be at the head of the power curve, where a lot of people are using the same search phrases.
Long-tail SEO is about creating pages specifically for less commonly searched keyword phrases. People may not search for these phrases as often, but when they do, do you want to be the company that doesn’t show up at all in those results or do you want to be the company that occupies that coveted #1 result and has a post full of images that are exactly what that potential client is searching for?
So, when it comes to search, for example, there are going to be a lot of results for a search term such as “Los Angeles Photographer” but there are much fewer results for “sunset engagement photos at Venice Canals Los Angeles.” After you did your homework from the last episode and built out your keyword phrases and updated your page title, you don’t have to spend much time on that anymore. Now you can spend time creating pages and blog posts for long-tail SEO search results.
This is exactly how Blackwood Studios holds the #1 position for wedding photography in Calpe, Spain, and a number of other European cities, even though I live in Canada, on the other side of the world.
To-Do List
So, here’s what’s on your todo list for today:
Set up a blog on your website, if you don’t already have one. This is super easy to do on Squarespace, which is the platform I recommend for both commercial and consumer photography.
Create a draft blog post for every project you’ve shot in the past year, or two years, or five years, or whatever. The more the better.
Write a good title using a long-tail keyword phrase.
Set the publish date of the post to the date and time of the shoot itself, so it doesn’t look like you’re publishing a ton of posts all at once. Doing it this way will also space out your shoots in alignment with your rate of shooting.
Select highlight images for each project. 6-10 images from each commercial shoot, and 20 images from each consumer session to put on your blog.
Make sure to name your images as I outlined in episode #11. Use the long-tail keyword phrase for that specific post for the image names for their related post.
If there are supplemental images, such as sketches or BTS photos, include those as well.
Don’t worry about writing anything right now. Just get the images selected and uploaded and get the blog posts published. We’ll write great titles and tighten up the text over the next couple of episodes.
