How to Maximize Your Photography Blog’s Potential
A major part of my SEO strategy, and something I think should be part of your SEO strategy, is blogging. In this episode, I’m going to outline some awesome ways to maximize your blog’s potential and how to create posts that automatically update themselves over time.
I’ve spent the past four episodes outlining the importance of keyword phrases and building a solid foundation for improving and optimizing search engine rankings. Over the last two episodes, I talked about why you should have a blog and what to include in your blog posts for great SEO value.
Now that you know your navigation tree and keyword hierarchy, understand the difference between common keyword phrases and long-tail keyword phrases, how to structure the content on your website, why you should have a blog, what to include in your blog posts, and — and this is very important to today’s episode — how to properly categorize and extensively tag your blog posts, now that you know all of that, we can do some really cool things with our website and our content that deliver fantastic SEO value for our businesses.
Create Auto-Updating Posts
Let’s start by creating some automatically updating blog posts. I think this is one of the most valuable things you can do for your website and SEO.
One of the reasons I love Squarespace so much, besides its ease of use, is because it has a content module called Summary Blocks. These summary blocks pull summaries of the content from collections on your website, such as your blogs, products, events, and, depending on your version of Squarespace, even gallery collections of images. These blocks can be displayed in four different ways: as a cascading wall of content, a rotating carousel of content, a grid of content, or a basic list. I don’t know if WordPress, Wix, or other websites do this, but if yours doesn’t, you’re doing yourself a massive disservice by not using a system like Squarespace that has this functionality.
Here’s why.
One of the metrics Google uses for SEO is whether or not your website content, your page content is updated regularly. In order to maximize this, we want to create a number of pages on our website that will not only increase the quantity of good content we have on our site, but also the quality of relevant content on our websites.
Since it’s coming up on the holiday season and a lot of photographers are currently shooting fall sessions and minis, I’m going to use this as our example. Let’s look at two session types: family sessions and engagements; and three locations: a pumpkin farm, a national park, and a vineyard. Now, I want you to imagine a simple grid or draw one on a piece of paper, with two rows, one for family sessions, and one for engagement sessions. Then add three columns, one for each location: the pumpkin farm, the national park, and the vineyard.
You now have a grid with six cells:
Family sessions at a pumpkin farm
Family sessions at a national park
Family sessions at a vineyard
Engagements at a pumpkin farm
Engagements at a national park
Engagements at a vineyard
Each of those shoots is going to create its own great blog post with great SEO value. However, we’ve also categorized each post by shoot type, and we’ve tagged each photo with: the time of day, the type of setting, the location name, the month, the season, and the year, at a bare minimum. From these six shoots, we can create a number of additional blog posts for our website. And remember, we’re focused on creating posts with great long-tail SEO value that update themselves over time.
For example, you can now create a blog post such as Pumpkin Farm Family Portraits. A post like this would include:
the title and H1 header of “Pumpkin Farm Family Portraits”
a couple of sentences about why you like shooting family portrait photography at pumpkin farms — this isn’t a post about a particular pumpkin farm, just pumpkin farms in general
a large hero image of a family photo with pumpkins (appropriately named as outlined in episode #11)
and a summary block connected to all of your blog posts in the category of Family and tagged with the phrase “pumpkin farm”
The summary block is going to be doing all the heavy lifting on this page. This post essentially acts as an index page for all of your pumpkin farm family sessions. Every single time you photograph a family session at a pumpkin farm, the summary block will update to display the latest blog post featuring a family session at a pumpkin farm.
If you set up family mini-sessions next year at a pumpkin farm, you have a page full of examples linking to individual blog posts of each family session at a pumpkin farm. A page like this will take you about five minutes to set up and you never have to touch it again.
Photography Blog Meta Pages
I refer to these as meta pages. They are blog posts referencing other blog posts to update themselves. (If you’re on Squarespace, this is the kind of post I would also turn on the featured post option for, but if you’re not on Squarespace, just tag each meta post with the word “featured” or “meta.”)
If you photograph newborns and you have even one shoot with twins, create a meta page featuring your sessions with twins. It takes less than five minutes to create, you never have to touch it again, it’s great for your SEO, and someone with twins searching for “newborn photographs of twins” is going to find you, see that you’ve done this before, how amazing your images look, and potentially hire you. If spending five minutes creating a meta page of newborn photography for twins attracts even one new client in the next year, that’s an incredible return on your investment of time.
Let’s say we have an engagement session at Two Sisters Vineyards in October of 2020. Not only would we have a blog post for that session, but we could also now create self-updating posts with titles such as:
Vineyard Engagement Photos
Category: engagements
Tag: vineyard
Fall engagement sessions
Category: engagements
Tags: fall / autumn
2020 Fall engagement sessions
Category: engagements
Tags: fall, 2020
Best engagement sessions of 2020
Category: engagements
Tags: 2020
Vineyard engagement sessions in October
Category: engagements
Tags: October, vineyard
A vendor page for Two Sisters Vineyard featuring:
Hero images of the venue
Information about the venue: contact info, description, link to their website
A summary block of all your blogged session posts tagged Two Sisters Vineyard
Maybe an embedded Google map
Hopefully, right now, you are abuzz with ideas of different types of meta-pages to create for your website, but I’m also going to help you with some others. The key is to think about how every single shoot can translate into multiple blog pages, instead of just a single post.
Best of Posts
If you use Google’s Keyword Planner, you’ll notice that people regularly search for phrases like “best engagement photos,” so we want to create posts that have these kind of keyword phrases in them. You can also create “best of” meta pages well in advance of their publication date, or “go-live” date.
I like to do this with posts that are collections of specific types of sessions for a specific period of time, such as:
Best engagement photos of 2020
Best family portrait sessions of 2021
Best newborn sessions of 2022
Create these at the start of the year. Duplicate the post and update the text a bit. I just use a summary block that references all of my engagement shoots for that year, but you can tag a session post that you really loved as a featured post if you shoot a lot of sessions. If not, just reference all of your 2020 engagements or 2021 family sessions, or whatever genre you shoot for that time period.
Meta-Page Examples
There is so much you can do to create meta-pages with content that updates itself. It’s great for your SEO, it’s great for potential clients, and it’s easy to do. I know there are a lot of photographers listening who shoot a bunch of different genres of photography, so I’m going to try to give a number of examples for different genres.
Interior Photographers:
Create a vendor directory and page for each vendor, such as designers, decorators, millwrights, textiles company, furniture company, mason, architect, etc.
Create meta pages for interiors and exteriors
Design styles: traditional, mid-century modern, contemporary, farm-house, rustic
Design elements: exposed brick, waterfall kitchen islands, chimney breasts
Rooms: bathroom makeovers, kitchen redesigns, landscaping design
Portrait Photographers:
Favourite couples boudoir sessions of the year
Family photos at the beach, family photos at a specific park
All your photos at a specific beach or a specific park, for all your locations
All your senior portrait sessions for athletes
All your sessions featuring families with six children
Wedding Photographers:
All your weddings a specific venue, couples search for this specifically
Engagement session in the mountains
Weddings geared towards specific religious groups, such as Muslim weddings, Indian weddings, Jewish weddings
Wedding geared towards specific cultural groups, such as same sex weddings
Engagement photos of LGBTQ couples
All your engagements in a specific city
All your weddings in a specific city
Personal Branding Photographers:
Personal branding photography for Professional Speakers
Personal branding for real estate agents
Branding images for law firms
Personal branding shot in a specific location or city, one for each location/city
Commercial Photographers:
All your covers for a specific magazine
All your sessions for healthcare, or specifically dental offices
Case studies featuring your sessions with long-time, repeat clients
Summary
If you haven’t figured out by now, I treat every single page of my website as a potential landing page, because every single page of our websites is a potential landing page. We just don’t know what particular search will bring people to our door. So, the whole idea is to create as many doors as possible for them to walk through and to give them a lot of great images and content to look at once they arrive.
