SEO Best Practices for Photography Websites

In the early days of the World Wide Web, back when it was called Cyberspace and the Information Superhighway, back before hashtags were used to classify information in tweets, we used topical keywords in meta tags, “meta” because those tags provided information about the information on the webpage — metadata.

Of course, as with all things, people quickly learned to abuse keyword meta tags and the results people got from search engines was not always accurate. So, search engines don’t even use them anymore. So, what do they use instead? Today, I’m going to look at five things you need to be doing to create good SEO value for your website. And again, I’m only talking about things you do on your own website.

Organize Your Site Hierarchy

The first thing you need to do, and you may have already done or can use an update, is to organize your website’s hierarchy by creating a navigation tree. Google recommends creating a naturally flowing hierarchy, so keep relevant content together. It does this by assuming that each forward slash indicates a new section or subsection of content.

If you’re creating a page for your wedding photography pricing, you would want to write it as wedding photography slash pricing, instead of just wedding photography pricing. Also, make sure you are separating words using a hyphen.

Bad:

• /weddingphotographyprices

Better:

• /wedding-photography-prices

Best:

• /wedding-photography/prices

So, open your Google docs and start a bullet list for your website’s hierarchy. This is essentially going to be the sitemap for your website. Use indents to show pages in a section or subsections.

Commercial photographers will find this pretty simple, as your website will likely be divided into sections for each genre you shoot, an about page, a blog, and a contact page. 

For consumer photographers, I recommend grouping your sections by genre, with information for each genre in its section. So, keep your family photography portfolio with your family photography pricing, instead of putting your family, newborns, weddings, etc. under one section for portfolios, and then having a separate section for information such as pricing or investment and including your rates for different services under that one section.

Here’s an example website hierarchy for a headshot photographer.

Example:

• Headshot Photography (home page)

  • Acting Headshots

    • Complete Acting Headshots Portfolio

    • Acting Headshot Prices

    • Preparing for Your Acting Headshot

  • Business Headshots

    • Real Estate Agent Headshots

    • Professional Headshots for Lawers

    • Professional Headshots for LinkedIn

    • Booking a Professional Business Headshot

  • Recent Sessions (Blog)

  • Locations

    • Atlanta Studio

    • Los Angeles Studio

  • Contact Us

Once you’ve created an outline for your website’s hierarchy using a bullet list with indents, you can move onto the next step.

Identify the Best Keyword Phrases for Your Photography Website

Now that you have a website hierarchy, you essentially have the page titles, URLs, and H1 headings for each page. Look at your navigation tree. It should look pretty close to the keyword phrases people use to search for your information.

For every page on your website, whether it’s an existing page or a new page, you want to write out what you think is the keyword phrase most relevant to that page and then also write out as many variations of similar keyword phrases that you can think of. For example, you might have Hamilton wedding photographer and a variation such as wedding photography Hamilton Ontario.

Once you’ve done this, you’re going to actually check to see which keyword phrase is most commonly used by Google users, and we’re going to identify that one most commonly used phrase for each page, and also identify the commonly used variations. To do this, we’re going to use Google’s Keyword Planner in Google Ads. You might need to create a Google Ads account, but you do not need to spend a single penny to use this feature. I have it bookmarked in my browser bar and I use it a lot. Like a lot a lot.

This is where we’re going to take things out of the realm of what we think is the best way to phrase something or the funkiest way to name a portfolio, and TRUST THE DATA. So, go to Keyword Planner, and page by page, type in the keyword phrases you wrote down for each page, along with the variations, and Keyword Planner will show you a list of search requests and how frequently those keyword phrases are searched. Sort it by Average Monthly Searches. 

There will often be one result that stands out above the rest in search volume. That is the search query you want to use as the keyword phrase for that page. Map that out in alignment with your navigation tree, and you have your website’s keyword phrase hierarchy.

As a side note, you’ll probably notice that very few people use the search words “investment” or “rate” when looking for photography prices, so stop using “investment” and “rates” in your navigation and page titles. Use the words price or pricing. I don’t know about you but I’ve never used the word investment when researching or making a purchase decision unless it was for actual financial investment.

Write Simple, Unique Titles for Every Page

Now that you have a navigation tree and the top keyword phrase for each page on your website, you also have the title for each page on your website. Use the top keyword phrase as that page title. Your page’s title is what appears in large text at the top of every search result, so you want that to match exactly the most common search phrase for the pages on your website. Don’t try to make it fun or fancy. Use the phrase that people are searching for as the page title.

Use Headings to Emphasize Important Text

Headings are a way to divide up the text on a page into sections. Headings should be meaningful and informative. Google uses headers and subheaders to determine what information is grouped together in sections and subsections. HTML has six header levels, H1 through H6. H1 headers are at the top-level of the hierarchy and H6 headers are six levels deep. So, let’s consider the H1 to be a page’s title and everything else to be a subheader. 

Your page should only ever have one H1 header. That H1 header should match exactly the title of the page, such as “Editorial Photography,” or “Hamilton Wedding Photographers.” Every other header on that page is a section header. Stick to H2 headers. Keep it simple. So, if you have a family photography page and want to create a section for your family photography prices, then your H1 title would be Family Photography and your pricing section be an H2 subheader with the text “Family Photography Prices.”

Here’s where using the Keyword Planner comes in super handy. You can use the other common keyword phrases on your website for your subheaders. Google sees that information as important and useful and if it exactly matches what people are looking for, and the information in that section is useful. That’s good SEO. Again, don’t get fancy. Don’t use headers as a design element. 

Write Short Meta Descriptions for Each Page

The last thing you want to do for each page is to write a good meta description for the content of that page. Google wants descriptions to accurately reflect the web result. Good SEO descriptions are unique for every page. Don’t include boilerplate text. Prioritize the major pages of your website. You don’t need a meta description for every blog post, but it certainly doesn’t hurt to have them.

Make sure to include words from the top keyword phrases in your meta description. You can repeat keywords or use variations, such as photography, photographer, images, portraits, etc., but don’t just stuff the description with random keywords. Since your description is likely to be used at the snippet of text below a search result, write it as though a person were reading it because someone probably will be.

Summary

So, to recap and wrap it up. Here’s what you want to do for SEO best practices:

1. Identify the top keyword phrase for each page on your website.

2. Use that keyword phrase for the title, URL, and header (H1) of that page. 

3. Change your subheaders to H2 headers and H3 headers.

After that’s done:

• Change your subheaders (H2) to match other common keyword phrases.

• Write high-quality descriptions for the major pages of your website.

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