Getting your photography website to the top of the search engines

There are several factors that, when done correctly, will increase search engine rankings for your top keywords within your desired geographic area.

Before proceeding, it’s important to realize that if you really want to increase your income with stronger search engine rankings, you simply need to follow the established steps for the next several weeks. These are the lessons we will cover over the next month:

• Set the right keywords
• Optimizing your website for strong search engine rankings
• How to position yourself strong in the exact geographic area you want to target
• How to use social media to boost your rankings through the roof

It all starts with the right keywords for each page of your website. Keep in mind that we are mainly talking about the pages on your website that are relevant to your services. It is also very important to keep in mind that you must have a website for each of the niches you serve.

If you have a website with nothing more than a photo gallery, you are probably not ranking well unless your website was established many years ago. Even if you have a service page for many niches, this just won’t give you the authority it could have when done right.

We’ll go over the photographers who have a niche and how to handle that page in a moment. First, I want to touch those who handle more than one niche.

The following example can be used for any number of niches within the photography industry. Let’s say you serve the following:

• Family portraits
• Wedding
• Events (edit)

I realize that some photographers will shoot pretty much anything, but it’s important that your website focuses on the top 3-6 niches.

Each of the above should have a separate web page. While having a photo gallery is fine, we highly recommend that you have your photo galleries on each of your niche pages. Show your family portraits on that page, weddings on that page, and events on that page.

Your prospects will stay on your pages longer and you will have much more authority from Google and the other search engines.

Now is the time to do your keyword research. If you don’t have access to the Google Keyword Planner within Google Ads, you should set up your account.

Just go to https://ads.google.com/ and click get started now. You don’t have to spend money on Google Ads just to start your account.

Once your account is established, go to keyword planner and tools.

Now click on discover new keywords and type in your main keyword. In this case, we will put “family portrait”.

Before proceeding, your keywords will be placed on every page of your website if they are not already there. You will also use these keywords in any type of marketing or publication that you do.

Keep in mind that whenever possible, you want to add photography to your keyword if it’s not already there. There is a big difference between wedding photography and wedding photography, or between event photography and event photography.

Looking at the keyword planner, I would choose the following. Keep in mind that you want a minimum of 8 and up to 15 or more keywords for each web page or niche.

Please note that I will cover targeting your local geographic area in greater detail with our Facebook Live event that takes place on Thursdays. We will be recording the event.

For now, if you’re not on page 1 for your top keywords (as discussed above) in your main geographic area, you need to determine which geographic area or areas you want to target your ads to. Don’t try to bite too hard with your geographic area. I will take a specific geographic area to give you an example. Feel free to open up Google maps and see what I’m talking about.

If you look at the suburbs of New York, we have a fairly large city called Yonkers, NY with a population of 202,000. Let’s say you want to target Westchester County, which is the county in which Yonkers is located. If you’re not on page 1 for Yonkers, you need to target that area first. In fact, if you’re going after Westchester County, you have to use Yonkers and another like Scarsdale or White Plains before trying to get the whole county.

I’ll show you how to use geographic in a moment, let’s first choose the keywords for your family portrait page:

• Family portraits
• Family photography
• Family Portrait Photography
• Family photography near me
• Family photos
• Professional family photography
• Family photography studio near me (if you have one)
• Family photos

Now place your geographic areas. We will use three of them.

• Yonkers NY
• White Plains NY
• Westchester County NY

Many times you, as a photographer, may think of other keywords that people are using to find your services.

In your coding you will find where to put your keywords. There are so many templates that it would be impossible for me to show them all.

Here is an example of the formatting of your keywords. Most templates allow you to put your keywords in the encoding. You will see that we add your main geographic area to the main keyword and your top three or four main geographic areas at the end.

We will go into descriptions, titles, and alt tags that will make a difference in the world in our optimization lesson. By now, you should have a much better understanding of how to configure your web pages and the keywords within each page.

The training we offer to photographers is priceless. We offer tools, training and resources that will allow a very consistent and strong growth of your business.