Every digital business wants proper marketing mediums, and the first step in starting one will always be to have a website.
Most people think that you get a website up and running and the clients will swarm in on their own.
Although that was possible back in the days when the competition was nowhere to be found, creating a page with a bunch of content would have ranked your site up to the top in SERPs.
But the situation has changed. You need a lot of practice to conduct with your website, as well as invest a good budget to get your attention. Or if I could sum up shamelessly, you should not be building a digital business when there is no demand in the town you want to operate/market.
Yes, I am well over taking full responsibility for my claim, especially with those digital businesses who plan to operate mainly in certain cities, towns, and even the areas.
Luckily, I am asked to share my two cents on the question a good photographer sent me directly.
The question was, “Hello, Ali! Forgive if this is not the right place to ask this but I have a WordPress site using RankMath Pro. I am a photographer and I am having issues adding keywords to my portfolio page because it is straight photos. Any tips on how to optimize my portfolio page with SEO?
Thank you in advance for any help!”
You know that I cannot go straight discussing the keywords thing, but I believe I should make it a complete go-to guide whenever someone is planning to start a photographic website to attain local clients.
Who am I to Ask for Your SEO As Well As PPC-related Questions?
Well, I am a Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and Bing Ads certified professional and also own a Google partner company providing a series of services in the domain of Google Ads management, Facebook Ads management, Bing Ads management, and all things related to SEO.
BTW, I do provide one-to-one paid consultation to discuss your SEO issues with me. But for questions like these, I am good to provide my expert overview on the issue without charging a dime! 🙂
So, you can safely drop me a comment with the specific questions on the videos published on my YouTube channel, @AliRazaMarketing.
What Best and Proven SEO Strategies I Recommend for Photographers to Attain the Maximum Results
For starters, various studies, websites, and professionals claim that SEO is the top-first channel out of many to get a good chunk of targeted visitors landing from the SERPs (search engine results page.)
And to your surprise, SEO is almost free of charge to practice as long as you know what you are doing right.
So for landing on the right path, let’s go with what I recommend for your new and upcoming photographic website.
We appreciate that the person asking this question wants to improve the SEO for his website to perform.
Recommendation #1: Simple and Clean URL Structure
The first recommendation in the line of SEO for photographers in 2024 is to stick with a simple, short, easy-to-read, and clean URL structure.
URL structure means your content pages, services pages, about pages, and everything posted on your WordPress blog should always contain the right format of URLs.
See, you go to https://aliraza.co/evergreen-niches.
What do you see there?
https://alirza.co is my primary blog URL where I publish my digital marketing-related content, whereas, /evergreen-niches is the particular permalink/URL to access that specific blog post.
I could have set it to contain 2023 as well, or any other thing just for the sake of longing the character count to make the URL sound detailed.
But wait? Why should I play with it!? That is not a professional approach to fiddling with URLs.
/evergreen-niches represents the content that will stay for a long, updating from time to time, and serving a good purpose as stated in the title.
So, I strongly suggest including your main focus keyword to go into the URL minus the inclusion of prepositions words like “to”, “of”, “for”, on”, “at”, and “in”, and the list goes on to attain the simple and shorter version of URL for your webpage.
Do not stuff anything there, please!
It is easy to practice when you are setting up your WordPress blog, but if you already have one and posted with a lot of pages here and there; take a reverse gear and work on fixing the URLs (if they look ugly and purposeless) and get them changed to at least with the focus keyword.
Recommendation #2: Picking the Right SEO But How?
The second but a critically-important recommendation is to lock on a good reliable web hosting company.
Some names that you generally see in the field, well, you should not blindly trust to buy your web hosting plan from.
When you have linked your website with a good web hosting company, it means you will have rare chances to go into downtime, faster page load speed, and good and timely support in times of emergency (we wish you never need to run into this situation), good specifications, security like an undefeated hulk, and the data limits are nowhere to be hit (bandwidth, updated software and hardware with the server, higher storage slot, uninterrupted backup, and a good RAM to support the load of your website.)
Even if your web hosting company lacks even one from what we specified above, then be ready to face the ordeal every single day….
Know that you have (or going to) a photographic website meaning these four cores should always be met;
- Your website would be consuming a lot of bandwidth
- Your website would require faster network speed for the visitors to access your
- And, your website would require larger data storage because it is a photographic site
- Of course, you cannot miss the daily backup!
It is no less than a task to get onto what is the best web hosting solution present online, but what I can safely recommend for your photographic site is Hostinger!
If you sign up using my link posted below, you are entitled to receive a good discount on your total bill.
Coupon codes to use:
“ALIRAZA MARKETING”
Or
“HI10”
Why we suggest and recommend Hostinger to be your number one web hosting solution is primarily based on its maximize website speed thing!
It is three times faster than the technology competitors are using, so it is going to be a safe bet to host your photographic website and enjoy the fast opening of your images. And the faster the overall website page load speed is, the better it will perform in SERPs.
Then we know it clinches the best practices to secure your website from leaking any data. And the inclusion of CDN on top of the high network speed offered by Hostinger is the cherry on top!
CDN is free in most of the Hostinger plans. And why I personally recommend placing CDN on top of your website, as it represents “Content Delivery Network” which throttles your website speed to multiple folds (for a safe buffer, it is 40 percent more) from the websites that are not using CDN at all.
So, your photographic site is safe, secured, and faster when you host it with Hostinger!
Recommended #3: Proper Content Plan
You cannot just upload the images, add titles, and publish the pages/blog posts without taking a complete road map to make your actions worthy in the eyes of search engines, primarily Google.
The proper content plan will include lots and lots of take-able actions;
1- Keywords
First thing first, the initiation of content should first go with the deep research on deciding the keyword.
I do not think how someone could just publish something out of nowhere without knowing the basics of keywords… Let alone skip adding the keywords at all.
Find your keywords, the right keywords that truly represent the real intent of your content.
With that, you not only need to lock on your primary keyword but also the related keywords to mask around.
As with the local photographic website offering services locally, the keywords would be more focused given your location is present there, for example:
- Best photography locations in London (assuming you are offering your services in all of London)
- Best photographer in London
- Best time to take photos in London
- Secret photography spots in London
- London photography map
- London photo ideas
- London photography opportunities
- Top photography spots in Greenwich
- Top photo spots near Westminster
However, you can also target keywords like “best photography near me” where the people from London are already asking for the resources they could find close to their locality (but they need to be from London first. If the visitor searching for the same keyword lives in Australia, Sydney, he/she would be getting the results optimized for Australia, Sydney.)
See, the intent of almost all of these keywords primarily revolve around spreading information which is the best medium to showcase your photographic knowledge and experience to lock on the trust of your visitors.
Know that they would not help to convert but a visitor coming to read your best resource will ultimately bring in business at a later stage.
And then those keywords should be returned with some sort of data — in our case, that is search volume (SV) which you can easily detect using the Keywords Everywhere paid version.
Then the keywords (and related keywords) go anywhere, and everywhere possible; content headline, permalink, images, and content.
Since it is a photographic website, all of the uploaded images need proper keywords without ignoring their importance.
2- Formatting the Content
Use bullet points, and headlines of several levels (h2, h3, h4, h5, and more) stuffed with your related keywords, images, linking to relevant resources, quotes, infographics, and what more. However, use the shorter paragraphs when possible.
So, that would make the content look beautiful while reading.
3- Interlink Your Other Blog Posts
Like you are writing one, you should be linking to other relevant blog posts to ultimately make the visitors consume more pages on your website.
This should be your common practice to raise engagement.
Recommendation #4: Take Charge of Your Social Media Handles
Whatever you post, whatever you do; share it all on your social media accounts.
It helps build the audience as well as branding.
This way, your content will not only earn backlinks but the visitors who land from social media platforms will keep on visiting your site (returning visitors.)
Recommendation #5: Monitor Your Competitors
Do not stalk, just monitor them and see what they are doing on their websites to stand out. Especially follow the established competitors in your domain.
Recommendation #6: Setting up Google Search Console (GSC)
Google Search Console is a must. It will detect and inform you about what’s wrong happening with your website without you running the audits now and then.
I cannot see why anyone would be missing setting up GSC for their websites at this time!!
Recommendation #7: Best Leveraging the Power of Google Search Console
GSC is the best auto-auditor for your website despite the fact it lets you finely track your search performance.
So, it detects the deep issues hindering your SEO like page experience, mobile usability issues, product snipping issues, and any other snippet errors. All in all, you can see a variety of errors (if your website is having ) and fix them accordingly.
Another best thing that I see using GSC for is to look into the search queries and create specific articles around to win better positions in SERPs.
For that, you can select the “Average Position” and see which position you are standing with this specific search query, and then you can just confirm the search volume using Keywords Everywhere.
If you see your web page ranking on the second or third page but having a good search volume, it is high time to target that search query/keyword being the center of your content.
Fix your errors, and improve your content with GSC!
Recommendation #8: Target Guest Postings
Try targeting the guest posts for your website to better your positions in SERP.
Better reach out to similar competitors to offer them placing your informative content on their websites.
But some may do that for free, others will certainly ask for money to do so. It is all up to you which route you take.
In rare cases, your good published content will win back backlinks from other websites. But it would be a slow process and when you are taking charge to go at some pace, paid guest postings seem to be the only option.
Mind that your main niche should be the main or at least the similar niche of the websites you are seeking to acquire for your guest posting efforts.
Recommendation #9: Using Google Business Profile!
Local SEO is a must for a physical business/digital business wanting to sell its stuff in a certain locality, town, or city.
Thus, you need to set up a Google Business Profile for your photographic website.
You keep updating your business profile with what’s happening on your website and adding all of the other fields like the phone number, address, work hours, contact pages, and everything will raise your chances to show up on top with the pool of local-based keywords.
Let’s suppose when someone searches “photographer near me”, and his/her location is already “London” through Google Maps or directly from the search engines, the updated pages will pull up easy peasy.
Find your local-based keywords, and keep on creating content (text, images, and videos) right on your business profile to expect an improvement in your conversion/traffic.
Recommendation #10: Finding and Fixing Broken Links
What most webmasters commonly do is just remove the content reported as broken links (404 error), and redirect them either to your homepage (at least) or write the new content on the same page.
The thing is that these links are already indexed but were removed unknowingly, so it is a best practice to win back the visitors searching for your web pages.
Recommendation #11: Create Email List
Create an email list on your website offering the best of what you can offer to incite them to punch the visitors’ emails.
This way you will certainly have a good pool of visitors instantly coming to your website as soon as you publish new content and send them an announcement email.
Hire Me For SEO
I am a professional SEO and blogger working in the field for years. Secondly, I am a Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and Bing Ads certified professional and own a Google partner company, so I am to offer my years-long working knowledge to help you get the best out of SEO. So, I am open to listening to your SEO queries through this link