Being a photographer, you must have realized the importance of displaying your work to your audience quickly and easily. Creating an outstanding online portfolio can be a great way to showcase your talent to your clients. Or perhaps you want to open an online photo gallery to exhibit your content. However, it is incredibly competitive online, and to rank your work over thousands of photographers can be a little daunting.

• Top 10 Free SEO Tools: Journey to Get Quality Traffic

However, new users and clients mostly find new content using search engines. Thus, ranking your work and optimizing your website is extremely important.

What is SEO?

SEO simply means to employ various methods to become more discoverable on a given search engine and to boost your rank on the search engine result page (SERP). Let’s take an example. Suppose you search for a new camera lens on google. Google will show you links to various relevant content on its search pages. Most of the people don’t go beyond the first five links. A very few people go beyond the first page. Thus, it makes it essential to rank your work on the first search result page.

To grow your business and create a higher ROI, we will share excellent tips with you in this detailed SEO guide.

1. Add Meta Tags for Better SEO

Meta tags are elements that provide structured metadata about a web page. These appear as snippets on the search result page.

The meta tags primarily include:

• Meta Title
• Meta Description
• Slug

Meta Title is the H1 heading for your page. It is the primary info that users read. It must be ideally 70 characters long. The meta description must briefly describe what the particular page is about. Ideally, it can be up to 275 characters long. The meta description acts as an organic ad text for your page. When your ad ranks for a keyword, Google and other engines will often show the meta description as a summary of the page, it raises the click-through rate of your organic search results.

2. Right Keyword Placement

Instead of putting in a lot of money to get people to click through your website, you can optimize your site for relevant keyword searches. You must find keywords relevant to your industry, target audience, and market environment.

You can use Google’s keyword planner to look for relevant photography SEO keywords. The keyword planner lets you find the most searched keyword in a particular niche. Depending upon your requirement, you can either use a short tail keyword or a long-tail keyword.

Long-tail keywords further narrow your search by adding more specific words at the tail of the phrase. For example, instead of searching for ‘Camera lens for Canon,’ you can narrow down by searching for ‘Best Camera lens for canon 1500d.’

You can use Google keyword planner to study the keywords used by your competitors too.

3. Index Your Domain and Web Pages

Google sends search bots to scrub your website for keywords used in the search query to fetch its search results. It also looks for linked pages to search further for keywords. This is called ‘Crawling’ in SEO. Crawling creates an index of queries that is used when a user performs a search to find matching results and rank and display search results.

If you want a search engine to crawl and index your website, you must create a sitemap. A sitemap tells the structure of your website to the engine. Being a photographer or creative, your website might have a huge no. of photographs or videos with different file sizes and extensions. You can embed a file called sitemap.xml within your page’s HTML code to create a sitemap.

4. Optimize Your Logo for Better SEO

Just like keyword placement, indexing and meta tags, your logo is also an essential element that can help you boost your SEO. Since this is relatively new to people, websites are still catching up on it. It can boost your rankings significantly at this point of time. 

Earlier, to create a logo that represents your brand, you had to hire a professional. However, creating your own logo is comparatively simple now using online design tools. There are many online logo makers you can use to create professional quality logos. 

To optimize your logo, ensure that you enter Alt text for your logo. Since search engines cannot read images, Alternate text (Alt text) lets the engine read your image. Describe the image in the alt text briefly. Also ensure that you choose the right and relevant file name for your logo source file. Instead of  ‘logo.png’ or ‘defaultlogo.png’, rename your file  to something relevant like your brand name or a keyword or phrase your target audience searches the most.

5. Consider Chatbots for SEO

Chatbots are AI-based computer programs able to talk to visitors and respond to their queries. Since Google voice search has already started impacting SEO, chatbots are the next tech fad that has slowly begun to impact SEO rankings.

A survey on Business Insider found that 80% of senior marketers in the UK, the Netherlands, France, and South Africa said they are either already using or planning to use chatbots as a part of their marketing strategy by 2020.

If your chatbot is resolving queries and providing a better user experience, it positively boosts your SEO rankings. A purposeful engagement with chatbot also ensures a more extended time spent on site and positive user engagement, which indirectly results in better SEO.

6. Optimize Your Images

Being a photographer or creative, photos might be the most dominant part of your website. However, search engines cannot interpret images and whether you use customized images or buy stock photos online you must include the Alt title and Alt caption with each image so that your photos are searchable. 

You can also group similar images using tags for better SEO. However, the most critical aspect is to upload smaller pixel sizes and reserving larger ones for download or buying. Since most of your website is images, it might take up a lot of space and decrease your load time dramatically. A slower load time may result in increased bounce rates.

This study by Pingdom found that sites taking more than 3 seconds to load see an average bounce rate of whooping 38%. To easily optimize your images, you can use Image Resizer.Use mobile responsive image resolutions with proportional width to height ratios as far as possible to get better results on mobiles, tablets, and other devices.

7. Google My Business

Getting listed on Google My Business can drastically boost your business, leads, and conversions. A perk to going digital is that you are open to the world. However, you must also consider strengthening your local SEO with Google My Business.

People can drop reviews, give customer ratings, and it lets you set open and closing hours, post updates, etc. This will bring in high-quality leads to your business.

Wrapping Up

As a photographer, your talent may lie in more artistic or creative dimensions. Optimizing your website, portfolio, or gallery might seem too technical to you in the beginning. However, in this guide, we have discussed with you tips that are easy to implement and directly related to the type of content you create. Once you begin implementing these tips, it will start making sense to you. The further you dwell, you’ll find more advanced methods of SEO. But begin with these simple yet immensely effective SEO tips.