Basic Wedding Photographers SEO

Basic Wedding Photographers SEO For Beginner to Advance Level

Search engine optimization for wedding photographers is really quite easy to understand and implement in your business and will have a huge impact in letting more clients find your photography business.

Yoast SEO Plug-in

Let's get into basic search engine optimization for wedding photographers SEO right now. The first step to getting started with search engine optimization on your blog is installing the Yoast SEO Plug-in. I'm using a WordPress blog, which I highly recommend for the functionality and availability of all their plug-ins. If you don't see this on the recommended page when you go to your WordPress settings and their plug-ins we're just going to search from keyword here,

Yoast SEO, and you're going to hit install now. I already have it so that's why mine says active so you're going to hit install now. Once that's done when you go to one of your blog posts you'll see it underneath your main blog post content. At the end of your blog post content you'll see the Yoast SEO plug-in right here. This is a really handy plug-in that allows you to set the focus keyword right here and also helps you to edit the snippet that'll be shown on Google when somebody searches so this is how it will appear in Google, you can edit that there.

Then they'll also tell you an analysis of how your SEO's doing so any problems they've found, improvements you can make, and good results. Then the plug-in will give you either a red light, a yellow light, or a green light for good, okay, or bad. You can this specific blog post, because I haven't worked on it yet, says "SEO Okay".

The second step to achieving a good SEO rating for your blog is to create titles that your ideal client is searching for. For this wedding that took place at this specific venue you can see that I've named it with the venue's name followed by wedding. This is a huge improvement versus naming the blog post Sarah and Brandon Wedding because nobody is Googling for Sarah and Brandon's wedding. Instead I want to attract brides who are searching in Google the name of the venue followed by wedding assumably because they're getting married there and want to see examples. Let's try this out, I've opened up a new Chrome window in incognito mode.

What this means is that it's not taking into account any of my past history or personal preferences and it's not personalizing my Google results at all, it's all exactly as another client or another person would see.

I've searched Robert H Lee Alumni Wedding, because that's the title of the post, and you can see here fourth, fifth, sixth, my post comes up number seven based on that search result. This is an amazing way for me to market to brides who are getting married at this venue and actually number eight is also me from a wedding two years ago. After you have your search friendly title you're going to want to make sure that you have the same title right here in the permalink because this also will help Google know that this is relevant information so not only is the title there it's also here.

Another great title I could add photos to the end of this, because that may be an exact search term that somebody would be using, either one. You definitely don't want just the venue name, you want to add wedding if not wedding photos.

SEO tip number three is to name all of your images in the specific blog post with the search term as well. All of these images that I've put into this blog post that you can see here they're not called SarahandBrandon.Jpg instead they're listed as RobertHLeeAlumniCentreWeddingPhotos01.jpg. You can see here if you look into the HTML you can see all of these different images tags here, this is how I've named them. It's quite easy to rename using a program like Photo Mechanic or Lightroom and you can rename these really quickly and I have them all named under the venue name or the search term.

The reason we name our images with the specific venues name is it provides another opportunity for Google to show off our photos to a client who may be searching for the specific venue. Instead of typing into the regular Google search results I tested this out by clicking images and under images I'm going to search through, these are all images that Google has deemed relevant to this search term.

Now I don't see ... well this is actually my image right here, you can see Jamie Delaine Blog written there so the third image is one of mine and as we go down I'll see a few more of mine here, this is also one of mine, it's even pulled in other weddings that aren't at this venue because it's been from my blog that had this wedding on it.

Here we start to see Sarah and Brandon's, the blog post I was showing you, so these are popping up here, this is also one of there's. Now this is only going to increase in weeks to come, this is a pretty new blog post. Maybe a bride would be searching for wedding photos on Google images, she'd click this, and then she'd want to go see where this post is, and the next thing we know she arrives on my blog post here and hopefully contacts me to book her wedding.

SEO tip number four is to include the name of the keyword you're focusing on throughout the blog post. It's not enough to just have it in the title and in the permalink and in the images, we can go one step further and include links throughout.

You can see that I've done that here by saying, "I'd love the chance to photograph weddings at Robert H Lee Alumni Centre," while linking to the venue site, I've also listed it here under Ceremony and Reception Venue there. You always want to make sure that this flows naturally, you definitely don't want to just copy and paste that link a million times, that kind of used to be the old SEO rules 10 years ago. What you're going to want to do is try to fit this in naturally with what you're saying.

I could have probably done even a better job at this, a good example would be I could go down to where there's a reception image, like here for example this is the ceremony, and I could say something like I love photographing in this beautiful space at the Robert H Lee Alumni Centre and then I could link to that as well and that would be another way of introducing my keyword into the blog post.

SEO tip number five is you want to include quality links throughout your post. A really easy way to do this when we are wedding photographers seo is to link to all of the vendors involved in the day. I've gone through here and I have every single vendor and a link to their website, this is showing Google that my website is quality and it's also focused on directing traffic to other quality websites and so I've linked all of these here.

These are called outbound links, you'll also want some inbound links which means bouncing people around to other blog posts you have that they may find relevant. Something I maybe should have done with this post is I could say, "P.S if you want to see another wedding photographed at the UBC Alumni Centre," it's another name for it, "You can visit Jamie and Jason's wedding blog post right here," and then I would link this to another wedding that I did at the Alumni Centre and that provides another quality link to Google to show that my website is worth indexing and bumping up in the search results.

The sixth and final SEO tip is going to be using alt tags in your images. Essentially alt tags are something that describe the image to Google because Google doesn't know what they're actually looking at, it's relying on all of this data we put in our blog post and in our images to provide quality search results for people who are searching.

In WordPress if you click the edit button here on the image you'll see the alt text under alternate text written here. I'm going to write Robert H Lee Alumni Centre Wedding Photos, this is telling Google that this is what this image is about. Let me click update, what this means is that when I go to this image here and say you have a pin it Pinterest button I can click save and my alt text will automatically be imported here so anytime this image is shared you'll have that text embedded in the image through the alt text.

Of course adding alt text to 80 images one by one by using this edit tool would take a long, long time so instead what I do is I use the HTML version of this post. If you're new to HTML we're going to click over here to text and then I'm going to copy all of this text by going command C, but I'm going to open up my text editor.

Once I have my text editor open I'm going to go format, make plain text, so there's no formatting, and then we're going to paste this. This looks like a confusing amount of code but what we're going to look for here is alt equals two quotes. We're going to use the find and replace and we're going to have alt two quotes go here, so this is what we're finding, and then what we want to replace it with. What we want to replace it with is your keyword search term.

Anytime you see this in the document it's going to replace it with that so we're going to replace all and then we're going to copy this text again and drop it back into the text editor and cover everything there.

Then you're going to want to make sure that nothing else changed in your post which it didn't and then you're going to hit update and that's a really quick way to update all of your alt text. I hope you enjoyed this video, if you want more tips on how to find your ideal client and how to bring more work into your photography business you're going to want to head to jamiedelainewatson.com/50ideas, five zero ideas, and there's over 50 ideas for how to market your photography business and bring more clients to your awesome work.

This is all for wedding photographers seo.

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