If you are building or expanding your photography business, ensuring that people find your site on search engines is a top priority. SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation, can be crucial to the success of your website because it can help you to enjoy a high ranking on search engine results pages, such as Google. 

As a result, this can mean more brand awareness, clicks on your page and increased traffic to your site. In this guide, we will look at five of the best ways to drive your site higher up search engine rankings, make your website more successful and generate more custom.

1. Optimise your website’s user experience

Customers, or potential customers, want to use a website that delivers an optimal user experience (UX). There are a few ways to achieve this. 

One of the best ways is to break up your content with headings and subheadings. These headings (h1/h2/h3 etc.) can allow both search engines and site users to understand precisely what your site is about. They also improve readability, making it a more pleasant experience for people to use your site.

Another helpful strategy is to ensure that customers can easily navigate your site. Make your menus prominent and easy to find, and don’t include unnecessary complexities in the structure of your site. 

Simple sites can be the best way to retain visitors once they click on your site. Always remember that websites with quicker loading speeds will have an advantage over websites that take longer to load. From both a digital and a human perspective, pages that load more quickly tend to rank more highly.

2. Build links to your website

One of the most common and most successful SEO strategies is to use backlinks. This means that other sites may use links to your site in their blogs or forums. Not only can this generate more traffic to your site as people will notice it more, but it can also encourage the Google algorithm to rank you more highly.

There are some caveats when it comes to building links. Links should be:

• Relevant
• High-authority/trusted
• Varied

The importance of link relevance comes from the fact that you are more likely to receive traffic that has been directed from relevant sites than irrelevant sites. For example, if someone is interested in a photography business, a relevant site might be one about cameras or photoshoots than one about coffee beans or motorcycle racing.

Use trusted, well-known websites, as search engines view these as more authoritative. This is because search engines are intrinsically aware of more trusted sites and will prefer these over other, lower-authority sites when it comes to SEO.

The diversity and variety of your link strategy is another vital consideration. If you can secure links to different types of sites, such as blogs or forums, there is a wider scope to build your SEO.

You can also use an online directory, such as Google My Business. This can help you to get started with link building and is often excellent for ensuring that you get noticed in the local area.

3. Use relevant and appropriate keywords

When consumers perform a search for the services they’re looking for, e.g. “wedding photographer”, search engines look for keywords on your website. Both short-tail and long-tail keywords can help improve your SEO. Short-tail keywords are single words or short phrases, while long-tail keywords can consist of several words.

One great way of ensuring that your site is rich in keywords is to start a blog. However, your blog should include keywords and be full of fresh, original, and unique content that will impress search engine algorithms and the customers who visit your site. 

While the inclusion of keywords is essential, oversaturating your website with them is a bad idea. If you “stuff” your site with keywords then it can actually be detrimental to your SEO efforts. Make sure to read through what you’ve written to make sure it sounds natural!

You’ll hear different recommendations for the number of keywords you should include in your blog depending on its word count (otherwise known as “keyword density”) but generally speaking, you’ll want to keep this to around 3% of your words.

4. Optimise for local SEO

Your photography business is likely to be more relevant to consumers and clients in your local area. Therefore, it is essential to focus on local SEO. 

Making your business more visible on searches that are performed in your region or local area is a great way to promote your business to the right customers and generate more website traffic. Optimising localised link content, localised backlinks and localised keywords can all be beneficial for boosting your local SEO.

5. Use metadescriptions

Meta descriptions are the information that search engine users see on the search engine results page. They are only small blurbs that can be packed with a lot of information if you write them correctly. 

It is crucial to try and include some keywords in your metadata because it can help a search engine recognise that your page is relevant to a user’s search.

6. Cyber risk

Remember that your website can be seen on a global basis – and is exposed to cyber criminals across the world.  As well as delivering business, your website can also present certain risks – in fact, your business is now more likely to suffer a cyber attack than a fire or flood. If you hold client data or portfolios or process payments on your site, it’s important to think about cyber liability insurance.

At Aaduki Insurance, we provide a variety of insurance policies for photographers and videographers across the UK to cover your equipment, professional indemnity, public liability, cyber liability and more. For more information or to take out a policy, please contact us and our team of experts will be happy to help you arrange a quote.