As photographers, it can be easy to get bogged down in the parts of your business you don’t love. On the other hand, some photographers avoid those areas at all costs. Either way, you probably didn’t get into photography to work on your SEO strategy.
If you’re new to the business side of things, search engine optimization, or SEO, is how you can optimize your website for Google. Businesses who rank higher on Google, specifically on the top 2 pages for their desired search results, get more business. So, it’s critical that you take into account SEO when it comes to your business’ website.
SEO may seem overwhelming, and that’s totally normal. There are people who devote their entire careers simply to studying it and learning to implement strategies for it. But, you don’t have to be an SEO expert to help your business grow online. We promise!
Katie has spent the last 7 years devoting herself to learning about SEO. She’s even worked with local marketing firms helping others develop and implement their SEO strategies. Today, we want to share what she’s learned with you.
Today, we’ll be sharing 3 practical ways you can boost your website SEO today. If you follow these steps, it’s going to have a positive long-term impact on your business and help clients find you online.
Start Blogging
Blogging is one of the number one ways you can give your SEO the boost you’ve been looking for. Providing your audience and clients with fresh, relevant content shows Google you’re still relevant. Blogging sessions, wedding days, helpful tips, or lists of your favorite vendors are all great ways to start blogging for your business.
A bonus way to help your SEO through blogging is by backlinking to vendors. Google loves when you share other relevant links in your content and vendors love the SEO help! It’s a win-win!
Check for Broken Backlinks
We just said it, backlinking to other vendors and relevant websites is great… most of the time. They become a problem when they become a dead or broken backlink.
A broken backlink is a link back to another site that no longer works. An example of this is if you tagged a hair & makeup artist who stopped offering their services and closed down their website. The link you gave them on an old blog is still there, but Google sees the link is no longer functional. This signals to Google that your website is out of date and users won’t be getting the best experience.
Thankfully, there are lots of great tools out there to help you locate and fix broken or dead backlinks. Most of the tools, like this one, are free! It may take time to fix these, but we promise you, it’s worth it.
Compress Your Website Images
As photographers, we are at a slight disadvantage when it comes to having a fast website. Website load speed is a huge ranking factor, and the number one thing that can slow yours down is the size of your images. Using a free lossless compressor maintains your image quality while drastically reducing the image size. It’s so easy to do!
If you have a ton of images on your website, don’t feel like you have to do every image at once. Make it a goal to tackle X amount of images per day or to do one page of your website at a time. Every small step helps!
Here’s the tool we use to compress our images for free. They allow up to 50 images per day for free and charge for more than that. They also delete your images and don’t lay claim to them in any way.
We hope that these 3 practical tips will help you boost your website SEO and ultimately find more clients! While SEO is definitely a marathon and not a sprint, these tips will start making a difference immediately.
Blessings,
Katie & Alec
Want more educational content for photographers? Check out our blog series for photographers here.
