Choosing SEO keywords for photographers

This week I’ve been thinking about why SEO is so important for photographers in particular. Obviously it’s crucial for anyone trying to run a business or promote their work online, but in a competitive industry such as photography, it’s absolutely essential that you do everything you can to make sure people see your work before that of your competitors. If you’re in a fairly niche market, you can be pretty sure that it won’t take much work to get yourself to the top of the Google rankings and get yourself seen. However, a quick search on google.co.uk for ‘photographer’ returns 266,000,000 results, so we photographers are going to have our work cut out trying to get ourselves seen amongst all the other people vying for attention. So, as tempting as it might be to target ‘photographer’ or ‘photography’ or even ‘black and white photography’ as your keywords, unless you have a mega budget behind you, it’s just unrealistic. So you should think about your own niche through which people can find you. This is where your Google Analytics data comes in handy. When people have found you in the past, what have they searched? Play on this to discover your niche. It might be that you specialise in portraits of pets, or you might operate in a relatively rural location around which lots of weddings take place. Maybe you use an unusual lens that produces a particular style of photo. Whatever it is that makes you unique, use it to your advantage and make sure that you can be found by anyone who wants to find that specific niche. For example, I can target 'wedding photography Surrey' as I work with a lot of clients and venues in Surrey to target people searching for a specific location. The main thing to remember is that the bigger your SEO budget, the broader the keywords you can target, but if you know you’re on a limited budget, don’t throw money away on keywords you can’t afford to fully attack. Once you gather speed and build up confidence in your SEO abilities, you can explore a wider range, but to start off with, keep it simple.