Local SEO is something that can help you increase the visibility of your brand and business on search engines once someone in your area or local community looks for (searches online) services similar to yours. It basically is a way to be relevant to customers and market your services to potential clients that are in your physical proximity. From on-page optimization for location-specific searches to setting up your account on local business pages, local SEO practices and strategies can put your business on your potential clients’ list of local vendors to consider. This can, especially, be important if yours is a business that operates on a local or regional level. It would also help you drive more traffic to your website, attract more leads, and get conversions. A focused local SEO strategy could also be instrumental in neutralizing the impact of national-level brands serving in your area and getting your business recognition among your target audience. Now, if you are wondering how you can improve local SEO and get more clients for your wedding photography business, we’ve shared some amazing tips for you here.
Top 8 Tips to Improve Local SEO & Attract Clients
1. Cover Local Content & Keywords
Creating high-quality content that your local audience finds relatable could be a good strategy for local search engine optimization. You can upload blog posts that cover local news stories, events, or activities related to your industry. Posting videos around local wedding venues, charity functions, or styled shoots could also help. Another thing you can do is set up location-specific pages on your business website. Similarly, use keywords that are relevant to your local audience and build your content around them. You can use tools such as the Google Keyword Planner to filter out the keywords that have a high search volume.
2. Set Up Location Pages
Location pages are very important for business websites. Especially, if you have a business that provides services in more than one location in an area or region. The location pages need to specify your business hours, give out your brand or business name, address, and phone number in the crawlable HTML text format. You can also mention parking facilities, individualized descriptions, and attach Google Maps location for each studio. Do not miss optimizing your URLs when setting up location pages.
Related Read: Top 15 Wedding Photography Website Builders
3. Claim Your Google My Business Profile
When it comes to driving traffic to your website, your Google My Business profile can have a significant impact. A few minutes spent in claiming your Google My Business profile could not only help your website rank for text searches but also voice searches. For example, if someone asks about “nearest natural light wedding photographer” or simply “top wedding photographers in my area”, Google would pull out information from your business profile and list your website on its search page. However, ensure that your profile is complete because incomplete information could lead to your website being pushed to the last page of the search.
4. Utilize Social Media & Build A Local Community
Create your business profiles on social media platforms and then post content on them consistently. Post text, images, videos, ask for feedback, or host contests to keep your audience engaged and interested. Keep your social media posts in sync with your website and Google My Business profile to give a sense of coherence and create the desired brand image rather than confusing your potential clients with different content and perspectives on all the channels you use. This will help you boost your local SEO. Also, grow a presence on local directories and review profiles to get feedback, resolve issues, and improve your services.
Related Read: How To Build A Social Media Plan For Photographers
5. Build Backlinks For Your Website
Take advantage of your local network to get quality backlinks for your website. Be a partner or sponsor events hosted by local wedding vendors. Offer scholarships to people participating in educational webinars. For example, a webinar on lighting and posing for amateur photographers. Invite fellow photographers to write guest posts on your website and co-author or write posts for websites of other photographers and vendors. This will also help you get quality backlinks.
6. Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly
With almost everyone sporting a mobile phone these days, the share of mobile searches is steadily witnessing an upward graph. So, it’s important that you make your website mobile-friendly. If you miss out on it, you could be risking your opportunity to market to a large number of potential customers. And, that would mean that your competitors would have a fair chance to fill in the vacuum and capture that market easily. How do you prevent that from happening? By ensuring that your website is mobile optimized and user friendly so that your audience doesn’t just visit your website on their mobile devices but also stays and eventually contacts you for booking.
Related Read: The Reasons Your Photography Website Needs To Be Mobile-Friendly (And How To Do It!)
7. Optimize Website Speed
Almost all of our patience has, at some point, been tested by a slow-loading website. Frustrating, right? In this age where time is money, your potential clients could be living as hustled a life as yours or even more. Thus, it is but natural that they’d expect their online searches to bear almost instant results. Therefore, if your website loads at a snail’s pace, chances are that it might experience a much higher bounce rate than those loading at the blink of an eye. So, if your website is sluggish and tardy, it could simply mean that you are paving the way for your potential clients to hop on to your competitors’ portals! To avoid this, monitor the speed rates of your pages and optimize them to resolve the issues (if any). Look for situations where images take lots of time to load or do not load at all. One tool that can help you check your page speed score and also get tips for optimization is Google’s PageSpeed Insights. All you’d have to do is to visit and add your URL.
8. Do Not Neglect Other Search Engines
It’s not necessary that all your target audience uses Google to search for answers to their queries. Some of them could be using other search engines such as Bing or DuckDuckGo. So, if you do not monitor the impressions across these search engines, you might not get the full picture and find out if your business was searched and viewed on these platforms as well. To ensure that your wedding photography business appears in the DuckDuckGo local map, set up an Apple Maps Connect profile for your business. For Bing, use Bing Places to be seen on their local map.
Further Read: Does Seo Even Matter For Your Social Media Reach?
Staying on top of the local SEO game is important for your wedding photography business to rank your website in the organic listings and attract more local clients. Our tips could help you level up your efforts and put your business in front of your target audience. You can use these tips either for a single location or multiple locations in the same area and improve visibility for your brand and services. Also, they could give you an edge over your competitors. Excited already? Looking for more tips to grow your business? Just check out our blog section and find everything from tips, tricks, ideas, humor quotes to inspiring features, and images.
At ShootDotEdit, we love sharing it all with you so that wedding photographers like you can hone their craft and also build their businesses. Another way we love to help you is by providing professional photo editing services. You can save up lots of time for professional as well as personal accomplishments while we take care of the grunt work for you. To learn how we do it for you, you can take a look at our pricing plans.