A great gray owl (Strix nebulosa) perches on osire dogwood shrubs while hunting for her next meal. Photo and story by: Annalise Kaylor

Just like it’s never too early to get organized with your photo archive, it’s never too early to get into the habit of making sure your website is optimized for search. Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is part of a longer-term strategy for getting your photography and website seen by the rest of the world. If buyers can’t find your work, they can’t buy your work.

Back in my days as a digital marketer, one of the agencies I worked for was a specialist in SEO. It’s not the sexiest part of marketing by any stretch. It’s time-consuming and detail-oriented, and it doesn’t change your success overnight. It’s definitely part of the long game. But solid SEO will help your website and your sales if you plug away at it every time you’re working on your site.

For all intents and purposes, Google is the search engine you want to please. Most of what I’m writing here will refer to “Google,” but it also applies to other search engines people use like Yahoo, MSN, or more privacy-centric engines like DuckDuckGo. They all essentially function the same way. Thus, I’m going to use “Google” as my catch-all for “search engines” in this article.

Fun fact: Google is the world’s most used search engine, but the second-largest searched? YouTube! YouTube has more searches per day than all of the non-Google owned search engines combined.

Understanding Website Indexing and Ranking

To better improve your SEO, you need a basic understanding of how search engines catalog your website and information.

When you make a website, search engines will find your website, scan it, and add it to their large database of sites that they store called an index. Getting your site “indexed” is how your website can be found. Indexing is an automated process, so you don’t need to take any action to have your site crawled and indexed, but if your website is new, it can take a few days before this process happens.

Indexing is also an ongoing process. Every time you update your website, Google will crawl and re-index your site based on the changes you’ve made to it. To see if your site has been indexed, you can perform a “site search” on Google. Go to Google.com and type in “site:yourdomain.com” (do that without quotation marks and put your website address in the spot where I’ve typed “yourdomain.com”). You’ll get a results page showing all the pages of your website in Google.

Once a site has been indexed, Google “ranks” your website and its content. How Google ranks your site impacts how high your website appears in the search results. With more than 200 factors used to determine site rankings, there is no way to control every part of the ranking process for your website. But we can control some of the key factors that Google uses to create its rankings, including page loading speed, whether or not your site is mobile-friendly, the quality of the content, how often it is updated, and all of the technical aspects that help search engines read and understand who you are, what your site is about, and how it might be helpful to people searching.

In my experience, most photographers pay almost no attention to SEO or the benefits it brings. It doesn’t have the instant gratification of social media, nor does it work overnight. As such, the bar you need to cross for edging out other photographers for the top-ranking spots is fairly low.

So let’s get into some of the small things that make a huge difference in the world of websites.

Keyword Research

When Jared and I teach our Lightroom workshops, I often tell participants to use keywords in Lightroom “like you would for Google.” Keywords serve both as broad categories and specific terms. For example, if you just type in “wildlife photographer,” you’re going to see pages of results that are broad in nature.

Search results are now personalized in a way that they weren’t in years past. Chances are that you and I could both search for the same thing and get vastly different results. This is because Google doesn’t look only at keywords when you search. They look at where you are located, what kind of websites you’ve visited in the past, what websites are popular with other people who search for the same thing, and how relevant the content is for the person searching, in addition to the other hundreds of technical factors.

These are called “search signals” and search engines use these search signals to help improve their index and rankings. Google knows that it is in its best interest to serve up the best, most accurate page results when someone searches. Its ad performance (how they make money) relies on it. Keywords are one of the big search signals that we can control as website owners.

Broad terms, like “wildlife photographer,” are almost impossible to break into at this stage in the game. These are too generic and competitive for individual photographers, outside a famous few, to gain any meaningful traction. Instead, we focus on “long-tail keywords” which is the industry's way of saying we want to focus on highly specific keywords.

Most of you reading this will probably rank highly already for a search that includes your name + photo or photography. I have a fairly unique name, so anyone searching for me tends to find it. As another example, there are several other people named “Jared Lloyd,” and the search results of his name tend to ebb and flow.

But you don’t want to rank only for your name, that’s kind of a given. You want people who don’t know about you and your work to find your website. So we have to dig a bit deeper.

Ask the Questions

People use search engines because they need information. As a website owner, you need to reverse-engineer the process a bit.

1. What solution to I provide for someone searching? (e.g., I sell wildlife photo prints and wall art)

2. What would I search for if I wanted to find what I sell on my website? (e.g., “buy wildlife photos,” or “buy photos of wolves”)

3. Why are people looking for what I offer? (They want to decorate their cabin or home with photography)

4. Do I want to be known more locally for what I offer? (I’d like to be THE photographer people think of when thinking of wildlife photographers who specialize in wolves)

Narrowing your focus helps you prepare your content for the best possible keywords for that outcome. With search engines, you don’t need to be ALL things for ALL searches. You will get better results if you home in on one or two search terms and goals, and then begin to expand into secondary terms and third-tier terms once your SEO for your primary focus has begun to bring in some traffic. I think I mentioned this is a long game, right?

Once you have a good idea of what you want to target for keywords, you can do some research with actual real-time data.

There are a handful of paid keyword research tools out there, but I still use Google Keyword Planner. It’s free to use and it’s created by the biggest search engine in the world. The Keyword Planner is a tool that’s mostly used for paid advertising these days, but it’s also really helpful for finding out what people actually search for. In turn, this informs what keywords you should be using.

When you get into the Keyword Planner, you’ll add several terms that you identified when you went through the questions. As an example, I used:

Wildlife photographer
Wildlife photos
Buy wildlife photos
Animal photos
Buy bird photos

These terms are broad and generic, but they illustrate the steps to take. The screenshot below illustrates all of the information you can glean from the search terms you input, as well as the keyword ideas to think about with your photography.

Let’s look at what we learn from the results.

Average Monthly Searches

This is the number of times that this is usually searched each month. With only 1k-10k searches per month, “wildlife photographer” isn’t something people Google a whole lot. Even more, you can see that “buy wildlife photos” is only searched about 10-100 times per month. But if you look down in the “Keyword Ideas” section, you can see that “dog pictures” get 100k-1 million searches per month.

Looking at the results of this search, I now know that while “wildlife photographer” itself isn’t searched all that much, I can see what kind of animal photos are searched often. There isn’t a hard and fast rule to use when it comes to keywords and how often they are searched each month. Generally speaking, you want them to be at least 1,000 searches per month and you want them under half a million per month.

That isn’t to say you won’t target keywords that are searched millions of times per month, but that’s something that comes a little later. Our goal at first is to tackle keywords that will get you traffic and start sending positive signals to Google, and going after high-volume keywords first is an uphill battle.

Competition

This column relates to Google Ads, not organic search keywords. But it’s a section that can help you formulate some ideas nonetheless. In this case, Google is saying that if you want to advertise on these terms in their Ads platform, expect a moderate amount of competition for those terms, which affects the prices advertisers pay.

When working on SEO, use primary keywords that have a low or medium level of competition. It’s okay to use words that are ranked high competition, too, but targeting the low and medium-competition keywords has other benefits.

First of all, when there isn’t a lot of competition for ads, that means your website and photos for that term have a much easier time ranking toward the top of the first page of search results. When there is high competition for ads, you can expect to see 3-5 ads from Google on the page before any of the organic (non-paid) pages rank for that term. Chances are people who search a high-volume term are going to click on an ad and not your page. Thus, targeting keywords that are not as high in competition can help you rise to the top of the results.

Adding Keywords to Your Site

Every website platform has its own setup for where you should add SEO information, but they all generally have spaces for you easily add the important pieces.

Photo File Name

The first step in SEO is to make sure the actual file name of the photo has keywords in it. If you want to start ranking higher on Google and other search engines, this is a must-do. Search engines don’t just read the words on the pages of websites, they look at all the information as a whole.

As such, I always change the names of my photos for my website to include a descriptive keyword. If I have a photo of a harbor seal floating on an iceberg, it will be named something like “Harbor Seal on an Iceberg.jpg” before I upload it. This is a much more descriptive file name than “DSC_4453.jpg.”

My choice of title gives context as to what is on my page, what the photo is, and how it might be relevant to a search. Collectively, when I have 20-30 images on a page, all having to do with wild animal photos, it tells Google that my page is definitely all about wildlife photos. A page filled with images with no keywords does nothing to help Google send people to my site.

Size of Images

Before I upload my images, I also make sure I’m uploading small versions of them. I always export at 72 dpi for web and social. For one, this makes my website load faster, one of the key factors in determining search engine rankings. The faster the load time, the better the user experience, and the better the user experience, the more Google likes your site.

For another, people can try to download the photo (my site disables that) and if they try to print it, it will look awful when printed at any sort of meaningful size.

Another tip: use keywords in Lightroom to create Smart Collections. I use “website” as a keyword so that all of the photos I’m considering for my website are automatically organized in one Smart Collection. This saves me TONS of time when I need to update my site. No more rooting through my archive to find images that work. I picked them out all year long while I was editing my work.

Page Titles and Descriptions

Most website platforms have a place for you to title your pages and insert a description. Titles should be relevant to each specific page. In my example screenshot, you can see what I’ve labeled my own wildlife gallery on my website.

I chose “wildlife photography gallery” because it’s a search term that I think I can rank well for over time. In the description, you’ll see that it’s informative, but also has keywords sprinkled in it, as well. It says exactly what kind of photos someone can expect when they click on the link.

A solid, basic formula for naming your pages is “Your Name: Keyword” or “Your Business Name: Keyword.”

The meta description is what Google will pull from to describe your site. These can be as long as your platform will allow, but Google will truncate the description, so sticking to 160 characters or less is a best practice. Using keywords in this description isn’t going to improve your rankings, but it does help impact your click-through rate (CTR). The more searchers who choose to click on YOUR website in the search results, the better. This is a signal that can help improve your rankings over time.

In the screenshot below, you can see how Google pulls in the Title and Description information in its search results. My page title, you can see, is a bit long. I’m not as worried about that because I still have my keywords and my name showing up for that page.

Example search results showing where the title and the meta description are pulled from.

Headings

If you blog or you have writing on your website, use keywords in your H1 text headings. Blogging itself, or at least having pages with written descriptions, can help improve your SEO considerably. For one, it’s a great place to put various keywords and provide more context for search engines. For another, every time your website is updated, like with a new blog post, Google re-crawls and reindexes your website. Google likes fresh content and updates, so it’s good to make updates on a regular basis, even if it’s uploading new photos to a gallery.

Image Alt Text

Alt text is the written description of an image that a webpage will display if the image fails to load properly. This alt text doesn’t show up on images or on the site, but it is crawled by Google and impacts rankings. Web page users who are visually impaired often use devices that read out the content of a website. Their readers use alt text, as well. Accessibility is finally getting some attention, and Google has incorporated whether or not a site is accessible to people of all abilities into their ranking algorithms.

Final Keyword Tips

In the early days of search engine optimization, website owners used shortcuts to try and outgame the algorithms of search engines. And for a while, it worked. But search engines are sophisticated, and before long Google and other search engines began to penalize sites that tried to game their system.

Similarly, they started penalizing websites that were obviously “keyword stuffing,” a practice that you can sometimes see on websites still today. Keyword stuffing is when a website owner tries to use so many keywords that the writing on the pages sounds unnatural and robotic. Or, they’ll use the same keyword so many times on all of the pages that it’s obvious what search terms the website is targeting.

Back in my agency days, I spoke on a panel at a digital marketing conference with Matt Cutts, the former head of spam for Google. The panel was about best practices in search and social. In many ways, social media algorithms have copied search algorithms. On that panel, I said, “Don’t beat the algorithm, impress it.” Matt agreed with me immediately, affirming my long-held belief that ultimately, search engines favor content that is accurate and helpful for its users.

That was true 15 years ago and I know it is still true today. I’ve seen many a website go down because they didn’t prioritize user experience or tried to manipulate the system to game the algorithm. If you implement the basics I’ve outlined above and don’t go overboard, you’ll soon see your website visits from search engines tick higher.

SEO for Photographers: Keywords