For freelance photographers, the idea of SEO can seem daunting. Too often, SEO techniques are simple but under-explained. This can mean that photographers building up credibility for their business as they create their portfolio miss out on vital strategies to improve search engine visibility.
However, SEO doesn’t have to be scary. It doesn’t have to require investing huge sums in outside help.
What is SEO?
SEO (search engine optimization) is a collection of techniques to help improve your site’s ranking on search engines. This makes it easier for you to get discovered when someone searches for something relevant to your business.
For example, say a marketing business was searching for black and white photography. Thousands of sites will be included in the search engine results, but only twenty or so will be on the first page.
When was the last time that you went past page two of the search engine?
Having your site near the top of the rankings will help drive customers to your business. It can also help to establish you as a thought leader in your industry if your site includes a blog.
What Are Backlinks?
Backlinks are a part of SEO. A backlink is a link on one website to a page on another. The more backlinks to a page exist, the more reliable that site seems to the search engine algorithm.
As a photographer, backlinks are a great way to increase the exposure that your work gets. Sites with no backlinks are unlikely to receive any significant organic traffic from search engines. Consider using a link building agency to build more quality backlinks. 
As with every business looking into SEO, you’ll want backlinks on reliable sites. Search engines most favor sites that are backlinked to by popular or trusted sites like mainstream news sites or popular blogs.
How to Build Backlinks
Deciding where to start with backlinks can seem difficult. These pointers are here to help you decide where to begin and what to focus your energy and resources on.
Have Something to Say
This is the bedrock of SEO.
It doesn’t necessarily have to be in words. Generating valuable content can come in any form, as long as the content adds something new to your industry.
A Google snippet aims to help answer questions within a search. For example, if you search the web for ‘wedding photography price’, Google’s AI will detect the question underneath: How much does it cost to hire a wedding photographer?
Articles or sites which directly answer this question with reliable information will be featured at the top of the search engine results page.
A great way to gain backlinks to your site is to answer burning questions within your niche.
For example, do you specialize in graduation photography? Consider producing sample photographs in different lights and with different gown colors and styles.
You could also address underrepresented issues in your niche. Continuing with the graduation example, you could demonstrate adaptations you could make for those with accessibility requirements, like lower lighting.
If you address something in your niche that hasn’t been done before, then your name is more likely to appear in connection with it when someone searches for it. The more reliable your site is seen to be, the more backlinks it’s likely to have.
Using Social Media to Your Advantage
Whether you’re an established photographer or you’re just getting started, there’s something you need to remember.
Social media is your friend.
In particular, make use of highly visual platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest.
There are two reasons that you will want to look into expanding your social media presence.
Firstly, it will help to build your credibility. That is what backlinks are about; building discoverability and credibility for your business.
Posting your best photos to social media will help to build up your brand and gain you engaged followers. This can quickly translate into a loyal customer base.
Make sure to include reviews and comments from any clients that you have previously worked with. Showing prior experience is a great way to increase your credibility.
The second reason is more directly related to gaining backlinks for your site.
When someone shares your work on Facebook or Twitter, it creates a link to your work on their profile. This works along the same principle as web backlinks. It builds your credibility with the search engine. But it also shows that other people in your industry value your thoughts, work, and input.
Gaining this kind of reputation is a great way to gain backlinks in the future. People are more likely to link to sites and work that they see as reputable, and social media is a great way of building a trusted reputation.
Social media is also a great way to generate a healthy return on investment of SEO. Organic reach, which is more common within niches like photography than for a general, personal account, is an inexpensive but invaluable way of increasing your search engine discoverability.
Make sure to ask any clients on social media to share your work and tag your account if relevant.
Connect With Relevant Sites
Most industries have a dozen or so websites that are well established as thought leaders. Their expertise is the go-to for everybody in the industry. These sites are well aware of their ability to impact not only the industry itself, but their ability to influence the popularity of other sites.
This is particularly relevant to photography, where individual style and technique is vital.
For this reason, a lot of industry-leading sites accept guest submissions. They may even run a scheme of sharing exceptional photography on their social media accounts.
Submitting to sites with lots of relevant traffic is a great way to build backlinks. Make sure to ask for the site to link to your website or portfolio.
It’s more difficult to build backlinks this way than some other techniques, but this is a reliable method of building up the credibility of your business and your website. To find sites for partnering on content and link collaborations, you can join a slack community for link building.
Unsure of where to submit? Need to expand your network?
Consider consulting firms like Amplifyed.
SEO keyword research is an excellent way of discovering which sites are popular within your niche. You may even discover a site that you hadn’t considered before.
There are a few tools that you can use to do this, but once you have chosen your tool, the method is straightforward.
Say that you’re a nature photographer looking to submit some photos to a popular site in your niche. You can use keyword research to discover similar keywords to ‘nature photography’. You can then see which sites are the top results for these similar keywords.
When doing a keyword search, try to avoid generic terms like ‘photography’ or ‘guest post’, as it is likely to bring up a lot of irrelevant material.
Clients Are Your Friends
Your previous clients are some of your most valuable assets as a photographer.
Ask clients with a website, particularly larger businesses, to link any work of yours displayed on their site. This means that everyone who lands on their site and is looking for photographers will have a direct link to your page.
An eye-catching portfolio is a must if you are going to rely on client feedback. Not only for gaining clients in the first place, but for encouraging them to backlink to your site.
The work you did for them might have been beautiful, but if your site doesn’t showcase your best work then clients may be reluctant to put a backlink into their site.
Understand Your Competitors
Yes, you need to do this in a general sense in order to run a successful business. But more specifically, understanding the sites that link to your competitors most often can help you to increase the number of backlinks to your own site.
Understanding what makes sites want to link to other photographers in your niche will help you to optimize your own site for backlinks.
There is another way that you can examine competitor businesses, and that’s through their SEO strategy.
As a photographer, the visuals of your site will be particularly important to your potential clients and customers. Something that can often affect how a site appears visually is whether it is being viewed on a mobile or desktop device.
The world currently has over 6.3 billion active smartphone subscriptions and 4.32 billion active mobile internet users .
It’s important, then, for you to make sure that your site is mobile-friendly.
Consider this. Have your competitors included AMP SEO in their strategy?
AMP SEO uses a mobile-first idea to rank sites by how user-friendly they are on mobile devices.
As mobile-only users become more common, it follows that search engines will continue to look for sites optimized for mobile. If your site functions well across multiple devices, then other sites are more likely to link to you.
More widely, making sure that your site is well-presented and optimized for client use will make other sites more likely to link back to yours, too.
A Final Word
The most important thing about using SEO through building backlinks is patience. Establishing a name for yourself and your business takes time. It’s much better to spend a year building up links to your work on trusted websites than to spend a few months getting links on any and every site you can find.
Backlinks are a very important component of SEO, but it’s important not to overlook other elements. Writing engaging copy and optimizing your site for user experience and relevant keywords are just as important.
A strong and comprehensive SEO strategy can be highly effective for visual content. The value of it shouldn’t be overlooked.
Don’t forget to pace yourself and set realistic goals for what you want SEO to achieve for your business.
Bio:
Nick Brown – accelerate agency
Nick Brown is the founder & CEO of accelerate agency, a SaaS digital marketing agency based in Bristol. He has over 12 years experience in digital marketing and works with large companies advising them on SEO, CRO, and content marketing.
