One page per specialty and city
A single "Services" page listing weddings, newborns, corporate and school work will rank for none of them. Search engines match a page to an intent, and those are four different intents with four different clients.
Give each combination its own page: wedding photographer in your city, newborn photographer in your city, and so on. Each page needs its own title, its own first paragraph naming the specialty and the place, its own gallery, its own prices and its own booking button.
- Title: specialty + city + your studio name.
- First paragraph: what the session is, where you shoot, who it is for.
- Real prices or at least a starting price.
- 8 to 15 images from that specialty only.
- One booking link, visible without scrolling on mobile.
Your business profile is a ranking asset, not a formality
For local searches, the map results often sit above the website results. A complete, active business profile — correct category, service area, opening hours, recent photos, answered reviews — frequently brings more enquiries than the site itself.
Treat it like a channel: add photos from recent sessions every month, answer every review, and keep hours accurate around holidays. Dormant profiles slide down.
Reviews are the local ranking factor you control
Ask every satisfied client, at the moment they receive their gallery — that is when enthusiasm peaks. Send a direct link, not instructions. Reviews that mention the specialty and the city ("newborn session in Lyon") are worth more than generic praise.
Never buy reviews. A steady trickle of genuine ones outperforms a sudden burst, and a burst of fake ones is detectable.
Heavy images are the number one technical problem on photo sites
Photographers upload full-resolution files and then wonder why mobile visitors leave. Export at the size the page actually displays, use modern formats, and let images below the fold load lazily.
Write real alt text describing the scene — it helps accessibility, image search, and increasingly the AI assistants that summarise your site.
- Longest side around 2000 px for a full-width image.
- WebP or AVIF, quality 75 to 82.
- Lazy loading everywhere except the first visible image.
- Alt text describing the subject, not "IMG_4821".
Write the pages your clients search before they book
Between "I need photos" and "I book" there are questions: what to wear, how long it takes, when the light is best, how many photos they receive, whether they can bring the dog. Each of those is a page, and each brings people who are already close to booking.
This content also feeds AI assistants. When someone asks a chatbot for advice on a family shoot in your area, the studios with clear, specific, answer-shaped pages are the ones quoted.
Frequently asked questions
- How long does photography SEO take to work?
- Local map results can move within weeks once the profile and reviews are active. Website pages usually take two to four months to settle. Publishing consistently matters more than any single optimisation.
- Do I need a blog?
- You need pages that answer pre-booking questions. Whether they live under a blog or in the main navigation is irrelevant — being specific and genuinely useful is not.
- Is SEO better than social media for photographers?
- They do different jobs. Search reaches people who already decided to hire a photographer; social builds recognition before that decision. Search traffic converts better, social produces volume faster.
Turn visibility into booked sessions
Fuze tells you which weeks need filling and gives you the campaign, the content and the trackable links to fill them — so the traffic you earn turns into dated bookings.
See how Fuze works