FOR ARTISTS & CREATIVES
What Should a Photography Website Include? A Page-by-Page Guide
A page-by-page checklist for UK photographers: home page, galleries, about, pricing, testimonials, booking, blog and legal pages.
How to rank in your town: build useful location pages, keep your details consistent, earn reviews and links, and blog about local venues.
Local SEO for photographers means making it obvious to Google, and to clients, which towns you cover and why you’re good. Build one strong page for your main location and one for each specialism. Keep your contact details identical everywhere. Then gather honest reviews, write useful posts about local venues and earn links from local businesses.
Most photography enquiries begin with a search that has a place in it. A wedding photographer in a certain town. Family portraits near a city. Headshots for a local business. If your website doesn’t spell out where you work, you’re leaving Google to guess.
Local SEO rewards honest detail. Working photographers have plenty. The trap is the shortcut lots of people try, which is copying the same page for fifty towns. This guide sets out the approach that holds up.
For the map-style results, Google says it leans mainly on relevance, distance and prominence. In the ordinary results underneath, your website’s pages are judged on their own merits, by the same principles as any other site. You need both, and each one helps the other. A clear website helps your listing. A well-run listing sends visitors to your site.
You can’t change how far away a client lives. What you can do is make your relevance obvious and build your prominence over time. That’s what the rest of this article covers.
Plenty of photographers trip up here. Google’s spam policies define doorway abuse as pages built to rank for specific, similar searches that then send people on to a page offering less value. Among its examples are pages aimed at particular regions or cities that funnel everyone to one destination, and near-identical pages that sit closer to search results than any sensible site structure would.
The exact wording is in Google’s spam policies for Google web search. Put simply, a page for every village with only the place name swapped is asking for trouble.
It needs a real reason to exist. Only build a page for a place where you actually work and have something specific to say about it. Show local proof, meaning real examples from that area, whether venues, schools, offices or outdoor spots you’ve shot at, with the client’s permission.
The information should be different too. Cover travel arrangements and the popular venues. Explain how sessions tend to run there, and answer the questions clients in that area ask. Finish with a clear next step. Give pricing guidance if you can, then add an enquiry form with a phone number beside it.
If you can’t write anything useful and different about a town, list it on a single page of areas you serve instead. A few good pages beat dozens of thin ones. Google’s guidance on helpful, people-first content says much the same thing: show first-hand experience, and show who’s behind the work.
NAP is short for name, address and phone number. The idea is simple. Your business should be described the same way everywhere a client or Google might come across it. That covers your website and your Google Business Profile. It covers social profiles and directories too, along with wedding supplier listings and any venue pages that mention you.
Small differences cause confusion. An old mobile number, a studio address you’ve moved out of, or a trading name written three different ways will all muddy things. Choose one version and stick to it. If you work from home and hide your address on your profile, make sure your website doesn’t contradict that.
On your own site, you can describe the business using LocalBusiness structured data. Google lists name and address as required properties and recommends adding a telephone number, written with the country and area code. If your website platform doesn’t handle this, a developer or our team can add it for you.
Google says prominence draws on links from other websites as well as review numbers and ratings. For a photographer, that boils down to two jobs.
Ask every client for an honest review. Reply to each one. Never offer anything in return. If a client chooses to mention the town or venue, great, but don’t script it for them. Google’s review policies ban incentives and selective asking, so keep the process simple and treat every client the same.
Links from relevant local websites tell Google that real people know your business. Good places to look include venues you’ve worked at and wedding or event suppliers. Local business groups and charities you’ve supported are worth asking too. So are schools. If you have a story, try the local paper. Ask for a link to your site where it fits naturally. Don’t buy links.
A blog is the safest way to cover local ground without building doorway pages, because every post is a separate, useful piece of content. Here are a few ideas clients really do search for:
Link each post to the matching service page, and ask the venue to share it. Write from experience. You know these places better than any directory ever will. A modern website designed for photographers makes it easy to publish posts like these next to your galleries.
It’s slow. Expect weeks before search engines recheck your pages, and months before your reviews and links start building on each other, along with your content. Nobody can promise you a position, so measure the things you control. Track enquiries from search and calls from your profile, and see which pages bring in visitors. Look at it every quarter and improve the pages that are close but aren’t converting. If you need enquiries sooner, advertising for photographers can fill the gap while your organic presence grows.
Our local SEO and advertising for photographers takes in your Google Business Profile and location pages as well as paid campaigns, so enquiries come from the places you want to work. For the wider picture, have a look at our approach to marketing for photographers. Before any work begins, we agree a clear brief with you, along with the scope and fee.
Only as many as you can make properly useful. One page for your main base and a few for places you really work, each with local examples and details, will do better than dozens that differ only by town name. Google can treat near-identical city pages as doorway abuse.
No. Your location pages and website content can rank wherever you work. For map results, a service-area profile lets you list the areas you travel to, although Google expects that area to be realistic. How far you are from the person searching still plays a part.
It means your business details appear the same everywhere online: the name, the address and the phone number. Stick to one trading name and one number, with the address always written the same way. Use them on your website and profile as well as your social accounts and directories. That cuts confusion for clients and for the systems trying to match up your listings.
Some are. Focus on the ones clients actually use, such as wedding supplier sites or venue preferred-supplier lists, plus local business directories, and keep your details identical on all of them. Skip the long lists of low-quality directories. They eat time and rarely bring enquiries.
It’s risky if what comes out is generic. Google asks for people-first content with first-hand experience, and says readers find it helpful to know how content was made. Use your own examples and photos from real venues, and have a person check every page for accuracy.
A page-by-page checklist for UK photographers: home page, galleries, about, pricing, testimonials, booking, blog and legal pages.
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A closer look at the work behind each part of your plan.
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