The key to local photographer SEO is building a hub and spokes. What do I mean?
Angela is a photographer in Portland whose main business involved senior portraits. Like most folks based in a a city, she works not just in Portland itself, but in the various suburbs as well. Some of her shoots are at her studio, while others are on location (in Portland, or in suburbs such as Gresham, Beaverton, or Oregon City).
Jason photographs weddings, based in Atlanta. But it’s not uncommon for him to photograph in the other cities around the city meaning that he’ll be working in Marietta, or Decatur, or Sandy Springs.
Angela and Jason aren’t alone. For most retail photographers (those working in weddings or portraiture), services are concentrated in a geographic region, and as you publish articles on your website you’ll be targeting those regions for local photographer SEO (search engine optimization) purposes.
Target ONE Locale for Each Article
As you publish new material such as a blog post, target one geographic area that’s relevant to that particular post. If you’re sharing work from a certain venue or just from someone in that city, include keywords focusing just on that one area or venue (maybe you’re targeting a specific park, or church, or a neighborhood). You don’t want to try to stuff too many areas into one post.
And if you’re curious about how to decide what to target, that’s one of the things I cover in my free SEO SpeedStart search engine optimization course for photographers.
So you write a good blog post that recaps a particular client, or shoot, or venue, or neighborhood. And then next week you write about a different location. And the following week it’s yet another venue, maybe in the same city or maybe in a different area entirely.
Over time, you’re building up a series of articles, each focused on one specific venue. Maybe a few of them are about the same venue, but unless you only shoot at a couple locations all the time, you’ll find yourself building up a nice series of articles that cover many locations in your areas of service.
Much like a nice rug in a living room, let’s tie it all together.
Local Photographer SEO: Build Hub Pages for Cities
Hopefully you’ve chosen good long tail keywords (again, covered in the SEO SpeedStart course) which will garner search traffic for folks seeking a particular venue or neighborhood, but you don’t want to miss the opportunity to allow those folks an easy way to see other relevant examples of your work.
As soon as you have more than one post that covers the same venue or neighborhood, start linking between them. From each article, link to the other(s) and encourage folks to see more of your work. This will help increase the amount of time that visitors spend exploring your site.
Once you have a handful of posts on the same area, consider building a hub page that serves as the main location you can send folks. From that hub page, feature your best work, and link out to the other examples. You’re building your content network, and as you build out these interrelated posts, you’ll establish yourself as an authority on a given area for photography services.
Like most things when it comes to SEO, this won’t be an overnight process, but if you’re bloging regularly, tying these posts together in an intelligent fashion can help you target not just long tail keywords but also allows you to tie these long tails together into a web of relevant photography examples for your potential clients.
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