STOP Making These SEO Mistakes on Your Website

You will not get hired if they can't find you. That's the key takeaway for this whole video is you need to be able to be found. Hey, I'm Kevin Patrick Robbins. I'm a photographer and educator. And I'm not just a photographer. I've been doing SEO a lot longer than I've been a professional photographer. I wrote the book, The Ultimate SEO Guide for Photographers, for people like us, professional photographers who have consumerf facing websites trying to reach our potential clients.

And to put my money where my mouth is, if we just look at headsh shot Hamilton, then you'll see that my result is is the first one. That's because I've spent a lot of time working on getting into first place. So, in this video, I'm going to break down some of the biggest SEO mistakes that I see photographers making on their websites, and they could be the reason that your clients never find you. I'm also going to tell you what to do instead.

So, if you're doing these things, I have the solution to help you get a better result on your website. Okay, the first thing is keyword stuffing. Keyword stuffing is an old tactic, but it makes your writing sound like robots. Now, I say pretty frequently that you are writing primarily well first and foremost for search engine bots. You are you're you're writing for the web crawlers first. If the people can't find you, then what does it matter if you're just using like natural language?

If your language isn't allowing your website to end up in search rankings, higher up in search rankings, if people can't find you, they can't read your website. They can't read your content. Secondly, you're writing for people. Keyword stuffing is a tactic people used to use and they would craft sentences like Toronto wedding photographer specializing in wedding photos in Toronto making photographs for weddings.

No human speaks like that. Nobody talks like that. Google employs something called latent semantic indexing which means that um for a word like photography or photographs it will also look at words like uh images or photos or pictures you if you talk about wedding albums it's going to understand that you are a wedding photographer and that's that is related to photography. So, what you want to do is you want to employ more natural language using keywording that isn't uh strictly like just hitting the same keyword over and over and over again.

I rank number one for head shot in Hamilton. That's because I talk about head shot as professional business photos, as head shot, as LinkedIn portraits. So use similar keywords so that Google understands that you're a human talking to humans, but also you have enough authority and knowledge in the industry so that you can use other words. So you want to use words that you would use talking to a person, but you want to use them strategically so that the bots, the crawlers, the search engine indexers will go, okay, well, all of these words are similar and mean similar things, means sort of the same thing.

So that this page is is all about that thing, right? So we have a very specific idea what this page is about. So then it knows, okay, that's what this is, and we're going to categorize it, and we're going to rank it higher for that thing. If you are just stuffing keywords, the same keywords over and over, it's actually detrimental because Google flags this as spammy. Also, real people aren't going to stay on your website if it sounds body and spammy.

So, we want to get rid of that. We want to correct that and we want to fix that. What do we do? We want to use our main keyword early on in the headline if possible in the H1 tag at the top of the page. And then we want to use variations of it and we can sprinkle it throughout the rest of the page. We want to add related phrases naturally throughout the rest of the page as well. If you have uh similar keywords, then you want to create like H2 subsection heading titles and use those throughout your page. in the lower indexing part of your page.

People will often search for uh best headshot photographer. And in order to rank for that, you don't want a page that says best headshot photographers. So, I will use uh lower down on my website a headline a section header that says one of the best headshot photographers in Hamilton. So, I'm still getting that best headshot photographers in there, but I'm using it in a way that is speaking to a human.

It's factual, but also it will rank for that keyword phrase of best headshot photographer. And then ultimately, you want to write like you're explaining your services to a potential client and not a robot. Even though you are doing both at the same time, you want to make sure that uh you sound normal, you sound natural so that when people land on your page, they're not going to feel like this is very spammy and body.

Number two, ignoring image optimization. Right? This is a big mistake. We are photographers. Images are our primary assets in our business and they are the best way that we can wreck. I have an entire video about how you should name your images and I I name my images on my file system on my computer uh back here so that they will be good for keyword indexing later on. Don't leave the images with the default camera image file name like image_1234.jpeg.

That's the worst thing that you can do. It tells Google nothing about what the image is about. What you can also do to improve that is include alt text for every image on your website. Now, if you're on Squarespace, Squarespace has just added a fantastic feature that it will you it has AI and it will take a look at the photos and it will write a descriptive alt text for the photo and it can not only do that at the image level, but it does it in the back end.

So, all of the photos on your website, it will find all of the photos that are missing alt text and then it can it will make suggestions and then you can just click yep, fix all of that. You could also, if you don't have Squarespace, you can use something like chat GPT and you can upload the image and then say, "Please write the alt text for this image." I actually created a custom GPT. I'll link to that in the description below as well that you can use.

Just drop your image on there. And what it'll do is it'll generate three alt text and then it will combine the elements of the three that it suggested into like a nice finalized version that is perfect for your website and that you can add to that image while you're uploading it to your website. But the best thing that you can actually do, not only for your website, but for your hard drive in general, is uh buy a copy of JPEG Mini.

Don't get the cheapo version. Get the studio version, the pro version, whatever it's called. And that includes plugins, extensions for Lightroom and Capture 1. So when I'm exporting my images from Capture 1, they get exported and then they get automatically optimized by JPEG Mini. I just have to click a setting and it does it. So everything that I export is uh optimized by JPEG Mini and JPEG Mini saves an incredible amount of space.

The difference to the image quality is imperceptible. A lot of people are worried about that. So when I export my images, I don't export them at 80% JPEGs. I I export them at as 100% JPEGs and then they go through JPEG mini to shrink the file size down. JPEG Mini is absolutely a software that every photographer should own. Get a copy of JPEG Mini. Run and optimize all your images through JPEG Mini.

Name them properly. Create and write alt text for every single image that you upload. That's very critical. Number three is ignoring local SEO. You need a Google business profile. You want to like add all your business info, your hours, your contact information, your website, and you want to upload images to your Google business profile, and you also want to be making sure that you are getting Google reviews from your clients.

Solicit those reviews every time you do a session. You also need to be using uh locality on your website. Uh the this is the biggest uh frustration that I see on photography websites, especially consumerbased photography, portraits, newborns, maternity, weddings. The biggest thing that I see is not including your location. I can't I can't find it on in your It should be in your footer on every page.

It should be in your about section. You should have a list of like your service areas on your website. You should have pages on your website that are specific to your city. If you shoot head shot, you should have a headshot page. You should have a head shot in this city page. Include the locality in the main information on your website so that Google knows where you are, but also people who are looking at your website aren't spending time going through.

I was just looking at a headshot website cuz when I was doing that example for Hamilton headsh shot, an ad came up for someone who I had never heard of. I clicked through, I went on on their website and I looked through and I couldn't find any information, but I finally found out they're in a city 3 hours away from me. You need to have local content to help Google connect you with the people who type in head shot near me.

People do that. You want to make sure that you're the result that's coming up. So, include service areas not only in your business profile, but on your website. Include service areas in your blogging information. When you're blogging a wedding or an engagement or a maternity session, newborn session, what every time you're blogging your sessions, and you should be blogging every session, we'll get into that in a minute. you should be including the location where that took place.

Especially if you're photographing at locations of interest. So if you're doing an engagement session at a specific conservation area, include the name of that conservation area. If you're doing a uh wedding elopement uh at city hall, include the name of that city hall. So people who want to get married at that city hall are they're typing in wedding photographer Hamilton City Hall. And if you have that blog post, wedding at Hamilton City Hall, they're they're like, "Oh, this this person has done it before.

This is the person I'm gonna I'm gonna look at first, right? They may not hire you. Hopefully, you're your work is good and you're you're a great photographer and everything else is great. The whole connection with your client is great that they will hire you, but you will not get hired if they can't find you." That's the key takeaway for this whole video is you need to be able to be found, and SEO will fix that.

Okay, so complete your Google business profile. Number one, get that done. Use location-based keywords in your homepage, in your subsequent pages, and in your locality pages, and include a service area. Create blog posts that are relevant to local venues, uh, neighborhoods, uh, or even events. And then again, ask clients to leave Google reviews. It's one of the most critical things that you can do is just ask for that review.

They help more than you can possibly imagine. Mistake number four is having a poor website structure. So, what does this mean? It means a couple of things. It means a hierarchy of how your website is laid out. A mistake that I often see is people will have like their domain, then they'll have information, and then they'll have wedding photography, domain, information, engagement photography, domain, information, newborn photography.

It should be the other way around. It should be website, wedding photography, information, gallery, portfolios, website, personal branding photography, rates. So you want to categorize things in a very specific hierarchy from a URL structure, but on the page as well, you want all your information to be structured as well. So you have an H1 tag at the top, that's your title. Any other headings on your website should be H2 or lower.

Think of everything as a section. If it's an H2, and then there's a subsequent text, that's H3 or H4 or H5. And so a new section, H2 again. H3 H2 again, and so on. and so forth. One H1 tag on that page. Google has said it doesn't really matter at this point, but getting in the habit and staying in the habit is important. It's no longer just Google looking at your websites. Now you have large language models running searches across the entire internet.

So you need to also be thinking about structuring the content on your website for how a large language model like Chad GPT or Google Gemini Anthropic Claude uh DeepS seek perplexity how they're going to be reading your website and understanding the information on your website as well. People are using these AI large language models to do searches. Also related to this is navigation structure on the navigation at the top of your site.

It should be very clear where they should be clicking. If you are making people work and try to figure out like what does this mean? What does this mean? They're going to leave your page. They're going to bounce pretty fast. And when people bounce from your website fast and Google's seeing that people are not staying on your website, that's going to decrease the rank on your website. You want to make sure that your navigation is clear, easy to understand for robots and people.

And then finally within that, you want to make sure that you have good internal linking. A lot of people don't do this. They only keep the internal linking within their menu. And that's not good. What you want to do is on your pages in your blogs when you're when you say, "Hey, I shot these wedding photos at this venue." Wedding photos should be linked to the main wedding photography page on your website.

Every time you're blogging and creating content and creating that value, adding value to your potential reader, you're linking to other sections of your website. So, people are staying and they might click on it and then take a look at your weddings. But if you writing a blog talking about your wedding photography and you don't have a link to your wedding photography in the content of the blog and you they have to like scroll back up, it's adding friction.

It's it's it may seem small, but it's adding a little bit of friction to your website. And that brings me to the final mistake that I see people making, which is that they have no content strategy. They're not blogging. They're not posting their sessions. They're not adding information of value to their clients. They're just posting their galleries, posting some information about this is me, this is my family, this is what I shoot, this is what I do, and that's it.

You're not going to you're not going to rank. You're just not going to do well with that strategy. You need to be doing everything that I've said before, but you also need to be providing value in the form of content for your potential clients. Even if they never read it. Even if they never read it. That is so important. You have to accept that you are generally writing blog content for Google. Google's search crawler.

Some people will land on those pages. Some people are going to read it. But you have to accept that for the most part, you're writing content to create a greater sense of value in Google's eyes for it to recommend you above everyone else. An easy way to do that is to blog every single session that you photograph. Every single session, select 10 to 20 images from that. Apply all of the imaging SEO that I just talked about earlier in this video to every single one of those images on your website.

Make sure that you're blogging every session. I can't state that enough. Put it up there. Get it up there. Let people see your work. Name the files properly. Alt text the image properly. Structure it properly on your website. Create blog posts that play into longtail keyword indexing. And longtail keyword indexing means that the keyword phrase is just going to be longer. So instead of just photography, you might have engagement photography.

That's a bit longer. You might then have sunset engagement photography as a blog post, a dynamic blog post. I've talked about that in a previous video. I'll link to that video below as well. You might have engagement photography at Balls Falls Conservation Area. Not a lot of people are going to be searching for that, but the people that are are going to find you first. That's what you want. In Squarespace, you can create self-updating blog posts on your website that will trigger every time you add a new blog with a keyword and then that blog page is updated and then Google sees that that page is being updated.

So, what you can do is you can also create like best engagement photos of 2025 and then every time you do an engagement session, that blog post gets updated. And when someone is searching for best engagement photos 2025, guess what they find? They find your website. Best Hamilton engagement photos 2025. Best Burlington wedding photography in 2025. Have those longtail keywords so that people can find you.

Your strategy should be this simple. Attract, educate, convert. When a client emails you a question, you should be thinking, "How can I turn this into content?" Avoid these mistakes and apply all of these fixes to your website. Your website will steadily do better. These mistakes are common, but everyone is fixable. And even the smallest changes can have a big impact on your website. I have written an ebook called The Ultimate SEO Guide for Photographers.

You can get this book by clicking on this QR code. For more information, click the link in the description below and check it out. Uh it's incredibly valuable. I think I I hope it helps you. Please let me know in the comments if anything in this video has helped you and and what you're doing to correct the mistakes that maybe you've made on your