How Important Is SEO For Wedding Photographers & Filmmakers?

When it comes to SEO, I’ve found that it’s a long-game strategy. However, if you are consistent and apply yourself well, over time this can be a huge benefit to getting good enquiries for locations and venues you want to rank for. I look at it like this. If you make a great page, optimise it well and somehow do enough off-page SEO to rank it well. That one page isn’t enough for you to get a strong number of enquiries for a successful business. However, if you’re able to create one more page that’s optimised as well and ranks well you have doubled your chances of getting more enquiries.

Now let us exaggerate to create the point I want to get across. Let’s say you make 2 pages a week for your website over the next 2 years. That’s 208 well-optimised pages that are going to generate leads. So like I said working on your SEO today isn’t going to necessarily a strategy to get more enquiries in the short term. Though I’m a strong believer in working on this in the background consistently and over time. FEDWED is a hugely non-competitive environment. The nature of our industry means when it comes to SEO we are all competing to rank as best we can. In 18 months time those who have put effort into SEO consistently are going to be in a much stronger position. The number of wedding photographers and filmmakers has grown so much over the years meaning more and more people are competing for work. Use the following tips or look out for the FEDWED SEO workshops to learn more.

Find The Right Keywords

I (Ste) love shooting weddings in Italy and over the years I’ve put a good portion of energy into ranking for “Italy Wedding Photographer“. So I’ve spent time using free tools such as Google Keyword Planner or paid tools like Ubersuggest to find actual keywords I want to rank for and of those keywords, which one’s potential couples are actually searching for. For example, you may want to rank for “London wedding photographer”. By doing research I’ve found this search term is searched for approximately 2900 times a month. However, searching for “editorial wedding photographer London” is only searched 10-100 times a month (Source: Google Keyword Planner + Ubersuggest). So using these tools makes sure you’re spending time working on the most important and lucrative keywords available.  These tools also help you work out how competitive these keywords are. Trying to rank for “Wedding Filmmaker” is going to be much more difficult to rank for than, “Wedding Filmmaker In Bristol”.

So in my journey to rank well for; Italy wedding photographer, I’ve found the keywords that are right for me. I’ve worked out which keywords I’m more likely to rank for from a competitive perspective and focused my content creation around that.

Use Internal Links To Boost Authority

Creating one good page is all well and good, though you can increase the strength of this page by linking to it from relatable content on your website. For example; let’s say you want to rank for “Yorkshire Wedding Photographer”. You’ve optimised your page and you have something to be proud of. Now is the time to either use other pages from your website to link to this page. Your strongest pages and those that are relevant are best. Your homepage would be a good start and perhaps you have an article on your site titled; Best Yorkshire Wedding Venues (this has an approximate search volume of 3600 see Ubersuggest below).

If you don’t have an article like this you can consider writing one. Again use the keyword research tools to come up with ideas for relateable content to Yorkshire Weddings. A great website for generating content ideas is Answer The Public. Once you have additional content, these pages can not only rank themselves but help you and your other pages by working as a team.

This also shows your potential couples as well as Google that you’re an expert in your field.

Doing this over time creates a content-rich website and will boost your overall SEO.

Get New Backlinks Via Guest Blogging

At FEDWED were all about bringing videographers/filmmakers and photographers together. Making new connections in the wedding industry is one of the most powerful things you can do. Making new friends, finding out new ideas and helping each other to grow. This doesn’t just end with those with cameras. The industry is full of wonderful people who are always keen to make new connections and collaborate. That’s why this tip Getting Back Links via Guest Blogging is great. You could offer a local wedding planner or florist a guest blog from yourself to them for their blog. A blog titled; “3 things to consider when looking for a wedding photographer or filmmaker”. This way they get some value in having good valuable content for their couples and you get a back link and a new connection from it. You can also add more value to your couples by asking the reverse. Ask a planner to write 5 quick tips for when you start planning your own wedding. You can have this on your blog and use it to gain visitors to your website. Backlinks are great for improving your DA (Domain Authority). Generally the higher your DA the more likely you are to rank better.

These new connections you create with local suppliers can lead to new and exciting opportunities. From working together on styled shoots, sending referrals to one another and building a trusted mini community you can all help and support each other.

Moving Forward

If you’re currently a member of FEDWED why not come along to one of our free networking events? We always have mini-talks at our events converging all sorts of topics from SEO to Flash and Creativity to Getting More Bookings. You’ll meet new and like-minded filmmakers and photographers who you can swap ideas with and learn from each other. If you are not a member keep an eye out for our SEO workshop that will be added to the events calendar. FEDWED members get notified about these first and also receive a discount on the cost of the workshop.