Last Updated: February 15th, 2020
Making the decision to start your own wedding photography business is just the beginning of a long journey. The most successful businesses will be able to attract clients over and over again. The great news is…once you book your client, they are yours to “wow” over and over again as you shoot their engagement, wedding day, and so on.
Based on our own experience starting a photography business, getting the first couple of clients booked is one of the hard parts about the industry. From there, it starts to feel less and less like an uphill battle – and more like something that seems entirely achievable. That is not to say there won’t be difficult times ahead, but getting those first people in the door can be a real confidence builder for sure.
As you begin to grow, the question soon becomes…
How do I get more traffic to my wedding photography website?
The reason for asking this is simple – you want to bring more visitors to your website, but your’e not entirely sure how to do this effectively.
Before we really jump into our own response for how you can bring more visitors to your website, we want to step back and make sure you define the type of traffic you are looking to get first.
Increased Website Traffic vs. Increased Bookings
One of the mistakes many website owners make is believing that increased website traffic is always a good thing.
While, no doubt, there is value in it – you need to identify what you are really after when you are looking to increase your website’s traffic.
As wedding photographers, one of our key goals we have is to get new search traffic organically through search engines like Google, that will be interested in checking out our work and booking with us. This could be for a wedding, engagement session, portraits, etc. How we approach this specific goal is different than the larger goal of increasing traffic, and being honest, is actually not the biggest contributor to the overall volume increase. We’ll discuss all of this in more detail in a second!!
Another goal you might have (and we do ourselves!), is to expand your wedding photography business brand to be something more that just taking pictures. Given the challenges of not always consistent incomes with the wedding industry, particularly during the winter “off season,” it is important to us to be able to find other revenue streams.
Actively speaking, we do a lot of smaller sessions during the winter – some even indoor at a local studio we can rent out. Passively, we produce a lot of blog content on both Formed From Light and Hand and Arrow Photography and monetize with affiliate links and advertisements from time to time.
These are just a few examples that we have based on our own experiences, what are the driving reasons behind your wanting to increase traffic to your website? Let us know in the comments!
10 Ways to Grow Your Wedding Photography Website’s Traffic
Now that we’ve started to stir your thoughts about what the goal(s) you have for increasing your website traffic are – we can discuss in more detail some ways you can put this into action.
We have a lot of experience driving traffic to our own websites, and even some past projects we have worked on outside of photography that required a learned knowledge on this topic.
When applied consistently, increasing your website traffic is actually a pretty easy thing to do – but doing it well, that is something that takes patience and continued experience over time.
Knowing right out the gate who your target audience is will be the biggest asset as you approach this task, and it is the one area where many people make mistakes – you want to grow your traffic in a way where you attract the visitors you want, not just visitors who will click your page link and bounce.
Here are 10 ways to grow your wedding photography website traffic to get the right kind of traffic to your site.
1). Learn about SEO
SEO (or “Search Engine Optimization”) is the foundational knowledge you need to get good at online marketing. At it’s core, increasing your website traffic is a form of marketing – you are marketing your website content and your brand to the world, and people who are searching for things via Google, Bing, and other search engines, can have the ability to find you. This is super effective marketing when done right, and free if you want it to be.
Learning about SEO is a starting point – much like going to school to become a doctor is only a starting point for a career that ends up requiring a lot of hands on experience to really know in detail. We have put together a great little list of starter articles on SEO for you to reference:
- Beginner’s Guide to SEO by Moz
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Starter Guide by Google
- The First 9 Things You Should Learn in SEO by Forbes
2). Use Keyword Research to Attract Viewers
While the use of keyword strings is a component of SEO – it is deserving of it’s own section as we can have a quite involved conversation about the do’s and dont’s of using keywords in your posts.
While this topic actually requires it’s own article series to really be effective, here is a snippet of some good information about keywords & how to use them to effectively drive more traffic to your website.
What to know about keywords – 2 types:
- Short-tail keywords
- Long-tail keywords
A short-tail keyword is (as the name implies…) – a short keyword string. These are really the most “basic” keywords. Every word you type is in itself a keyword. Small 2-3 word phrases also fall into this category like “wedding photographer” or “professional photography” or “wedding photography service.”
The good thing about short-tail keywords is that they are easy to target naturally in your writings. The bad thing about them is, well, everyone who is blogging or otherwise producing written content on their website(s) is using these terms if within the same niche – whether intentionally or not. While this works out well for the highest ranking websites – usually established “authority” sites – for the smaller blogs out there (like our own), it is incredibly difficult to compete and get content seen by organic viewers.
This is where long-tail keywords come into play. A long-tail keyword is just the opposite of the shorter keyword strings we just talked about, and instead involve longer search phrases. For example, searches for things like “Lehigh Valley wedding photographer”, “how to start a photography business blog?”, and “professional photography education resources online” are all examples of longer keywords. It is these types of keywords that we tend to focus on the most, and they are the most likely to drive real and beneficial traffic to our websites.
As you can see from the examples we provided, long-tail keywords are great because they are more specific. While there are many “wedding photographers” in the world (and all competing for search engine real estate), there are much less “Lehigh Valley wedding photographers” out there. The result? More targeted traffic!!
So…with all this fun talk about keywords, how do you find good keywords to target? This is yet another detailed conversation for another day, and there are many options and approaches out there, but a good starting point is through using the Google Keyword Planner Tool. This is a free service that enables you to find great keywords, and is integrated as a part of Google Adwords, which is used by advertisers to bid on certain keywords.
3). Target Your Local Area (or the Area You Want to Work)
Going along with some of the keyword strings we mentioned above, where we mentioned a popular keyword in our local area (“Lehigh Valley photographer”), with the Lehigh Valley being the region we live within in Pennsylvania, there is something really critical for wedding photographers to take into consideration when they are looking to grow their online presence.
One type of audience we are looking to attract to our wedding photography website are people who want to hire wedding photographers in our area. Ranking high for a keyword like the one mentioned is important to our marketing strategy – as it is a pretty popular keyword for people to search in our area, and being up high in the search engine means we will be one of the first photographers put in front of a prospective client’s face.
Of course, location tagging is about more than just your local area, and you can really take advantage of this if you are looking to shoot elopements or destination weddings. If there is a place you’d like to shoot, start tagging your media content, writing blog posts, etc. about those locations. For us, our personal travels to Iceland led to a large volume of great landscape shots – many of which we tag with wedding photography type keywords like “Iceland wedding photographer.” It has the potential to drive unique traffic to your content, and who knows, maybe someone looking for a photographer will fly you there! It happens!!
Outside of the world of keywords, a few other things worth considering when it comes to location optimization:
- Get a Google Business Listing. This will allow your business to show up in a nice format on Google listings.
- Know that, generally, localized content is easy content to get traffic from. The reason for this is simple: there are usually very few, if any, pieces of valuable content online about most areas of the world. You may have more competition if you are in a major metro-area, but if you happen to live in a small town, tagging your town has the potential to drive a lot of website traffic.
4). Create a Social Media Presence
Social media platforms – such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. – all have a powerful ability to put you (as a brand) in direct contact with people.
For better and for worse, your standing on social media, such as how many followers you have, play into how modern audiences perceive your brand – as well as impact how interested they will be to want to check out things you are offering (be it website content, services, or otherwise).
As valuable as social media is, keep one thing in mind: you will only get value from social media if you put in a lot of effort to produce high quality, interesting, and valuable content that is an accurate reflection of your brand.
The way we manage to stay on top of our social media postings, especially during a busy wedding season, is by utilizing Later – a social media scheduling app that can be set up to plan and automatically post things to Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. It comes highly recommended by us for this reason – and through the quality content we post, can be directly attributed to a large quantity of our sales, which most frequently come from IG referrals.
But, how does this all impact website traffic? Simple! People find and like us on social media, then come to our website to see more about us, what we’re up to, read our blog content, and sometimes even book us for their wedding!
Beware of social treadmills –
With all of this said regarding social media, it would be irresponsible of us not to put forth a warning about just how important it is to beware of social treadmills. In so far as we can see in our research, “social treadmills” is a term coined by Jim and Ricky (creators of a number of high trafficked authority and niche websites, such as ImprovePhotography.com, CamperReport.com, CabinFreedom.com, DirtBikePlanet.com and IncomeSchool.com) and mentioned and covered as point #5 (Secret #3) (on their Phase 3: The Authority Site slide, introduced at the 22:54 mark) in their YouTube video entitled How to Go Full-Time with Blogging in 24 Months (FULL WEBINAR).
Social treadmills are just as they sound.
In explaining what a social treadmill is, in the above YouTube video, Jim relates his experience actively and aggressively investing a significant amount of his time trying to build, grow, and engage an audience and community over on his Facebook page for his authority website that just so happens to be in the photography niche (and, provided here, as this shows an exact case study for photographers, like YOU, to learn from)–ImprovePhotography.com.
Currently at over 600,000+ page likes now, Jimmy details how Facebook’s continual changing of policies and functionality of its website has had a direct impact on small business owner’s Facebook pages–with Facebook now favoring paid advertisement for Facebook page owners to reach the very audience that, in many cases, they invested significant time and effort (and, money, in some cases) into growing before the implementation and changes in paid reach.
After looking at his website analytics one day, a light bulb went off for Jim.
He realized that less than 1% of his website’s traffic was actually coming from the 600,000+ Facebook page likes he had worked tirelessly to achieve over years of building his Facebook page audience and community. To him upon reflection, this represented hundreds of hours of wasted time with an opportunity cost that could have otherwise been spent writing his own article content and building his own website–a website that he actually owned and controlled himself.
This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t invest any time into posting on Facebook or building a community there–we do this, and we mentioned earlier in this article about our use of a social media scheduling app called Later to essentially automate our posting on Facebook (and other social media outlets)–however, it is important for us to convey to you the reality of the ROI (return on investment) of your time and effort of building a community on Facebook (as one of many social media outlets), in particular, at this time.
To conclude this section of this article, Facebook, and other social media outlets/platforms, have become social treadmills; like an actual treadmill functions, users can spend a significant amount of time and effort doing what Jim did (i.e. running on the treadmill) and never actually get anywhere with their business (or incur minimal results and ROI, so as to make it simply not worth the time, energy, and effort invested). If at all possible–and, in many cases there are tools and resources available that allow for it–we would highly recommend automating your social media processes (posting, engaging, etc) in so much as you are able to.
5). Engage Your Audience
Now that you have social media setup, it’s time to shift gears and think about actually engaging your audience.
Their are different ways to do this, and you need to find what works for you – both as an individual and a business brand. For ourselves, we are actually fairly reserved in “real life,” and as a result don’t tend to make too many posts about ourselves or our personal lives except when we have something extraordinary going on. This most frequently is exemplified through our travels, as it’s hard not to post about these sorts of things.
By putting parts of yourself into your posts, you become a more authentic brand. It should be no surprise when we say this – people are attracted to authenticity. For us, it is the best part about running our own business – being able to be ourselves without restriction.
This is another topic we could probably spend an hour talking about, but let’s break down a few different ways you can engage your audience and entice them to check out your website:
- Ask questions on social media posts
- Answer questions people may have asked in the past on your website and post the link
- Post all of your blog content on social media
- Set up a mailing list and send out email-blasts to your followers with links to your content
- Set up automated messages on Honeybook to send useful content to your current clients
- Hold contests on social media that require engagement with your content in exchange for the chance to win a prize (such as through the use of Rafflecopter)
Want to know more about Honeybook? Check out our article: Honeybook – a Comprehensive Review
6). Don’t Disregard Face-to-Face Referrals
While unlikely to be a huge generator in website views, face-to-face referrals have the potential to be the best kind of traffic to your website. We’re talking about people who are “pre-qualified leads” – breaking down the marketing jargon, we mean these are people who you have already broken down a barrier with, they already like you and are interested, and now they want to check out your work.
The most common way to get face-to-face referrals is to hand out business cards and talk about your wedding photography service. For us, this most heavily happens at wedding venues on the day of a wedding we are shooting. During some lulls, we might find ourselves chatting with some of the guests, as well as other wedding vendors. Most of these conversations result in us handing out our business card – sometimes being asked for it directly.
These people, with your card in hand, can find your website, increase your viewership, and potentially invest in your service. It’s a win-win, and while you’re not likely going to have a large volume of people visiting your site – the people that due are invaluable.
7). Create Content People Want
You will probably not find it to be a shocking revelation, but the best content that exists on the internet is the content people want.
Given the diversity of the human population, it can sometimes be difficult to lock in exactly what this means as people who run websites and write blog posts. There are after all many, many articles online just talking about small details of some C-list celebrities life. Where there is a will, there is a way – and where there is content, there is probably an audience (even if it’s a small one).
With this said, the goal is not to have an audience of one, but to consistently grow your audience by producing quality content. Assuming you have a goal that aligns with this statement (and how we think 🙂 )
While we can’t dictate what kind of content you should produce, we can help give you some guidance on things you will want to do to make your content stick out:
- Create a mixture of short and long content – with emphasis given to long-form, staple content that can gain optimal traction in search engines
- Create content that serves multiple purposes such as: driving brand awareness, communicating special deals, reviewing photography equipment, talking about personal experiences, educating clients and/or other photographers on topics that mean things to you…the list goes on…
- Add custom imagery (photos, graphs, charts, etc.) to make it your own and leave more of an impression on your audience
- Write naturally and provide useful information – this is probably the most important thing you can do!
8). Link to Other Vendors You Work With (& Have Them Link Back)
Having a solid backlinking strategy is an important part of growing your website traffic. Backlinks come in many forms, and all impact your search engine rankings. One of the easiest ways to get organic backlinks is to link to other vendors you have worked with, and enabling them to link back to you. Sometimes, all you have to do is ask!
Depending on the vendor and how much traffic they receive, the potential to drive good traffic to your website can be quite high. For example, say someone lands on 15 Landsdowne Catering website (a caterer we’ve worked with and love!), and stumble across the link to our wedding photography business (Hand and Arrow Photography) on their Vendors & Venues page. While the visitor may have been there initially to check out wedding catering options, they may also want to check out a recommended photographer, and click through to check us out!
It’s another small strategy in the context of a larger website traffic growth strategy that can reveal some added viewership!
9). Tag Your Images
One of the most impactful ways we have increased our website traffic is by meticulously tagging every image we upload to our site. This is referred to as “alt text”, “alt attribute,” “alt tag” and an “alt description” – all used interchangeably, and their are probably other names for it. In essence, by filling in this field associated with your image – it stores the file name meta-data and reports this to search engine robots that crawl your website periodically.
If you didn’t know, search engine robots can’t actually see your image, but instead read text – or in the case of images – how an image breaks down into text. These alternative tags tell the search engine what the image is of.
So for example, when we post a picture of a beautiful bride, we have many options for tagging the image depending on our intentions. Some options include:
- Literal tagging. Naming the file with the person’s name or some other key feature in the image.
- Location tagging. Name the file in a way that refers to the area the photo was taken. This might be with the city/state/country, or with the name of the wedding venue. For example, you should tag an image like “Barn-Swallow-Farm-Wedding-Photographer”
- Generic SEO tagging. For a lack of better words, you can also tag your images with somewhat relevant tags or descriptors of what a thing is (such as a chart image) to highlight keyword strings you want to optimize your website for. For example, you might want to tag some photos as “wedding-photographer” and “wedding-photographer-1” to just increase your exposure for these very simple terms.
Out of all the tools, photographers have a leg up in this area as we are constantly producing new photographic content just begging to be posted on our websites and tagged correctly.
10). Consistently Update Your Website
Our last suggestion is also the simplest.
One of the most important aspects of driving new traffic to your website is keeping your content fresh. Blogs die out very quickly if they are not maintained, as search engines prioritize content providers that actually provide valuable content consistently.
If you are struggling to put out more content, consider scaling back some of your ideas and just writing shorter pieces.
There are many ways to drive traffic to your wedding photography website.
We have been experiencing this for the past several years, and our growth has been consistently skyrocketing.
Through the production of valuable content paired with some time waiting for our content to be effectively picked up by search engines, we have seen steady growth in site visitors. With this growth in visitors, also has come an increase in inquiries for our photography services, as well as increased commissions from affiliate sales and advertising fees on occasion. While the increasing number of visitors is valuable to us, the real sign of success is seeing how people are interacting with our content in a positive way.
We hope you are able to take the advice provided here and apply it to your own website growth strategy.
How are you planning to put these points to good use? Tell us below in the comments!