SEO for Images: A Photographer’s Guide to Optimizing Your Visual Content

As a photographer, you know that the images you create are a major part of why clients hire you. After all, your images have the power to evoke emotion, share beauty, tell a story, and more! 📸

But did you know that beyond the aesthetics, your images could also draw in future clients with a few SEO optimizations? They can!

Today’s photographers need to know how to deploy quick SEO tips to help their images appear in front of potential clients as they’re searching on Google.

When your image files are named effectively and you’ve successfully included alt text for all of your images, your photos can help drive traffic to your website and improve your search engine rankings, too. 💻

To start, let’s take a moment to define what image SEO is and how you can use it to improve your friendship with Google and draw in potential clients!

Image SEO is a process to optimize, or make more effective, the images that appear on your website.

How do you know if an image is optimized? Well, Google can only understand (and index) images that fit specific criteria.

This means that it’s important for all business owners, but especially photographers, who rely on their imagery to showcase their style and approach and attract potential clients, to ensure that all images meet specific requirements.

The good news? It’s not difficult to take these steps to ensure that your stunning images are visually impressive but also can help your website rank higher in search results, attract more traffic, and get discovered by potential clients! 👏🏻

Here are two quick steps you can take to better optimize your website images:

1) Choose the Right Image File Names 🎞️

As a photographer, you take time to carefully and beautifully edit your client’s images, and one of the final steps of your process before delivering a gallery involves naming the photo files. Typically, photographers name the files with the family name or date (or, in the case of brand photography, the business name and date), followed by a number (ex: “What-Sara-Said-2024-1”).

But before uploading and placing imagery on your business website, it’s important to take a few extra moments to rename your images using descriptive, keyword-rich file names to help optimize your images.

Instead of relying on generic names like “IMG-1234.jpg”, using relevant keywords will help Google understand the role your images play on your photography website.

Here are a few important considerations to keep in mind when naming your images:

• Use dashes, not a lack of spacing and not underscores, between words in your image file names.
  • Correct: “San-Antonio-Wedding-Photographer-Reception.jpg”
  • Incorrect: “SanAntonioWeddingPhotographerReception.jpg” or “San_Antonio-Wedding_Photographer_Reception.jpg”
• Avoid keyword stuffing, which is the practice of using multiple keywords to create long image file names in an effort to boost search results. Google indexing is aware of the inclination to keyword-stuff, so it regularly marks as spam image titles that are unnecessarily long or appear to be full of keywords.
  • Correct: “San-Antonio-Wedding-Photographer-Reception.jpg”
  • Incorrect: “Best-San-Antonio-Wedding-Photographer-Outdoor-Classy-Reception-at-Rancho-La-Mission-June-2024.jpg”
• You can create image titles that share information about your photographic style, but it’s important to always ask yourself first, “What appears in this image?”
  • Correct: “Natural-Light-San-Antonio-Outdoor-Wedding-Ceremony.jpg”
  • Incorrect: “Best-Natural-Light-Photographer-San-Antonio.jpg”

2) Optimizing Image Alt Text for Accessibility and SEO 🔎

While image file names are an important step in optimizing your website (or blog posts!) for Google to crawl and index, there’s one additional step I recommend taking, not only for SEO optimization, but also for accessibility. That step is entering alt text for the images you use on your website.

There are two purposes for image alt text. First, alt text has the important job of helping improve website accessibility for people with different abilities.

Depending on the person’s needs, devices such as screen readers and other assistive devices may be used to help a potential client who is visually impaired, for instance, read and understand the content (including the visual elements!) on your website. Both image file names and alt text are able to be crawled and understood by assistive devices, which is why it’s important for these names to be accurate and not overly complex or keyword-stuffed.

In addition, alt text is also considered a secondary way to enhance SEO. As my own SEO coaches, Abbey and Courtney of Duo Collective, state, “Alt text is important for SEO because search engine bots can’t see or understand images very well.”

So, what does alt text look like or need to include?

Again, I turn to my SEO coaches at Duo Collective here, who offer the following guidance:

“This is an image of [fill in the blank]. That blank is your alt text.”

So simple, right? Keeping this quick sentence in mind when you’re creating alt text will help you to avoid unnecessary keyword stuffing (although you certainly can use keywords in alt text) and will help people with disabilities be able to understand and envision what your images showcase when using assistive devices like screen readers.

Here are some examples of alt text that I’ve written for images on my own website:

Copywriter Sara Gillis creating website copy for a photographer client

Show art for Copywriter on Call marketing podcast

How to Optimize the Images on Your Photography Website and Blog 📸

It can feel overwhelming to rename all of your images and write alt text for every image that appears on your website. Instead of going back and changing every single image that exists on your website or blog, consider adopting this strategy moving forward! Now that you know better, you can do better. 💛

As you upload new images to your website or blog posts, consider renaming your files BEFORE uploading them to your website (it’s SO much easier to change the names before they hit your website!) and taking a few extra moments to add alt text to your images.

These practices are important not only for search engine visibility, but also for accessibility. After all, who doesn’t want their website to be accessible to potential clients of different ability levels?! Like so many industries, services, and products in our modern world, photography is for everyone, and promoting a more accessible online experience is beneficial to all of us.

NOTE: You’ll notice this post didn’t mention image compression, which is also an important step to make in optimizing your website. I’ve got an entire blog post coming up that’s dedicated to that topic, so stay tuned!

Ways to Work Together

Want more support as you elevate not only the visuals on your website, but your website copy, too? I’d love to support you!

• Storysale – a three-month group coaching program for photographers and creatives to market their magic ✨

In Storysale, you’ll receive:

✔️ Three months of weekly, 60-minute group coaching calls with me and guest experts

✔️ Weekly 1:1 Voxer access to ask any questions you have about marketing your services, creating offers that your clients will love, brand messaging, and more

✔️ 1:1 Intensives – every month of our program, students will schedule 1:1 intensives with me to put your website copy, SEO page titles and meta descriptions, and email copy to work for YOUR business and your ideal client

• Copywriter on Call – for the photographer who wants custom website copy…fast!

What You Get:

✔️ 1:1 kickoff call, where we talk strategy and define your project to-do list

✔️ Up to 6 pages of done-for-you website copywriting, with two speedy rounds of revisions to ensure we get it right

✔️ Custom website copy, delivered in Google Docs or implemented on your website

After our strategy session wraps up, I ride off into the proverbial sunset (or, as copywriters often do, into my Airpods-muffled world) to do what I do best: write. ✍🏼

During this time, you get to hang out in your zone of genius or serve your people. In other words, you do you, friend. I’ve got this!

At the end of your project, I’ll send over all of your deliverables or place your copy on your website, and thank you kindly for trusting me with your brand and your business!

Click here to connect, and let’s work together to create your very own word magic in your business. ✨