SEO for photographers on WordPress

Pages every photographers site needs

• Genre pages. One page per kind of work (weddings, family, headshots, commercial product), each with a curated gallery, your approach, what a session includes and a starting price.
• Venue or location posts. A post per shoot at a named venue or landmark, with a short story and the venue's name in the text. Couples search for photos of the venues they are considering.
• Pricing and packages page. Starting prices, what each package includes and travel fees. It qualifies leads before they email you.
• About page. Who you are, where you are based, how you work and a real photo of you. People hire a person, and this page is where they decide.
• Session guide pages. What to wear, how to prepare and what happens on the day. These answer searches like "what to wear for family photos" from people close to booking.

Galleries need words around them

A gallery page with forty images and no text gives search engines almost nothing to rank. Add an introduction of a few paragraphs: who, where, the season, the light, what made the shoot distinctive. Name the venue and town in the text, not only in a tag.

Alt text should describe what each image shows, such as "bride and groom on the stone bridge at Biltmore at sunset", not "wedding photographer Asheville" repeated forty times. Hydrogen SEO's AI alt text can draft descriptions in bulk from the Media Library with a free account, but it cannot know the venue or who is in the frame, so edit the drafts. Rename files before upload (biltmore-bridge-sunset.jpg, not DSC_4412.jpg).

Speed, file sizes and image search

Photographers upload large files, and a portfolio page that loads 30 MB of JPEGs will have a poor Largest Contentful Paint on phones. Export web versions at the size they display, serve modern formats such as WebP or AVIF, and lazy-load everything below the first screen. Keep the hero image eager so it is not delayed.

Hydrogen SEO's XML sitemap includes image entries for each post, which helps image search find your photos. For licensing, Google Images can show a "Licensable" badge when an image carries license and acquireLicensePage in structured data or the equivalent IPTC metadata embedded in the file. Many editing tools can write IPTC creator and copyright fields on export.

Keep client galleries out of search

Proofing galleries and private client sets should not be indexable. Use your gallery tool's password protection or a noindex setting, and do not link to them from public pages. In Hydrogen SEO, switch on No Index in a page's SEO Settings sheet for any private gallery page built in WordPress.

Also check attachment pages. Older WordPress sites create a separate page for every uploaded image, which can mean thousands of thin URLs. WordPress 6.4 and later turn attachment pages off on new installs, but older sites may still have them; redirecting them to the image file or parent post removes the clutter. For schema, LocalBusiness with your service area suits most studios; a Person for the photographer on the About page adds identity.

LocalBusiness schema example

A starting point for your site. Replace every value with your own, and only mark up what is visible on the page.

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "LocalBusiness",
  "@id": "https://example.com/#studio",
  "name": "Rowan Hale Photography",
  "url": "https://example.com/",
  "telephone": "+1-828-555-0131",
  "image": "https://example.com/images/rowan-hale.jpg",
  "priceRange": "$$$",
  "address": {
    "@type": "PostalAddress",
    "addressLocality": "Asheville",
    "addressRegion": "NC",
    "addressCountry": "US"
  },
  "areaServed": [
    {
      "@type": "State",
      "name": "North Carolina"
    },
    {
      "@type": "State",
      "name": "Tennessee"
    }
  ],
  "founder": {
    "@type": "Person",
    "name": "Rowan Hale",
    "jobTitle": "Wedding and portrait photographer"
  },
  "sameAs": [
    "https://www.instagram.com/rowanhalephoto"
  ]
}

Checklist

• Write several paragraphs of text for every public gallery
• Describe what each photo shows in alt text, including the place
• Rename image files before uploading
• Export web-sized images in WebP or AVIF
• Keep the first large image eager and lazy-load the rest
• Publish a post for each named venue you shoot at
• Password-protect or noindex proofing and client galleries
• Redirect leftover attachment pages on older sites
• Add license and creator metadata to images you sell or license
• Show starting prices on a packages page