SEO for Photographers: Back to Basics From Someone Whose Website Fell Off Google
SEO for photographers comes down to one thing: making it easy for Google to understand exactly what you do and where you do it, so the right clients can find you. That's it. Not code, not dark arts, not a monthly retainer to a mysterious agency. And I can tell you this with some confidence, because in September 2025 my own website, the one that had fed my family for years, fell off page one of Google. And I had to learn what actually matters the hard way.
So this is the post I wish I'd read before it happened. What went wrong, what fixed it, and where to start if your own website is sitting on page three doing absolutely nothing for you.
Why isn't my photography website showing up on Google?
Usually for one of three boring reasons: Google can't tell what you do, Google can't tell where you do it, or someone else is simply answering the searcher's question better than you are.
In my case, it was something sneakier. I'd been making changes to my website to optimise it for AI search, and without realising it, I'd undone years of solid SEO work in the process. Right in the middle of a Google-wide re-evaluation. My traffic roughly halved, my most important keywords slid from page one to pages two and three, and the enquiries dried up with them. Nine years in business and I was suddenly invisible.
The lesson I want you to take from that isn't "don't touch your website". It's this: check your rankings regularly. I didn't notice for months, because business was busy and checking Google felt like a job for another day. Google Search Console is free, it takes ten minutes to set up, and it would have shown me the slide the week it started.
Where do I actually start with SEO?
When I finally asked for help, I got it from Lee Fletcher, a absolutely brilliant photographer and SEO expert in Scotland. I booked an hour with him fully expecting to be blinded by science. Instead he said: "You're not bad at SEO. You just need to go back to basics."
And the basics, for a photographer, are gloriously unglamorous:
One page per service. If you offer family shoots, proposals and headshots, that's three pages, not one page trying to rank for everything. Google matches pages to searches, not whole websites.
Say what you do in the words people search. You might call it "capturing your story in golden light". The mum looking for you is typing "family photographer in [your town]". Your page title, your headings and your opening paragraph need her words, not just yours. (Fifteen years as a journalist drummed this into me: write for the reader, not for yourself. Google reads exactly the way a busy stranger does.)
Name your places. Location is half of every photography search. The towns you cover, the parks you shoot in, the landmarks behind your favourite sessions... they all belong on your pages, naturally, in sentences a human would write.
Claim your Google Business Profile and gather reviews. Free, hugely underused, and those reviews get quoted everywhere: by Google, and increasingly by AI tools when someone asks them to recommend a photographer.
None of this is clever. All of it works. My rescue was an eight-week plan built on exactly these foundations, and I spent a school half term buried in my laptop putting it into action (my children were THRILLED). By June 2026 my key rankings were confirmed back on page one, and they've held.
Do photographers need a blog for SEO?
Honestly? It's the single best long-term move most of us aren't making. Your service page can only answer so many questions. A blog answers all the others your clients are typing into Google: what to wear, where to shoot, what things cost, what happens if it rains. Every genuinely helpful post is another door into your website.
The catch is consistency, and this is where most photographers (me included, for years) fall down. Writing takes time we don't have. It's also exactly the problem I now use AI to solve, but that's a story for another post... you can watch me testing the whole system in public over on my From 0 experiment if you're curious.
Do I need to pay someone to do my SEO?
Not at first, and please don't hand money to anyone who cold-calls you promising page one. (I've had those calls. I only listened so I could tell them to get lost.)
The foundations above are completely doable yourself, for free, without touching a line of code. Where an expert earns their fee is diagnosis: when something's gone properly wrong, the way it did for me, an experienced pair of eyes will find in an hour what you'd spend months guessing at. I am NOT an SEO expert, and I've never needed to be. I know enough to get my website ranking highly on Google, and that's the level every working photographer can reach. (And if you'd like the exact method rather than months of guessing, that's precisely what my SEO Success for Photographers course teaches: nine lessons, no code, £99.)
How long does SEO take to work?
Longer than you want, sooner than you fear. Small fixes (page titles, headings, your Google Business Profile) can show movement within weeks. The bigger authority-building work, like blogging, compounds over months. My own recovery took a focused eight weeks of foundations plus a few months of patience.
Which is exactly why the best time to start is now, while things are fine. SEO built in the good times is what catches you in the bad ones.
What about AI search?
This is the new frontier. More and more of your future clients aren't googling "family photographer near me" at all. They're asking ChatGPT, or Claude, or Google's AI answers, and booking whoever gets recommended. Getting your business into THOSE answers is called AIEO (AI engine optimisation), it's the thing that tripped me up when I did it wrong, and almost nobody in photography is teaching it yet. It deserves a post all of its own, and it's getting one: that's next in this series.
In the meantime, if you'd rather have all of this laid out step by step, my SEO Success for Photographers course walks you through the whole thing in nine lessons, no code and no jargon, built from the work that took me to the top of page one and held me there. It lives alongside the rest of my photography business courses, and if you're not ready for a course yet, my free guides for photographers are yours, no strings.
Because the brilliant photographs are the part you've already mastered. Being findable is just the part nobody taught us. And it's SO much more learnable than it looks.
Good Questions, Honest Answers
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SEO (search engine optimisation) is the work of making a photography website easy for Google to understand and rank: clear service pages, locations named in plain language, page titles that match what clients search, reviews, and helpful blog content.
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Start with the foundations: one page per service, page titles and headings using the words clients actually search (service plus location), your locations named naturally on the page, an active Google Business Profile with reviews, and regular helpful blog posts.
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The foundations cost nothing but time: Google Search Console, Google Business Profile and on-page fixes are all free and doable yourself. Paid expert help is worth it for diagnosis when something has gone wrong, not as a monthly retainer sold by a cold-caller.
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It's the strongest long-term SEO move a photographer can make. Every helpful post answering a real client question (locations, costs, what to wear, weather) is another way for your website to be found on Google and quoted in AI search answers.
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AIEO (AI engine optimisation) is the practice of making a business findable and recommendable in AI search tools like ChatGPT, Claude and Google's AI answers, where a growing share of clients now look for photographers.
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Yes: SEO Success for Photographers (£99) is Kirsty Hamilton's nine-lesson course teaching photographers to run their own SEO, from keyword research to service pages, blogging and Google Business Profile, with no code or jargon. It's built from the method that took her to the top of page one of Google and held it for four years.