How do you improve and increase traffic on your photography website? SEO can feel like a lot of black magic but actually it can all be learned and is all really common sense. All Google really does when ranking a photography website in searches is establishing how good an experience it provides to its visitors.
Since 2010 I have spent countless hours working on my photography website with the aim of improving the user experience subsequently increasing time spent and pages visited by each visitor and of course reducing the bounce rate.
I started with pretty much not a clue.
However I am very curious so with time, trial and error, lots of hours spent reading web development websites, forums, SEO tips and staying up to date with the latest trends, I eventually accumulated quite a bit of knowledge in this department.
My marketing background has also proven to be very useful and has been put to good use.
For the first four years I was using a different platform / CMS. It was not intuitive and failed to showcase my photography in the best possible way due to numerous limitations, including the lack of a built-in blog.
That was an important lesson and I switched to another “build your own” website provider (who I won’t advertise since they do not reward users for referrals)
That was a lot of work and headaches and hair pulling but also one of the best decision in my personal history of decision making.
I now understand when it comes to web development that not only it is a never ending quest to improve user experience but also that even a decade on, sometimes even the tiniest tweak can still have a big impact.
To demonstrate this, a month ago I did some fairly skinny adjustments and that resulted in big fat happy results.
My bounce rate dropped (that’s amount of users who leave my website without looking at other pages than the one they reached), visitors now spend more time exploring it and in the process visit more pages than before.
And it can clearly be seen in the stats below comparing the last 30 days with the month before that:
So if you take anything away from reading this it should be this:
Don’t let your website get old and give it some love! Done the right way it will bring you a lot more business just like it does for me.
How much time do you spend as a photographer working on your website?
Share your experience by leaving a comment or contact me directly!
Liked what you read? Why not also check out my best Photography Business Tips?
Nico