SEO for photographers: the results are full of other photographers

The pages ranking here belong to working photographers and to the platforms they build on, rather than to marketing companies. Nobody with a budget has bothered to compete properly.

That means the ranking is winnable with ordinary care rather than with spend. It also means the advice in those results is honest but uneven, written from one person's experience of one market.

Weight. A portfolio is images, and an unoptimised gallery is the single most common reason a photographer's site is slow on a phone. Modern formats and correct sizes usually cut the page by most of its weight without anyone seeing a difference.

Pages that are only images. A gallery cannot be read, so a site of galleries has almost nothing to rank with. The fix is not blogging for the sake of it: it is a page per thing you are hired for, written like you would explain it to a client.

Location. Most photography is hired locally, and a site that never names the city it works in cannot be found by the people searching with one.

Platform limits. Builders are fine until you need speed and control over how pages are structured, and then they are the ceiling.

Google places an AI answer above this list. It rewards pages that answer a specific question in plain words: what a wedding costs in your area, how many images a client gets, how long delivery takes.

A portfolio that hides all of that behind “enquire for pricing” gives the answer engine nothing to quote and gives the client a reason to keep looking.

A photography site is mostly a speed and structure problem, not a design problem: the pictures are already good. We build it hand-coded so the gallery stays fast, and we publish the price before you ask.