As a photographer, your most valuable asset is your work. Your entire business is built on providing photos to either share with the world or sell to your clients. No matter what type of photographer you are, creating a portfolio or gallery page on your website is a necessity.

You can create a single gallery page on your website or make multiple galleries to organize your portfolio and showcase the variety of types of photographs you take. Image galleries are easy to set up on your website.

If the gallery pages of your website only feature images, you are missing out on opportunities, primarily in search engine optimization. You can optimize your galleries simply by doing a few things to make your page more targeted. 

In this article, we’ve outlined ways you can enhance your website portfolio and gallery pages to make them search engine friendly.

First, determine if you will feature a single gallery page or multiple gallery pages on your website. If you shoot more than one type of photography (seniors, wedding, fine arts, portrait), you’ll likely want to have multiple gallery pages. If this is the case for you, we recommend creating a portfolio page on your website to direct people to the different styles you offer. You can showcase your work in a visual way and add descriptive context to the page. What should you say? Provide details about your work, something like:

”At Jane Doe Studios, we make moments that last. From newborns to seniors to weddings, we elevate your portraits to a rich and tasteful quality unlike any other. Select which style of photos you’re interested in by viewing my galleries.”

While you can display everything you offer on one page, it can help to have the portfolio page point to gallery pages for each of the specific types of photography you offer. These targeted pages can allow you to better communicate directly to your target audiences.

Another option to encourage people to view your galleries is to feature them in a dropdown menu in your website’s main navigation. Using a dropdown menu is a simple way to organize these pages. It’s up to you if you want to organize your galleries in a dropdown menu or on a portfolio page. To make that choice, ask yourself how you want your customers to travel through your website.

Add your images

Start by creating a new page on your website. You’ll probably instinctively want to add your photos. Go ahead. Upload your images and style them how you like. You can add as many images as you want, but there are benefits to being selective. I’m sure you’ve heard “less is more.” It’s true, we recommend having at most 30-50 images per gallery. Why? There are a few factors to consider: 

• Show only your best work, update it often, and remove outdated work

• Not every shot is showcase worthy, be selective

• The number of images on a page has a direct correlation to the time it takes your page to load. The load time is a factor for Google and other search engines. Faster loading pages = better ranking.

• Use the lazy loading or “load more” function to limit how many images load on your website at a time. This optimizes the page load time. Same as above, but now it won’t load everything right away.

• Keep things from being overwhelming or stale. People can get an impression of who you are and if you are a good fit by reviewing just a few shots. You don’t need to show hundreds of images to prove that.

Once you get your images uploaded, organized, and styled the way you like, now it’s time to add other types of content including titles and text to help with optimizing the page. 

Add a title

You can easily add a title to the page by using a title block. Your title block should include details about your style and the area you serve. The title block automatically serves as an H1 title tag for Google.

Add a description

Every page of your website should have a combination of text and images. Include at least 300-500 words on each page. On your gallery pages, the text should describe the service you’re offering and the geographic areas you serve. This is a good place to include keywords you want to be found for in Google. That said, your text content needs to be written for people not bots. Your primary audience is people, so it needs to be easy to read. As Google bots review websites and determine which ones to showcase, it looks for websites that have quality content that is geared towards the audience that is searching for it.

For example, a page that is targeting senior photography clients might say something like:

“Jane Doe Studio captures seniors' photos in the X location and surrounding areas. I work with you to showcase your personality through portraits that may be taken in-studio or on location. Allow me to bring out your hidden talents, beauty, or what makes you unique. You might be an athlete, artist, tech wiz, or wallflower, no matter what, I will make you shine your brightest. So get ready to have fun and work together to capture memories. You’ll receive Instagram-worthy digital images you can share plus artwork for the walls of your home that your parents and grandparents will treasure. Let’s get started.” 

That's 103 words, it is a great start. All 300-500 words don’t have to be together on the page. You can break it up, and add text in multiple places on the page to highlight your services, investment options, and even testimonials. 

There are a few vital things to consider when creating content for SEO. You need to include the:

• Who: Jane Doe Studios

• What: Senior photography (athletes, artists, tech students)

• Where: X location and surrounding areas

• Why: To share online or with family and friends

• What else: Digital images and prints options are available

Now that there is text on the page, let’s explore more options to make the page powerful.

Next, you’ll want to add other options to encourage visitors to interact with the page. Beyond just showcasing your work, and telling people about it, you should offer options to keep visitors engaged. This could mean keeping them on the page or encouraging them to journey further through your website. The main thing you want to do is avoid having any deadends on your pages. It’s important that you direct visitors to what you would like them to do next. Here are a few options that will also help with your sales funnel.

Dedicated form

A form provides visitors with a clear option to connect with you. You can customize the information on the form to the page it is located on. For example, on a landing page about senior photography, you can have questions such as:

• When are you graduating?

• What type(s) of setting(s) do you prefer?

• What are you into? (e.g., sports, cheerleading, gaming, music, art)

A form is a great tool to curate information and at the same time organize your contacts with the help of tags. By adding a tag to a form, like “senior photography”, when someone fills it out, the system creates or updates a contact in your CRM and includes that tag. You can then use that tag to do targeted follow up communications, including email marketing.

It is a good idea to have a form on every page of your website. It can be a perfect way to end a gallery page. 

Secondary menu

Another way to get people to engage further with your website is to include a secondary menu at the bottom of a page. What’s a secondary menu? It is a collection of links to encourage people to explore more of your website. It can act as a sales funnel by telling them what they should do next. 

A secondary menu often sits at the bottom of a landing page. It can ask a leading question and share multiple links in a visual way, such as: 

• Learn more

• See more of my work

• Ready to book?

• What to expect

Creating a secondary menu can serve three purposes on a gallery page: 

• Saves scrolling and unnecessary clicks. It can prevent people from having to scroll back up the top menu to select another page or go back to a portfolio landing page and click another option. 

• Gives visual direction. It can clearly display the options for what to do next.

• Discourages people from leaving. It offers additional options to learn more and continue the conversation. 

Calls to action (CTAs)

A call to action (CTA) invites people to do something specific. You can use CTAs to drive visitors to other pages or to go deeper in your website sales funnel. You can encourage visitors to go to a booking page, investment pages, testimonials pages, and many more. It is up to you and what you think is important for your potential customers to do next. Remember you are the director of your website. Similar to during an in-person sales pitch, you need to decide what you want to happen next. Do you want to provide more validation? Do you want them to see pricing? Strategically placed buttons can help guide them to the next step.

There are also behind-the-scenes settings you should review to optimize your page for search engines. You can adjust your page’s title, meta description, keywords, and friendly address (the characters after your URL, yourdomain.com/friendly-address). 

To access these settings, from the control panel navigate to the page you want to edit and click on the SEO button. There are auto-SEO settings by default. You can switch to custom SEO to personalize the data.

The metadata for each page of your website should be unique. This can help your website be found for multiple keywords or phrases. For gallery pages, you should focus on the content on the page versus the entire website, especially if you shoot multiple types of photography. After you make edits, remember to click save!

Read our handy SEO guide for more tips. 

Publish your site map

Once all the recommendations above are complete, you have one more thing to do, tell Google and other search engines you made changes to your website! It’s easy to do but often looked over. You should publish your site map after you make radical changes or additions to your site. Publishing your site map notifies Google to recrawl your site to look at the changes. This can help search engines figure out what to catalog your site for in their search engine directory, including keywords or phrases you haven’t ranked for in the past. 

Strategically adding content to your gallery pages can help Google decide how to rank you and help the right people discover you. Need help with setting up a targeted gallery page? Give our support team a call 866.463.7620 or log in and chat with us.

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