A step-by-step SEO checklist you can implement this week

This checklist works best for photographers with an existing website who want to improve their Google rankings without hiring an agency. If you're building from scratch, use this to guide your platform choice and initial setup.

The tactics here apply across wedding, portrait, commercial, and product photography. Local photographers targeting a specific service area will get the most immediate wins from the NAP and Google Business Profile sections.

If your website is built on Squarespace, Showit, or WordPress, you'll find platform-specific guidance later in this checklist. Custom-built sites can adapt these steps by working with your developer.

Before optimizing for rankings, your website needs to be fast and crawlable.

• Measure page speed: Run your homepage and a portfolio page through Google PageSpeed Insights. Image-heavy sites often slow down here. Document your baseline — you'll compare this later.
• Check mobile responsiveness: Open your website on a phone. Tap images and buttons. If anything breaks or lags, that's a crawl issue.
• Audit your robots.txt: Visit yoursite.com/robots.txt. It should not block /wp-content, /images, or your portfolio paths. For Squarespace and Showit, this is usually managed automatically.
• Install Google Search Console: Verify ownership and check for crawl errors under Coverage. Fix any 404s on portfolio pages.
• Enable HTTPS: Your URL should start with https://. If not, upgrade your SSL certificate immediately.

Skip any of these? Your SEO improvements won't compound later. These take 30 minutes total.

Photography websites live or die by image optimization. Google can't see your images the way clients do — it needs alt text, compressed files, and smart loading strategies.

For every portfolio image:

• Write descriptive alt text: "Portrait of bride and groom at sunset" is better than "IMG_4521.jpg" or "wedding photo." Include your service type when natural: "Headshot photography of business professional in studio." Aim for 8–15 words.
• Compress without losing quality: Use Squoosh (web-based) or ImageOptim (Mac). A wedding photo should be under 200KB on web. Many photographers serve 2–5MB images — this tanks your page speed.
• Use descriptive filenames: Rename files before uploading. "bride-groom-outdoor-portrait.jpg" beats "photo-123.jpg." This is a small signal but compounds across 50+ portfolio images.

Platform-specific image hosting: Squarespace and Showit handle image compression automatically. WordPress doesn't — use Smush or ShortPixel to compress on upload. Document how many images you've optimized (e.g., "47 portfolio images compressed — reduced homepage load time from 4.2s to 2.1s").

How you organize your portfolio directly affects which keywords you rank for. Two approaches exist: gallery-based (all work in one page) or single-image pages (one image per page with dedicated text).

Gallery-based approach (Squarespace/Showit default): One Portfolio page contains 20–50 images with filter tags. Fast to set up. Harder to rank for specific keywords like "wedding photography Boston" — Google sees it as one general portfolio page, not 10 service-specific pages.

Single-image pages (WordPress advantage): Each image gets its own page with 200–300 words of supporting text. Slower to produce but ranks for more keywords. Example: /portfolio/jennifer-mike-wedding-boston with descriptive text about the couple, location, and service type.

For most photographers: Start with gallery structure on your main portfolio. Create 3–5 additional standalone pages for your highest-value services (e.g., /wedding-photography, /corporate-headshots). Each standalone page includes 4–8 portfolio images, 300 words of text describing your approach, and a clear call-to-action.

Page structure within each portfolio page: H1 should match your service type and location if relevant ("Wedding Photography in Boston"). Include a photo gallery, 1–2 testimonials, your process or approach, and a contact button. End with an FAQ relevant to that service.

Schema markup tells Google what your website contains in a language it understands. For photographers, two schemas matter most: LocalBusiness and LocalService.

LocalBusiness schema: Add this to your homepage or About page. It includes:

• Your business name
• Phone number
• Address and service area (geo radius or list of cities)
• Business type ("Photographer")
• Hours of operation (if you take bookings during specific times)
• Image of you or your studio

LocalService schema: If you book clients directly through your website, this schema tells Google you're available for bookings. Include service area, rates (if public), and areas served.

How to add it: Squarespace doesn't expose schema controls directly. Showit has limited schema options. WordPress users can use Yoast SEO (free version adds LocalBusiness schema) or RankMath to paste schema JSON in your homepage HTML.

If you can't add schema directly, your platform still sends some signals to Google — but adding it manually improves clarity. Validate your schema using Google's Rich Results Test after implementation.

NAP stands for Name, Address, Phone. Google uses consistency across your website, Google Business Profile, and local directories to verify your business exists and ranks you locally.

Audit your NAP: Search a spreadsheet for your business name. Write it exactly the same way everywhere:

• Homepage header
• Footer
• About page
• Contact page
• Google Business Profile
• Google Maps
• Photography directories (WeddingWire, The Knot, Yelp, etc.)

If your homepage says "Sarah Chen Photography" but your GBP says "Sarah Chen Photographer," that's a mismatch. Standardize to one version and update all instances.

Build citations in high-authority directories: Being listed in The Knot, WeddingWire, Yelp, and local Chamber of Commerce sites signals legitimacy to Google. Complete your profiles with identical NAP, photos, and service descriptions. In our experience, photographers adding their NAP to 5–10 relevant directories see measurable improvement in local map pack rankings within 6–8 weeks.

Claim your Google Business Profile (if you haven't): This is non-negotiable. Even if you're not local-service focused, a claimed GBP gives you a knowledge panel on Google and a place for Google to verify your phone number and address.

Squarespace: Strong defaults for image compression and mobile responsiveness. Limited schema and alt text controls. Portfolio galleries are gallery-based (hard to create service-specific pages). Workaround: Use custom code blocks to add schema JSON to your homepage and alt text to images via their native editor. No robots.txt access, but Squarespace blocks nothing by default.

Showit: Built for photographers with drag-and-drop portfolio builders. Good mobile performance. Minimal SEO controls — no native alt text fields for images added via drag-and-drop, no built-in schema, no control over title tags per page. If using Showit, expect to write most SEO control through Showit's custom code block (limited). Consider if you plan heavy SEO investment.

WordPress with a photography theme (Neve, Astra, Soledad): Maximum SEO control. Alt text fields on every image. Full schema support via Yoast SEO or RankMath. Slower out of the box but most powerful if configured right. Requires basic technical comfort or a developer. Recommended for photographers planning service-specific pages beyond portfolio galleries.

All platforms: Focus first on page speed (Phase 1), then image alt text (Phase 2). Platform differences matter less than execution on these two.

Week 1: Foundations

• ☐ Run homepage and portfolio page through PageSpeed Insights. Document baseline score.
• ☐ Test mobile responsiveness (open on phone, tap elements).
• ☐ Visit yoursite.com/robots.txt and confirm it's not blocking portfolio paths.
• ☐ Install Google Search Console and verify ownership.
• ☐ Check for 404 errors in GSC Coverage report. Fix any broken portfolio links.

Week 2–3: Image Optimization

• ☐ Compress all portfolio images (target: under 200KB per image for web).
• ☐ Rename image files to descriptive names (bride-groom-outdoor-portrait.jpg).
• ☐ Write alt text for 20 key portfolio images. Use 8–15 words describing the scene and service type.
• ☐ Re-run PageSpeed Insights. Compare to Week 1. Target improvement: 0.5–1.5 second faster load time.

Week 4: Pages and Structure

• ☐ Decide: gallery-based or single-image portfolio approach (see Phase 3 for tradeoffs).
• ☐ Create 3–5 standalone service pages (e.g., /wedding-photography, /headshots). Add 300 words and 4–8 images to each.
• ☐ Write or update homepage and About page H1 tags. Include location and primary service type where relevant.

Week 5: Schema and Local

• ☐ Add LocalBusiness schema to homepage (or use Yoast/RankMath plugin if on WordPress).
• ☐ Audit NAP across your website. Standardize spelling and format everywhere.
• ☐ Claim or update your Google Business Profile. Add photos, service areas, and hours.
• ☐ Validate schema using Google's Rich Results Test.

Week 6: Citations

• ☐ Add your NAP to 3–5 photography directories (The Knot, WeddingWire, Yelp, local Chamber of Commerce).
• ☐ Ensure directory listings match your homepage NAP exactly.

Ongoing (Monthly)

• ☐ Write alt text for new portfolio images as you upload them.
• ☐ Compress new images before uploading.
• ☐ Monitor GSC for new crawl errors or indexing issues.
• ☐ Check PageSpeed monthly to catch speed regressions.

Image optimization is where most photography websites lose rankings. The good news: it's fixable in 2–3 weeks with the right tools.

Compression tools:

• Squoosh (free, web-based): Upload an image, set quality to 75–80%, export as WebP. Typical result: a 4MB JPEG becomes 200–400KB WebP with no visible quality loss. Fast and requires no software installation.
• ImageOptim (Mac, free): Drag and drop a folder of images. Removes metadata and compresses losslessly. No quality setting — it's fully automatic.
• Smush (WordPress plugin, free tier): Automatically compresses images on upload. Recommended for WordPress photographers adding images regularly.

Benchmarks for photographers: Industry benchmarks suggest portrait images (headshots, wedding photos) should be under 150KB on web for fast loading. Product photography or high-resolution detail shots can be 200–300KB. If your homepage loads in over 3 seconds, image compression is usually the culprit.

Lazy loading: This tells browsers to load images only when users scroll near them, not all at once. Squarespace and Showit enable this by default. WordPress requires a plugin (all SEO plugins include lazy loading). Test by opening DevTools (F12 on Chrome) and watching the Network tab — images should load as you scroll, not all upfront.

WebP format: Newer format that's 25–35% smaller than JPEG with same quality. Most browsers support it now. Use it for portfolio images. Keep JPEG as fallback for older browsers (most tools handle this automatically).