Your photography site looks stunning — and Google can't read a word of it

Photography is a visual profession. Every decision — from site theme to social platform — gets filtered through aesthetics first. That's the right instinct for your craft, but it creates a structural blind spot when it comes to SEO.

Google doesn't view your portfolio. It reads text, parses file metadata, measures load times, and evaluates link structures. A site that wins every design award can still rank on page four if it gives search engines nothing to work with.

The mistakes covered here aren't obscure technical failures. They're the same five patterns that appear repeatedly across photography sites — wedding photographers, portrait studios, commercial photographers, headshot specialists. The details vary; the underlying errors don't.

Understanding why each mistake happens is as important as knowing how to fix it. When you understand the mechanism, you stop making the same error in a different form next month.

• Visual-first decisions produce beautiful sites with thin or missing text content
• Workflow shortcuts leave camera-generated file names untouched at upload
• Platform confusion leads photographers to treat Instagram engagement as a substitute for search visibility
• Theme selection priorities favor aesthetics over performance, and performance is a ranking signal

None of these are permanent. Each has a specific fix. Work through them in order of severity and you'll see measurable improvement in crawlability, indexation, and — over time — rankings.

This is the single most common issue on photography websites, and it's the one with the highest SEO cost. A gallery page that contains only images — no headings, no descriptive copy, no alt text — is functionally invisible to Google.

Google's crawler cannot interpret what's in a photograph the way a human can. It relies on surrounding text, headings, alt attributes, and structured data to understand page context. An image-only page gives it almost none of that.

What this looks like in practice

A wedding photographer builds a beautiful gallery page for "Intimate Backyard Weddings." The page has 40 stunning photos and a single H1 that reads "Gallery." No description of the shooting style, no mention of location, no copy about what couples can expect. Google sees a near-blank page and has no signal to rank it for anything.

The fix

• Add at least 150-200 words of descriptive copy above or below each gallery section
• Write naturally — describe the session type, location context, mood, and what clients experience
• Include your target keyword phrase once in the first paragraph, and variations throughout
• Add descriptive alt text to every image (covered in Mistake #2)
• Use a proper H1 that includes the service or session type, not just "Gallery"

You don't need to turn your portfolio into a blog post. A few well-written paragraphs that describe what's in the gallery and who it's for will give Google enough to work with — and they'll also help prospective clients self-qualify before they contact you.

Every image you upload to your website is a small keyword opportunity. The file name, alt text, and title attribute are all signals Google uses to understand image content. When your file is named IMG_4823.jpg, you've used that signal slot for nothing.

Renamed files don't produce dramatic ranking jumps on their own. But across a site with hundreds of images, the cumulative effect of descriptive naming is meaningful — and it costs nothing except a few minutes per batch upload.

What good file naming looks like

Compare these two file names for the same photograph:

• Before: IMG_4823.jpg
• After: austin-wedding-photographer-ceremony-kiss.jpg

The second version tells Google: this image is relevant to Austin wedding photography. It reinforces the page's topical relevance. It improves the chance of appearing in Google Image Search, which drives real referral traffic for photographers.

The fix

• Rename files before upload using a consistent format: [location]-[service]-[descriptor].jpg
• Use hyphens between words, not underscores — Google reads hyphens as word separators
• Keep names under 5-6 words — longer names provide diminishing returns
• Add alt text to every image in your CMS after upload: describe what's in the photo and include your keyword naturally
• For existing libraries, prioritize renaming images on your highest-traffic pages first

For photographers on Squarespace, Showit, or WordPress, alt text is editable in the media library or image settings panel. Make it part of your standard upload workflow and you'll never fall behind again.

These two mistakes are treated together because they share the same root cause: misunderstanding where Google-driven clients actually come from.

Mistake #3 — Session posts with no keyword strategy

Many photographers blog consistently — posting galleries from every session with a title like "Sarah and Jake — Downtown Austin Wedding" and a few lines about how beautiful the day was. These posts get shared on social media, get some engagement, and then disappear from Google entirely.

The problem isn't the blogging. It's that the posts aren't written for search. "Sarah and Jake" is not a phrase anyone searches. The posts have no target keyword, no location-specific copy, and no internal links to service pages.

A session post that targets a real search phrase — "intimate rooftop wedding in Austin" or "candid family portraits outdoors" — can rank for that phrase and bring in new visitors who weren't already following you. The session itself becomes the evidence; the keyword is the hook.

• Pick one target phrase per post before you write it
• Use that phrase in the title, first paragraph, and one subheading
• Add 200-300 words of descriptive copy — location, session style, what made it unique
• Link from the post back to your relevant service page

Mistake #4 — Treating Instagram as a substitute for organic search

Instagram is a powerful discovery platform. It is not an SEO platform. Your Instagram followers do not become Google rankings. Your engagement rate has no effect on your website's position in search results. Your Instagram profile does not rank for "wedding photographer in [your city]" the way a well-optimized website page does.

Photographers who build exclusively on Instagram are building on rented land — one algorithm change or account suspension away from losing their entire audience. Your website, properly optimized, is an asset you own.

The fix isn't to abandon Instagram. It's to stop treating it as your primary acquisition channel for search-intent clients. Invest equal time into your website's content and you'll build a traffic source that compounds over time rather than decaying the moment you stop posting.

Photography themes are designed to show off images. Full-bleed galleries, parallax scrolling, autoplay video headers — these features look impressive and they have a predictable effect on page load time: they make it much worse.

Page speed is a confirmed Google ranking factor through Core Web Vitals. A site that takes 6-8 seconds to load on mobile will rank below a comparable site that loads in 2-3 seconds, all else being equal. For photographers, where mobile traffic from couples searching on their phones is significant, this is a direct rankings liability.

How to diagnose your speed problem

• Run your homepage through Google PageSpeed Insights (free) and check your mobile score
• A score below 50 on mobile indicates serious issues worth addressing
• Look specifically at Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) — the two metrics most commonly triggered by image-heavy photography sites

The fix

• Compress every image before upload — tools like Squoosh or ShortPixel reduce file size without visible quality loss
• Use modern formats — WebP files are smaller than JPEGs at equivalent quality; most modern themes and CMSs support them
• Lazy-load images below the fold — most WordPress themes and page builders support this natively
• Remove unused theme features — autoplay video headers, excessive JavaScript sliders, and third-party font libraries all add load time
• Consider your theme critically — if your theme scores below 40 on mobile PageSpeed consistently after optimization, the theme itself may need replacing

You don't have to choose between a beautiful site and a fast site. But you do have to be intentional. Speed doesn't happen by default on photography platforms — it requires deliberate optimization at every layer.

If you've recognized multiple mistakes above, the question becomes: where do you start? Not all of these errors carry equal SEO weight, and not all of them take equal time to fix. Here's a practical priority order based on the typical impact we observe across photography site audits.

1. Image-only pages with no text (Highest priority) — This is the foundational issue. Until your key service and portfolio pages have real text content, no other optimization will reach its potential. Fix your top 5-10 pages first.
2. Page speed (High priority) — If your mobile PageSpeed score is below 50, this is actively suppressing rankings. Compress your images first — this alone often produces meaningful score improvements.
3. File naming and alt text (Medium-high priority) — Implement this as a going-forward workflow change immediately, then backfill your most important pages. Don't try to rename your entire back catalog at once.
4. Blog keyword strategy (Medium priority) — Stop publishing unfocused session posts. Pick a keyword for every post going forward. Backfill titles and copy on your 5-10 most-visited blog posts.
5. Instagram dependency (Ongoing/strategic) — This is less a quick fix and more a strategic reorientation. Commit to publishing one keyword-targeted piece of website content per week and track the compounding effect over 6-12 months.

Most photographers can work through the first three priorities in a single focused weekend. The results won't be immediate — SEO changes typically take 6-12 weeks to reflect in rankings — but the foundation you build will compound over time in a way that no social platform can replicate.

If you want a structured approach to identifying every issue on your specific site before you start, the photographer SEO resource hub includes an audit guide that covers each of these areas in diagnostic detail.