A Step-by-Step Framework for Auditing Your Photography Website's SEO — and Fixing What You Find

A photography website is structurally different from a law firm's or a plumber's site. The content is predominantly visual. Pages are often built around galleries rather than text. The platforms photographers commonly use — Squarespace, Pixieset, Showit, SmugMug — each have specific technical characteristics that affect crawlability, page speed, and indexation in ways that a generic SEO audit won't catch.

This matters because Google's crawlers still rely heavily on text signals to understand what a page is about. A stunning gallery of wedding images tells a human viewer everything — and tells Google almost nothing without supporting text, structured data, and properly written alt attributes.

The second structural issue is volume. Photographers who blog consistently can accumulate hundreds of session posts. When those posts follow a near-identical template — venue name, a paragraph of sentimental copy, 40 images — Google often treats them as thin or near-duplicate content, which suppresses the entire domain's authority over time.

This audit framework is built around those photography-specific vulnerabilities. It's not a generic 100-point checklist. It's a focused diagnostic that helps you answer one question: why isn't my portfolio showing up when ideal clients search for photographers in my area and specialty?

Work through each section in order. The issues are roughly ranked by how often they're the primary cause of ranking problems — site speed and Core Web Vitals first, then content quality, then local signals.

Run your homepage, a gallery page, and a blog post through Google PageSpeed Insights (pagespeed.web.dev). Do this on mobile — not desktop. Google uses mobile-first indexing, and photography sites tend to perform significantly worse on mobile due to large image files and slider-heavy layouts.

Focus on three Core Web Vitals scores:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): This measures how long it takes for the main content to load. On photography sites, the LCP element is almost always a hero image. If that image isn't properly sized and formatted, LCP suffers directly.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Images without defined width/height attributes cause content to jump as the page loads. This is extremely common on photography platforms.
• Interaction to Next Paint (INP): Heavy JavaScript from gallery plugins can make pages feel sluggish to interact with.

What to look for in the audit output:

• Are images served in next-gen formats (WebP or AVIF)? Most photography platforms allow this — check your settings.
• Are images lazy-loaded below the fold? The hero image should load immediately; everything else should load on scroll.
• Is your hosting fast? A slow server compounds every other performance issue.

If your mobile LCP is above 4 seconds, that's the first thing to fix — it affects both rankings and the experience prospective clients have when they click your site from Google.

Document your scores before making changes so you can measure improvement. A screenshot with a date is enough.

Open Google Search Console and go to Coverage → Indexed pages. How many of your gallery or portfolio pages are indexed? Now visit five of them and read them as a text document — ignore the images entirely.

If each page has fewer than 100 words of unique, descriptive text, you have a thin content issue. Google cannot rank a page it doesn't understand, and without text context, gallery pages are almost invisible to crawlers.

The fix is straightforward but requires time to implement at scale:

• Write 150-300 words per gallery page describing the session, location, style, and what prospective clients can expect from a similar booking
• Include the city, venue name, and photography style naturally in the copy — these are the phrases clients actually search
• Add a descriptive H1 heading that includes your target keyword (e.g., "Autumn Wedding Photography at Prospect Park, Brooklyn")

Also check: are your gallery pages even being indexed? Some photography platforms use JavaScript rendering that makes galleries difficult for Googlebot to crawl. If valuable pages aren't indexed, that's a technical problem that goes beyond content.

Prioritize your most commercially important gallery categories first — wedding, portrait, commercial — rather than trying to update everything at once. Even improving your top 10-15 gallery pages can shift domain perception with Google over time.

What About Pages with Duplicate Templates?

If your session blog posts all follow the same structure — intro paragraph, gallery, closing paragraph — and the intro and closing barely change between posts, Google may assess these as near-duplicate. Audit a sample of 10 posts and check how different they actually are. If they're nearly identical in structure and word count, consolidate the weakest ones or substantially differentiate them.

Alt text serves two purposes: accessibility for visually impaired visitors, and keyword context for search engines. On photography websites with hundreds or thousands of images, missing alt text is one of the highest-use fixes available.

Use the browser extension Web Disability Simulator or a site crawler like Screaming Frog SEO Spider (free up to 500 URLs) to identify images with missing, empty, or generic alt attributes like "IMG_4821.jpg" or "photo".

What good alt text looks like on a photography site:

• Descriptive of what's actually in the image: "Bride and groom first dance at The Foundry, Long Island City"
• Includes location and specialty where relevant: "newborn lifestyle photography session, Brooklyn home"
• Not keyword-stuffed — one or two natural descriptors, not a list of search terms

A practical approach if you have a large image library: don't try to fix every image at once. Prioritize:

1. Hero images on your homepage and key landing pages
2. The first image in each gallery or blog post (this is often the image Google chooses to display in search results)
3. Images on pages targeting your most important keywords

Going forward, build alt text into your upload workflow. Every image you add to the site should have a descriptive alt attribute before it's published. This takes 10-15 seconds per image and compounds significantly over time.

Also check that your platform isn't stripping alt text during upload — some gallery builders discard alt attributes entered during import. Test this on a single image before investing time in a bulk effort.

If you're targeting clients in a specific city or region, local SEO signals matter as much as on-page content. Run through this diagnostic quickly:

NAP Consistency

NAP stands for Name, Address, Phone — the three pieces of business information Google cross-references across the web. Search for your business name and city in Google. Check your listings on Yelp, The Knot, WeddingWire, Thumbtack, and any local directories. Is your business name, address format, and phone number identical across all of them?

Even small inconsistencies — "St." vs "Street", a missing suite number, an old phone number — can weaken your local authority. Document every listing where your NAP differs and update them systematically.

Google Business Profile

Is your GBP claimed and fully completed? Check:

• Primary category: "Photographer" — and relevant secondary categories (Wedding Photographer, Portrait Studio, etc.)
• Service area set to the cities or regions you actually serve
• At least 10 recent photos added through the GBP interface (separate from your website)
• Business description that includes your specialty and service area naturally
• Recent posts — Google favors active profiles

Service Area Pages

Do you have individual pages targeting the cities where you want to attract clients? "Wedding Photographer in Austin" and "Wedding Photographer in Round Rock" are different searches. If you don't have location-specific pages with unique content, you're invisible to those queries. Even a single well-written page per target city is a meaningful starting point.

Most photographers can self-diagnose the issues this audit covers. The harder part is knowing which fixes to prioritize, how to implement them correctly on a specific platform, and how to track whether they're working.

A few signals that it's worth bringing in outside help:

• You've fixed the obvious issues and rankings haven't moved in 3-4 months. There may be a deeper authority or backlink problem the audit didn't surface.
• Your platform is limiting what you can control. Some photography website builders have hard constraints on metadata, URL structure, or JavaScript rendering. A specialist can help you evaluate whether migration is warranted — or find workarounds.
• You're in a competitive market. In cities with dozens of established photographers competing for the same keywords, technical fixes alone may not be enough. You need a content and authority-building strategy alongside the technical work.
• You're spending more than a few hours per week on SEO tasks. That time has a real cost. If SEO work is pulling you away from shooting and editing, the math often favors professional management.

The audit itself is a useful conversation starter when evaluating SEO help. If you bring your PageSpeed scores, your Search Console data, and a list of the issues you've found, any competent specialist should be able to tell you clearly what they'd address first and why. If they can't — or they immediately pivot to a package price without looking at your data — that's a red flag worth noting.

If you'd prefer to have specialists review your findings and identify what you may have missed, get a professional photographer SEO audit — we'll go through your site systematically and give you a prioritized action plan.