3 Strategies for Driving Traffic to Your Photography Site

Your website is a vital component of your photography business. However, simply showcasing your photographs online isn’t enough to guarantee sales. If you want your photography site to reach a wide audience and generate revenue, you need a plan for driving traffic to it.

Fortunately, there are a handful of optimization and marketing techniques you can use to make it easier for people to find your website. Adopting certain tools and strategies can help get your site in front of your target audience and, in turn, increase sales.

In this post, we’ll discuss how increasing traffic to your site is necessary for growing your business. Then we’ll explore three strategies you can use to do so. Let’s get started!

How Increased Site Traffic Can Grow Your Photography Business

When it comes to tools that aid in business growth, the internet is undefeated. In today's digital-first environment, if you want to make an impression, a strong online presence is a must.

Hopefully, your photography website boasts an engaging aesthetic and effectively showcases your experience. As a photographer, you likely have an eye for design and beautiful photographs to fill your portfolio:

Unfortunately, that won't help much if people aren't coming across your website. Aside from design and layout, there are other aspects to consider, including elements such as Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and social media marketing.

The more visitors you get to your website, the better chance you have of expanding your client base. Turning your attention toward driving more traffic may be the solution you need to see a boost in sales.

3 Strategies for Driving Traffic to Your Photography Site

You don't need to be a digital marketing expert to use the internet to benefit your business. Let's take a look at three simple strategies you can use to drive more traffic to your photography website.

1. Add Alt Text to Images to Improve Your Site's SEO

The purpose of SEO, in a nutshell, is to improve your rank in search engine results, especially among people who are looking for the type of services you offer. There are a handful of related best practices every business should follow.

However, an SEO strategy that is particularly relevant for you as a photographer is adding alternative or 'alt' text. This is a short sentence or phrase attached to each of your images that search engine crawlers use to index them.

Therefore, incorporating keywords in your alt text can improve your images' SEO. WordPress makes this easy. After you upload an image, the Alt Text field will appear on the right-hand side of the editor:

There are also plugins you can use to auto-populate alt text, such as Bialty:

This WordPress plugin will automatically generate alt tags based on the page title or focus keyword. It can save you the time it would take to manually edit each file.

Some people confuse alt text with title text. The latter has little influence on SEO and serves only as a tiny pop-up description. However, your alt text can be the same as your title text. This is why our NextGEN Gallery plugin uses the same input field for both:

When you upload an image to a NextGEN gallery, you can save time by only writing the text once. The plugin will then automatically insert the metadata for you.

2. Start a Blog to Establish Yourself as an Industry Expert

Speaking of SEO, one of the best ways to improve your rankings and drive traffic to your site is by creating content. Adding a blog to your website is an easy way to publish relevant, unique posts regularly, which search engines appreciate:

A blog is also a way to engage visitors and differentiate yourself from your competition. There's a wide range of topics you could cover on your photography site, such as:

• Compelling stories about photoshoots
• Behind-the-scenes insight
• Tips and tutorials for photographers
• Industry news and trends

The key is to consider what types of content your audience will find most valuable. In addition to helping your SEO, showcasing your knowledge on topics related to photography demonstrates your expertise to potential customers or clients.

Plus, you can share your posts on social media to expand your online presence beyond your website. If you're already using WordPress for your photography site, you can start posting right away.

3. Use NextGEN Pro to Enable Image Commenting and Social Sharing

Sharing your content on social media can help spark user engagement on your website. It's also a way to stay connected with clients and customers to boost brand awareness.

When clients share your images on their social media accounts, it helps expose your work to more people. By also providing social proof, this practice can lead to more traffic for your site as well.

This is why we recommend including social sharing icons for all the images on your site. NextGEN Pro is one tool that can help with this:

Our premium plugin includes a Pro Lightbox with image commenting and social sharing features. When you upgrade NextGEN Gallery to NextGEN Pro, you'll be able to prominently display comment boxes and social media buttons to increase engagement.

Conclusion

Most photographers today understand the importance of having a website. However, if you’re disappointed with the lack of business your photography site is bringing in, it’s likely because it isn’t receiving enough traffic.

In this article, we discussed three strategies you can use to drive traffic to your photography website:

1. Add Alt text to images to improve your site's SEO.
2. Start a blog to establish yourself as an industry expert.
3. Use NextGEN Pro to enable image commenting and social sharing.

Do you have any questions about driving traffic to your photography site? Let us know in the comments section below!