By now, you’ve started making peace with the idea that your gorgeous photography isn’t enough on its own. You’ve added a clear intro to your homepage. You’ve started naming your images like an adult. You’ve even braved the back end of your site to fiddle with some alt text. That’s huge—give yourself a high five. Now let’s crank it up a notch.
Next, you’ll sit down to write something real—a service page, a blog post, maybe a bio update—and immediately hit the wall. Because all this talk about SEO and keywords sounds great until you’re staring at a blank page, wondering how to write something that works for Google without making you sound like a knockoff wedding blogger from 2011.
Here’s the truth: most keyword advice is written for marketers, not photographers. And that’s the problem.
You don’t need a 47-tab keyword planner or a spreadsheet color-coded by search volume. You need to understand how to talk like your clients talk—and how to make sure your website reflects that, clearly, naturally, and without making your soul mourn its own existence.
Let’s break it down the way it should’ve been explained all along.
Keywords Aren’t Marketing Tricks, They’re Just Common Sense
Forget everything you’ve heard about “keyword density” and “SEO juice.” We’re not here to game an algorithm. We’re here to connect the dots between what you offer and what your clients are already searching for.
Think about the way people actually use Google. They don’t type in vague, one-word requests like “photography.” They type exactly what they need at that moment, like “family photographer in southern Idaho who shoots with natural light” or “what to wear for fall engagement photos in Yosemite.”
That’s the real gold—not the short, obvious phrases every photographer is chasing, but the specific, human-sounding questions that reflect intent. These are called long-tail keywords, and they’re the easiest way for you to show up in search results without trying to shout over a million other people all trying to rank for “Alabama photographer.”
If you’ve ever answered a client’s question over email, you already have what it takes to start using better keywords. You’ve heard the questions, like “how much do you charge,” “where do you shoot,” “what should I wear,” “what’s the process like.” All of those real-world inquiries can be turned into search-friendly phrases—and if you build pages or blog posts that answer them, you’re doing SEO, whether you meant to or not.
Most Photographer Keywords Are Useless, Sorry
This is where things usually go wrong. Somewhere along the way, someone told you to include keywords on your website. So you Googled something like “photography SEO” and found a list of generic phrases that looked promising—things like “family photography,” “wedding photographer,” “portrait session.”
The problem? Those words mean absolutely everything and completely nothing. They’re vague. They’re broad. And they’re insanely competitive. If your goal is to rank for a keyword like “photography,” you might as well try to out-sing Beyoncé. Good luck—it’s just not happening.
Your job is to get more specific. More local. More useful.
That means identifying the actual words your dream clients are typing into the search bar and writing your site around those. Not in a spammy way. Not by cramming the same phrase into every paragraph. But by being intentional. Direct. Helpful.
Instead of “portrait photography,” talk about “senior photos in Snow Canyon” or “natural headshots for creatives in Utah.” Instead of “elopement packages,” write about “how to plan a Zion elopement with less stress and more scenery.” These aren’t just prettier phrases—they’re search terms. And people are using them every single day.
Where Keywords Belong (And Where They Really Don’t)
Let’s be clear: keywords are not seasoning. You don’t just sprinkle them on top of your homepage and hope for the best. They need to live inside the structure of your site, woven into your most important pages in a way that makes sense for both humans and Google.
Start with your homepage. The first few lines should include who you are, what you shoot, and where you’re based. Not in a fake-sounding way—just the basics, clearly stated. Something like, “I’m a Southern California photographer specializing in adventurous family sessions and natural light portraits for couples, creatives, and wildly lovable weirdos.”
That one sentence alone is doing work. It tells Google your location, your specialties, and your target audience—all without sounding robotic. And that’s the goal. From there, those keywords can carry into your service pages, your image captions, your blog post titles, and even your contact page.
The one place they don’t belong? Repeated endlessly in a way that starts to sound suspicious. If a sentence reads like you wrote it for a robot, your readers will bounce—and so will Google.
The magic is in subtlety. Use keywords like you’d use conversation. Trust that they’ll work better when they’re treated like language, not code.
How to Know What People Are Actually Searching For
The best way to figure out what your clients are typing into Google isn’t by guessing—it’s by paying attention. To your emails. To your DMs. To the stuff people ask on discovery calls. Those are your real keywords. Not the terms you think they’re using, but the actual phrases they reach for when they’re trying to find someone like you. Questions like:
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“How much does a branding shoot cost?”
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“Best place for family photos in southern Utah”
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“Zion photographer who does elopements”
You can also check out Google’s autocomplete suggestions or the “People Also Ask” box that shows up during a search. These are like cheat codes—they show you what people are asking right now. Your job? Answer them. On your blog, your FAQ page, or even in a standalone guide. You don’t need a full SEO strategy to rank—you just need to be the most helpful option.
Keywords Should Never Kill Your Voice
If you take one thing from this, let it be this: your keywords should support your brand voice, not strangle it. You can be warm, witty, sarcastic, soulful—whatever fits you best—and still speak in a way that Google understands. You can write like a real person and still rank in search. The trick is blending the two: adding structure and strategy without losing authenticity.
You’re not here to write clickbait. You’re here to show up as yourself and help people feel seen when they land on your site. The moment someone thinks, “This person gets me,” you’ve already won. Google might bring them to you, but your voice is what gets them to stay.
What’s Next?
Now that you understand what keywords are, how they work, and why the generic ones don’t cut it, it’s time to start putting this into action. You don’t need to tackle everything at once. Start with one service page. Update one blog post. Rewrite your homepage intro so it actually reflects what you do, who you serve, and where you’re located. It doesn’t have to be perfect—it just has to be clear.
In Part 3, we’ll dig into the structural side of things: how to build a website that guides people through the experience of working with you, page by page. Because it’s not just about getting found. It’s about what happens after they land. We’re not building a digital scrapbook—we’re building a system.
And when you put the right words in the right places? That system starts working for you, 24/7.
