SEO for Elopement Photographers

This is part 3 of a 5 part series for the Ultimate Guide to Book the Elopement You Want. In this segment, we’ll talk ALL about SEO for elopement photographers.

Miss us? We are BACK with part 3: SEO for Elopement Photographers. This is the next installment of our ULTIMATE guide to book the elopements you want. If you haven’t read part one yet, make sure you check it out. It’s everything you need to know about the what / why / how to be able to automate your elopement business. Part two is how to stop the damn ghosting! We know it drives you mad just as much as it does us when a prospective client reaches out and then POOF ghosts us! 

SEO Workbook Freebie // download the free workbook

First, if you haven’t downloaded our nifty SEO WORKBOOK, you need to stop, drop, and download. This is the workbook you’ll want open to take you section by section when you write your own blog. Called, How to Spice up Your SEO, it’s a blog template that will help you breeze through how to get on the first page of Google. We use this form on the daily. We are known for our Montana elopement photography, but we have also branded ourselves as worldwide elopement photographers. Using this template, we get booked in locations we have never even been! We are talking ICELAND, SPAIN, FRANCE, some heavy hitters. So, go download. Then come back to us for some pumpkin spice pointers on a more in depth level. Okay, now back to our regularly scheduled blogging.

Breaking down that S-E-O

Let’s get you noticed by the Google SEO gods. You have so much to offer and we are here to get your creative content noticed. If you hear the word “SEO” and you get immediate shivers, let’s take a step back to calm the bumps down. By breaking down what SEO is, it makes it far less scary. SEO is an acronym that stands for Search Engine Optimization. What’s happening is your content needs to be OPTIMIZED so the Search Engine IE Google can recognize and produce searches for it. Long story short, we are focusing on how to optimize here. When people type in something like weddings or elopement packages, pertaining to you, we want YOU to show up as the head honcho on page one.

Butttt, what about *Insta*

Now, in a world where social media rules all, there is this fallacy that blogs are outdated. No one cares about mommy bloggers, they all care about influencers. Well I’m here to influence you to write the damn blog. You know what doesn’t pop up when you search for things in Google? Instagram posts. Nope. Don’t get me wrong, there is a whole purpose for Instagram, you might even find us doing a blog post on social media strategy down the line! But right now, let’s get that SEO for elopement photographers.

Blogging takes a lot more time and is more intensive and knowledge based than Instagram, BUT if you create stunning content for your couples, you’re able to have this evergreen post that people can keep coming to and coming to. You won’t have to worry about posting blogs three times a week. If you even create 12 blogs, one blog a month, that is MASSIVELY HELPFUL. Google is like, oh girl I see you there, maybe Google winks at you. You know you’re in a good place. You can also use the blogs to fuel your Instagram so it’s not so daunting to come up with multiple Instagram posts and captions. Take your blog, chop up the highlights, add your STELLAR photos. Two birds, one stone…. We promise to start brainstorming more animal friendly analogies, but you and the birds get it!

Problem Solving

Let’s dive into the first step of writing a blog – topics. What DO you even write about? We are brainstorming topics that are going to be really impactful to Google and that Google will serve up to the couples and clients that are looking for you. When thinking about  SEO for elopement photographers, you are looking for the lovely couples wanting to get hitched. Focus on them. 

The first thing we want to know is what are the problems that these couples are having. Our couples are looking to Google to provide solutions. The main purpose of a blog post that’s going to come up on Google is to solve your clients problem. Easy peasy! Even if you’re new at this, we promise you can solve some of their wedding problems.

Hear us out, as an elopement photographer, you should know that the couples will be looking for a place to have this wedding. They are opening Google and searching for a location. Location searching in Google is one of the biggest tools that you can maximize on when you’re writing your post.

For example, if you’re a wedding photographer in Chicago, you might write a blog about the best wedding venues in Chicago. If you’re an elopement photographer you might write a blog about how to elope in glacier national park. You want to be the one to provide your potential couples their answers on a silver platter. 

Blog Title

Once you have your topic, the next step is to integrate that into a blog title. The title is the number one most searched optimized function and part of the blog itself so it needs to be intriguing, yet simple. If we make really complicated titles Google is going to pull an Avril and be like “Why’d you have to go and make things so complicaaaaated?” You just need to make it searchable. Damn computer limitations not understanding our witty titles! 

Always remember that the title needs to be searchable on Google. Such as –  SEO for elopement photographers. Think about when you are searching on Google. If you’re searching for SEO in your elopement photography business you’ll find us! Big picture, you’re probably searching things like Chicago wedding venues or how to prepare for a family session or how do I get the best headshots. Some of these titles are the EXACT title that you’re going to want to put for your blog. 

Key Phrase

Your blog title will be about four to five words and it is also going to be your key phrase. You will sprinkle your key phrase / title throughout your blog and reference back to it again and again and again. Kind of like, are you properly using  SEO for elopement photographers? Ooops, we did it again! PSST Sara Does SEO provides some good brainstorming for how to choose your key phrase.

Metadata Description Diva

We all know that diva is a female version of a hustla. So we are going to hustle Google here. We are going to get them to lead people to us. Metadata, just like SEO, is easier to understand when you know what it stands for. Metadata, according to our buddies, Wiki and Webster, is a set of data that describes and gives information about other data. Focus on “describes” and “gives information”. So, the meta description will describe and give information about the blog. This gives you more words than the title and you can make it fun and fancy and clickable.

The metadata description is that little box right below your blog post on Google that will tell people why your blog is different and more special than anyone else’s, in 150 characters. For example, our title can be How to Elope in Glacier National Park. Our meta description allows us to add more information such as “the ultimate guide for our backpacking couples” or
“updated in 2022 to provide you with the hottest trends”. Think of a wedding keywords list, this will include “couple”, and “venue”, but can also be more targeted such as “backpacking couples”. 

Research Boss

Once you have figured out what the problems of your couples are and have decided what topic to write your blog post about, you then need to figure out how your blog can be better than everyone else’s. Boss shit. You know who loves that? Googly eyes Google. If Google sees that you are linking really reputable sites like Wikipedia or a Chicago visitor guide, Google is going to be all over making you #1. Even sites that aren’t necessarily wedding related or the theme of your topic, if they’re really reputable sites and you can tie them in organically, that’s the move.

Taking it a step further, if you type in Chicago, there’s a news article, which is fine, but there is also the city of Chicago which is more reputable. There is also a Wikipedia page, which is a very popular page to link back to. Do your research, link it back.

What are your intentions with the intent?

Continuing to hustle Google, we are going to let Google tell us what they expect to see by looking for the intents. The intent is something that people are trying to find in Google. It’s the problem that they’re trying to get solved, it’s the answer that they’re looking for, it’s the Holy Grail of the Indiana Jones saga!

What it actually is – the little bubbles that come up that say “People also ask” a few lines down in a Google search. What we want to tell Google is that we’re not only looking for our main key phrase but we’re going to help our people out with all these other things that they’re looking for as well! We know, we know, we’re pretty helpful peeps. 

Welcome back to another example! When we put in best Chicago wedding venues there’s all these other intents that are popping up such as “What is the average cost of a wedding venue in Chicago?”, “Is it expensive to get married in Chicago?”, “What is the best month to get married in Chicago?”  Pick a few of these to make into a subheading in your blog. You may not have known that the best month would be a popular topic and that’s one that is easy to integrate into your blog. According to our research it is Summer and Fall! Now you know, and we know, and your future blog will know!

Common Phrases

Now, let’s identify some common phrases. When Google picks up a common phrase, it solidifies to Google that our blog post is even more credible and it has even more helpful information! Google knows what people are looking for so we can identify common phrases by  typing in our key phrase. I know, this is a lot of back and forth. It’s basically chicken and the egg.

Check it out. If our key phrase is “the best Chicago wedding venues”, we then go over to the images tab to see what common phrases are coming up. Here we find, “Illinois”, “Arranmore Farm” and “Polo Club”. These we will also sprinkle into our blog just like we did with intents.

Expected Places

Our last research section is all about expected places. By now, you have to be hearing our scratch, scratch, of being a broken record. BUT IT WORKS. We want to include things in our post that Google is like “I know that this thing is credible and I know it’s well researched. These are the exact wedding terms and the exact elopement locations and the exact photography business words that we are picking up on all the time!”. Yeah, Google Boo, we know you. 

To look for expected place, keep your key phrase in the search box and then you go into maps. When we look at results on the Google map, we’re looking for businesses and entities in Chicago that are coming up as one of the most searched things. 

Searching “best Chicago wedding venues” yields results such as Stan Mansion, The Crystal Gardens, Chicago Illuminating Company, the Ivy Room at Tree Studios. Pick a few of them and feature them in your blog. When you link the words to their home site, Google knows it’s legit.

Conclusion

Round it up peeps, we’ve created our topic. We’ve found our key phrase and we’ve researched our competition. We’ve researched authoritative websites and we have included intents, common phrases, expected places. We have a direct title that we use as a key phrase. Voila! We have a few common phrases and a catchy meta description. We are going on page one baby!! Now it’s time for our couples to click on us as their wedding photographers when they are thinking about elopement packages! 

We hope you have found this blog about  SEO for elopement photographers. SUPER helpful, but we get that it is a LOT. That is why this blog is NOT the document you have out while you’re writing. Our How to Spice up Your SEO is going to be your BFF. For the editable step-by-step template of everything we just covered, download the free editable SEO blogging template. Love you awesome nerds. If you read this and want even more of our elopement photography hacks, you can check out our blog on How to Become an Elopement Photographer and even schedule a one on one mentor session with us.