Effective Photography Portfolio in 2020

As a professional photographer you are always looking to expand your client base, to bring more business. 

Social networks like Facebook and Instagram have fallen short providing leads in recent years. Crowded, competitive, packed with fake profile and bots, in an environment transformed to follow Stories and requires quantity over quality. 

The most important factor in marketing your photography services is your personal portfolio website. A personal portfolio website is the format to curate and present your work in your own style and design, describe your services and clients to maximize the impact on your potential clients. 

The Search Engine Optimization Barrier

Your beautiful portfolio website is like a storefront, you want people to see it, you need traffic. People searching for photos (or for a photographer) are mostly using search engines, describing their interest in keywords. Having placement in the top 5 organic results for those keywords, you are simply getting more traffic. To achieve this your portfolio website must follow the search engines best practices: needs to be very fast, accessible, with super clean and search engines optimized markup.

All platforms promise amazing SEO, do they really deliver?

Running a quick comparison of real photographers websites, built on high profile websites platforms (* The websites urls are not disclosed for their owners privacy), using Google’s websites audit tool reveals a gloomy picture: Many of the platforms do not produce search engines friendly websites, and most of them have really bad performance.

The four factors Google measure to determine your search rank are Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices and SEO, failing in either one will lower your search rank, resulting in less traffic, less exposure to new clients.

A do-it-yourself photography websites platform must emphasize organic traffic in smart, creative ways. Since there’s usually very little textual content in photography portfolios, the markup of the photos themselves needs to be accessible and utilized for the page’s SEO. 

Bablab developed unique methods for optimizing photos-based pages for SEO, showing outstanding results. Let’s see an example:

Case study - results of a photography portfolio website

Photographer Sivan Askayo is a travel photographer, specializing in hotel photography. Sivan started using Bablab in 2019, her portfolio website performance now evaluates with nearly a perfect score of 100:

Pretty impressive right? 

Within a couple of weeks she saw a massive improvement in her Google search ranking. She ranks #1 for “editorial + travel + hotels + photography”, and her photos have a strong presence in Google’s images results:

Staying true to our belief in the key role of SEO ranking, bablab, our site for creating photography portfolios, was assessed with the maximum score, a perfect 100:

There is so much that one can do to improve the chances of being found by his potential clients. Being a great artist is up to you, but when it comes to selecting the online platform for your portfolio website, start with the option to reach the maximum, and this is what we do for our users.