5 Effective Ways to Boost Traffic to Your Photo Website



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Using smart tactics to increase your photography site’s traffic is a way to achieve lots of goals. Those goals could include selling your photography products and services, building brand awareness, creating useful connections and more. Whatever your goals are, traffic gives you an ability to engage and sell. Without visitors nothing happens.

Traffic

Photo by RayBay

So, if you have just started a photography site or you’re struggling to grow your traffic, the tactics listed below will help you to dramatically increase your traffic.

1. Start Email Newsletter

There are three types of traffic exist: direct traffic (email marketing), referral traffic (links from other websites), and search traffic (from search engines). So, direct traffic is a group of people who visit your site without visiting any other sites. About ten years ago it meant that a person saved your site to bookmarks and regularly visit your site, or remembered your domain name. But those times are gone, which means today you may get direct traffic from your email newsletter.

The easiest way to start email newsletter if you’re blogging. In this case you can just send your subscribers some updates from your blog every Wednesday, for example. Just copy the first two paragraphs of your new blog post, add a link to continue reading and schedule this email newsletter for any day of the week you want. Don’t be to annoying to your readers: onlу emailing once a week is just fine. Email newsletter is a great way to let your potential clients know about discounts, sales, holiday offers, or some news you may want to share.

Also, you should consider building your email subscribers list by offering some discounts or freebies for your readers.

2. Start Blogging

I have mentioned blogging in the previous point telling that an email newsletter is much easier to make if you’re a blogger. Also, it’s much easier to get more traffic. So, why should you start blogging if you don’t already have one?

Blogging

Photo by Wilfred Iven

First things first, blogging will give you more chances to get traffic from search engines. Websites that have not been updated for a long time are less likely to appear in search engines as Google and Bing see them as stagnant. This presents a huge problem for photographers, as they don’t want to update their portfolios too often – it could become tiresome quite quickly. So, having a blog within your site gives you a great opportunity to update your content regularly and keep Google’s search bots coming back, check your site and add it to search results.

The second major reason to start blogging is building a following that keeps coming back. That could be fans of your photography or writing, potential clients who want to know more about your work.

3. Get Social

You need to expand your social media reach. It’s all about referral traffic coming from other sites, including social media. Most likely, more than a half of your referral traffic will come from social media. Facebook and Pinterest are the largest traffic sources you should consider first of all.

Social Networking for Photographers

Photo by Duncan Shaffer

The more active you are on social media, the more traffic you can expect. Share your blog updates or some news on your Facebook fan page to make it grow. Each post should include a photo and a link. Also, you can add a link to your Facebook fan page to your About Me page, photo description, watermarks and status updates. Join photography related groups and start commenting. You may position yourself as a guru helping other people, or even share your links from time to time.

Also, create a Pinterest account if you do not already have one. People pin your images even if you’re not aware of it. You can add a plugin to your site encouraging users to pin your images. Also, consider creating an inspirational board on your account with some wedding ideas, what to wear for a photo shoot ideas, and more, depending on your type of photography. Make sure each your social media profile has a link to your site and analyze your traffic.

4. Pay Attention to SEO

Improving SEО means taking care of your search engine traffic. Every page or post you create on your site is about a topic someone may looking for in Google. And the most important factor is a title. The title of your post is like a title of a book. Imagine that all web pages and blog posts are like books on Google’s book store. Depending on the keywords, Google will choose the section of the book store.

So, if you put a book “John Doe Photos”, there are almost no chances someone will find you. However, if you put a book with the title “Portrait Photography in Cape Town”, which is more specific, it will come into a few categories such as photography in Cape Town and Portrait photography, for example.

There are a few ways to boost your popularity on search engines:

  • get links from other respected sites
  • get your photos featured on other respected sites (if you win a big photo contents, your images will get spread across the web, so Google will see other people use your photos often and increase your rank)
  • be talked about on social media (the more likes and shares you get on your blog posts, the more chances it has to get on the top of Google search results)

5. Optimize Your Website for Mobile Traffic

Analyzing statistics of Google and Bing traffic from June to November 2014, the research shows that 52% of users used desktops and 48% used mobile devices. With rapidly increasing mobile technologies, you as a photographer should build your site taking into account mobile users.

If your mobile visitors are being shown the same site they see on the desktop, you’re going to lose your visitors. Navigating normal sites from small smartphone screens is quite a tricky experience, and most users will just leave the site. So, your site needs to be mobile-friendly. It means that it will adjust user’s screen resolution and will be convenient to use even on the smallest screen.

There are a lot of options these days to make your site mobile-friendly. You may install plugins or ask your designer to create a special mobile version of a site, so your mobile users will be redirected to this version. If you have no photography portfolio yet, consider creating it on a platform which enables mobile-ready site. For example, Defrozo will give you that opportunity.

Defrozo

Defrozo is all-in-one marketing platform for photographers which allows you to create a mobile-ready portfolio, manage your tasks and files, create clients galleries using just one login. And the best thing about Defrozo that it’s completely free.

If your site are built on WordPress, you can try out some cool plugins which will turn your site mobile-friendly, for instance, WPtouch Mobile Plugin. It automatically enables a minimalistic and elegant mobile theme for your site and give your mobile visitors pleasant experience.

Summary

Consider different types of traffic while trying to boost overall traffic. Create a newsletter, a blog, social media accounts, use SEO, and have a mobile version of your site to increase your traffic dramatically. Of course, all these improvements take time, but in the end you’ll likely get twice the traffic or more.