Anyone searching for good site keywords for photography is usually expecting a list. Lists are easy to produce and almost useless on their own, because a keyword only has value once it has somewhere to live. The real question is not which words are good — it is which words your site can actually rank for, on a page that already exists or clearly deserves to.
This guide covers keyword selection at the site level: how to judge a candidate, the four layers a photography site needs to cover, where good candidates come from, and how to map them so your own pages stop competing with each other.
Site keywords and image keywords are different jobs
Photographers routinely conflate two systems. Site keywords are the terms a page competes for in Google — they live in titles, headings and body copy, and they are judged by how well the whole page answers a query. Image keywords are a structured field: alt text and filenames for the web, and the embedded keyword list that stock agencies read. Those are covered separately in the guide to image keywords for SEO. Confusing the two is why a portfolio full of well-tagged images can still be invisible in search: the images are labelled, but no page is arguing for anything.
Three tests every keyword should pass
1. The intent test. Type the keyword into Google and look at what is already ranking. If the first page is full of free image results and you sell wedding coverage, the searcher wants a picture, not a photographer — no amount of optimisation fixes that mismatch. If the results are service pages, pricing pages or guides, you know what format the query expects. This takes thirty seconds and eliminates more bad keywords than any tool.
2. The reachability test. A new or small site does not outrank an established one on a two-word term, regardless of how good the writing is. Difficulty scores from keyword tools are estimates, but the direction is reliable: below roughly 20 is contestable for a young site, 20–40 needs real depth and some links, and anything higher is a two-year project. Longer phrases — four or five words — are almost always where a small photography site wins first.
3. The destination test. Name the page this keyword belongs to before you commit to it. If the honest answer is that you would have to invent a thin new page to hold it, skip the keyword. A site of forty shallow pages performs worse than a site of twelve substantial ones, and the shallow pages actively dilute the strong ones.
The four layers a photography site needs
Most photography sites over-invest in one layer and ignore the rest. A balanced keyword map covers all four.
Layer 1 — service plus location. "Newborn photographer Portland", "corporate headshots Manchester". Low volume, high intent, fastest to convert. Each service you genuinely offer in a place you genuinely work deserves one page with real detail: what the session involves, what it costs, what the client gets. One page per service-location pair, and only for places you actually serve.
Layer 2 — genre and style. "Documentary wedding photography", "fine art landscape prints", "editorial food photography". These describe how you work rather than what you sell, and they attract clients who are choosing an aesthetic. Portfolio and about pages carry this layer well, because the images do most of the argument.
Layer 3 — informational. "What to wear for engagement photos", "how much does a family photoshoot cost", "best time of day for outdoor portraits". Highest volume, slowest to convert, and the layer that builds topical authority over time. This is what a blog is for. Expect these pages to bring traffic that does not book immediately and to make your service pages rank better through internal linking.
Layer 4 — commercial and comparison. "Best stock photo sites for beginners", "Lightroom vs Capture One for portraits". Competitive, but the traffic converts on affiliate income, courses or tools, and it reaches other photographers rather than clients. Worth building only if selling to photographers is part of the plan.
A site built entirely on layer 1 stalls at a handful of pages and never grows. A site built entirely on layer 3 collects traffic that never books. The imbalance is usually visible in the analytics long before it is visible in the calendar.
Where good candidates actually come from
Google Search Console, first. The Performance report lists queries your site already appears for. Filter to positions 8–20: these are terms Google already associates with you but does not yet reward. Improving an existing page for one of them is far cheaper than winning a new keyword from zero, and the data is yours rather than an estimate.
Autocomplete and People Also Ask. Type your service and let the suggestions finish the sentence. These come from real search volume and are phrased the way people actually type, which matters more than a tidy noun phrase.
Competitor page titles, not competitor keyword lists. What a competitor built a whole page for tells you what they believe converts. Their sitemap is a strategy document written in public.
Your own inbox. The questions clients ask before booking are keywords with the volume already proven by the fact that someone bothered to email you. Keep them verbatim; the awkward phrasing is the point.
One caution about volume numbers: they are modelled estimates, frequently rounded and bucketed, and they can differ by a factor of two between tools. Use them to rank candidates against each other, not to forecast traffic.
One keyword, one page
When two pages target the same intent, Google picks one of them — often not the one you would choose — and both perform worse than a single merged page would. This is keyword cannibalisation, and photography sites are unusually prone to it because portfolio, service and blog pages all naturally describe the same work.
The fix is a plain spreadsheet with four columns: URL, primary keyword, search intent, last updated. Before writing anything new, check whether the intent is already claimed. If it is, improve the existing page instead. If two pages already overlap, merge them into the stronger URL and redirect the weaker one — losing a page is not a loss when the traffic consolidates.
Where the keyword goes on the page
Once a keyword has a page, placement is quick and mostly mechanical. Put the primary term near the front of the title tag and keep the title under roughly sixty characters so it is not truncated. Use it once in the H1, phrased the way a person would say it out loud. Include it naturally in the first hundred words, so both the reader and the crawler confirm quickly that they are in the right place. Give one H2 a close variant. Keep the URL slug short, hyphenated and free of dates. Write the meta description for the click rather than the ranking — it is not a ranking factor, but it decides whether the ranking earns anything.
Then link to the page from related pages using descriptive anchor text. Internal linking is the most underused tool photographers have, and it costs nothing. What does not help is repetition: keyword density targets are folklore, and a page that repeats its phrase twelve times reads worse and ranks no better.
The second search engine, if you sell stock
Many photographers running a business site also license work through agencies, and agency search behaves nothing like Google. There is no page context to interpret, no headings, no surrounding copy — only a structured keyword list attached to the file, where order carries real weight and the opening terms do most of the work. A phrase that reads beautifully in a page title is worthless in that field, and vice versa.
The practical consequence is that these are two separate pieces of work, and the agency side scales badly by hand: every file needs a title, a description and up to fifty keywords, per agency, with different rules for each. Rastock AI handles that half — it generates the titles, descriptions and keywords, embeds them as IPTC and XMP so they travel with the file, and delivers to 10+ agencies over FTP. It does nothing for your website's rankings, which is the point: they are different problems and deserve different tools.
What progress looks like
Impressions move before clicks do. A page that starts appearing at position 30 for its target term is working, even though nobody has visited it. Track average position in bands rather than exact rank — moving from the fourth page to the second page is meaningful progress and is invisible if you only watch traffic. Give a new page three months before judging it, and six before rewriting it.
Five mistakes worth avoiding
Chasing head terms like "photography" or "photographer" — the intent behind them is unknowable and the competition is national. Building location pages for cities you do not serve, which reads as a doorway pattern and risks the whole site. Assigning the same keyword to five pages and splitting your own authority. Collecting keywords with no page in mind, which produces a list nobody ever uses. And publishing a page once and never revisiting it, when a two-year-old pricing page with outdated numbers loses ground every month to competitors who update theirs.
Good site keywords for photography are not rare words waiting to be discovered. They are ordinary phrases matched honestly to pages you were going to build anyway — priced, mapped, and left alone long enough to work.
Frequently asked questions
How many keywords should a photography website target?
One primary keyword per page, plus a handful of close variants that occur naturally. A site with twelve to twenty well-defined pages, each owning a distinct intent, outperforms a site with fifty pages competing against each other. The count that matters is pages with a clear job, not keywords in a spreadsheet.
Are location keywords still worth targeting?
Yes, for services you genuinely deliver in places you genuinely work. Service-plus-location terms have low volume but the highest booking intent on the whole site. What does not work is generating pages for cities you have never shot in — that pattern is treated as doorway content and can damage the entire domain.
What keyword difficulty is realistic for a new photography site?
Below roughly 20 is contestable within a few months. Between 20 and 40 needs substantial content and some external links, so expect a year. Above that, treat it as a long-term goal rather than a starting point. Longer four- and five-word phrases usually sit in the reachable range and convert better anyway.
Do meta keywords tags still do anything?
No. Google stopped using the meta keywords tag well over a decade ago and it carries no ranking weight today. Effort belongs in the title tag, the H1, the first paragraph, and the actual substance of the page. The one place a dedicated keyword field still matters is stock agency submissions, which use their own internal search.
Can two pages on my site target the same keyword?
They can, but they should not. When two pages answer the same query, search engines choose one and often pick the weaker page, while both accumulate less authority than a single merged page would. If you find an overlap, consolidate the content into the stronger URL and redirect the other.
How long before keyword changes show results?
Impressions typically shift within four to eight weeks; clicks lag well behind. Three months is a fair first review, six months a fair verdict. Rewriting a page after three weeks because nothing happened is the most common way photographers reset their own progress.