A professional website design can help freelance photographers to get more business.
Why every freelance photographer should have a website?
- To showcase their works.
- To reach mass audience.
- To enable the target audience contact them.
- To advertise their services effectively through their websites.
There are indeed many photographers who have great websites that help them to get recognition & more business.
If you too are a photographer and planning to build a nice website for you, this blog may help you.
In this blog post, I have shared 6 essential features that your photography website must have.
Before you hire a web developer to create your website, you can discuss these 6 essential features with him.
Let’s dive in!
#1 Portfolio
A nice portfolio can help you to get more business from your website. As a freelance photographer, you may need to share your portfolio with your prospects in order to get their business.
But when you build a website, you don’t need to carry your portfolio with you.
You can simply create a portfolio section on your website where you can showcase some of your best works.
If you provide photography services to different kinds of businesses, you can also consider creating several categories such as “Wedding”, “Business”, “Food menu” etc. and assign the portfolios under their respective category.
Additionally, you can also request your website developer to integrate a confirm form on the portfolio page on your website so that it’s easier for your users to get in touch with you easily.
#2 CMS (Content Management System)
As a photographer, you must be able to manage the contents of your website without any technical knowledge.
Especially for updating the portfolio section of your website regularly, you should be able to manage the images hassle-free.
Therefore, a CMS (content management system) driven website is essential for you. You can ask your developer to use WordPress for your website development.
When your developer uses WordPress to build your website, you can save more than 30% of your total website development cost.
How can WordPress save your website development cost?
- WordPress is free to use & customize.
- WordPress developers are available at an affordable cost.
- Most of the WordPress plugins are free.
- It’s easy for you to manage your WordPress website even if you are a layman. So you don’t have to pay your website developer each time you want to make any changes on your site.
#3 Testimonials
People don’t believe what we say about ourselves. But they do believe what others say about us. Same applies to the online business as well.
No matter how good is your website and how well you have written the content on it, the users will still be hesitant in engaging your photography services.
What’s the solution here?
You can create a section of ‘testimonials’ on your website and showcase all the valuable feedback/reviews that your past clients had given about your services.
According to various online researches, it’s proven that when you share your clients’ testimonies with yours prospects, it increases your chances of getting more sales & conversions.
So, if you need a website that can help you to get more sales & more customers, do ask your web developer to create a section for testimonials.
Additionally, you can also showcase some of your best testimonials on the homepage of your website.
#4 FAQ
Your potential customers who visit your website may have a lot of queries to be answered before they engage your services. But some of these prospects may not take time to write those questions to you or call you to clarify their queries.
Having an FAQ (frequently asked questions) section on your website can help them to read the general questions (from your past customers) along with their respective answers.
What are the benefits of adding an FAQ section on your photography website?
- Your prospects can read them and resolve their queries without emailing you or calling you.
- When your prospects see their query in the FAQ section along with its satisfactory answer, they are more likely to engage your services.
- FAQ section can help to boost your search engine rankings as well.
- FAQ helps to enhance the user-experience of your website.
Additionally, you must always update your FAQ list whenever you get any new kind of query from your potential customers.
#5 On-page SEO
The primary objective to build any website is to get more business & sales. SEO (search engine optimization) is one of the best mediums to get relevant traffic on any website and capture more sales & customers.
You could also ensure that your photography website is SEO-friendly and your target customers are able to find you on search engines like Google.
How can your website help in SEO?
Well, here are few things that your website designer can integrate with your photography website in order to get noticeable rankings on search engines:
- Meta tags (title tags & description tags) for each webpage.
- Loading speed optimization
- Responsive website design
- Header tags
- Image optimization
- Alt tags for all the images
- Interlinking among the webpages
- XML sitemap creation
- Robots.txt file creation
Of course, there are many other off-page SEO activities that you need to do in order to gain higher rankings, but it all starts from the website itself. If your website is SEO-friendly, your website can start ranking pretty sooner.
#6 Blogging
Various studies have shown that the businesses who write & publish blogs on their websites regularly tend to get more sales than those who don’t.
You can also have a blog on your photography website. All you need to do is publish the blog posts regularly on your site.
What are the benefits of blogging on your website regularly:
- Blogging boosts search engine optimization.
- Blogging helps in lead generation for your photography services.
- Blogging helps you to establish yourself as an industry leader.
- Blogging helps your prospects & existing customers to connect with your brand.
- Blogging enables you to provide valuable content for your readers.
- You can also describe about your services through your blog.
If your web developer has used WordPress to build your website, then creating a blog section becomes even more easier.