Backlinks for Photographers: SEO Link Building Guide

If you're here, you've probably heard that you need backlinks. When I bring this up, most photographers will ask me: What's a backlink? Why do I need them? How many backlinks should I have? Should I be paying for backlinks? Why would anyone even want to link to my site...?

All of these are great questions. And my goal is to cover all your main questions and then some in this short guide. I'll start with the "why," and go all the way into the "how." This way you can get set your site up for success with proper search engine optimization (sounds fun, right...?)

What are Backlinks?

Any time a website links to your site, you've gained a backlink. It's literally just a link pointed "back" to your website. This is a very important SEO signal for Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, and all the other search engines out there. But let's not forget the detail that almost every SEO forgets: A great backlink will actually drive the right traffic to your site in addition to SEO benefits. Backlinks are an important component of SEO for Photographers.

Why do photographers need backlinks?

The comparison I use for my photography students is that backlinks are essentially a vote of popularity. One of the main ways Google, and other search engines like Bing, determines a sites value is through this popularity contest. They want to see quality links coming to your site.

Each link you get is like someone in high school raising their hand and saying, "hey Google, this guy's legit!" Just like in high school, Google will only trust some of these votes.

Now, when we were in school there were always people with opinions that we valued less, and people with opinions we valued more. Maybe you trusted the student president, but you didn't trust Riley (He's lead you wrong in the past with questionable movie recommendations.)

Google works the same way. They "trust" some sites more than others. They trust sites that are related to what you do and that have good quality links from other trustworthy sites - they consider these reputable. They value websites that have a lot of traffic coming in. They trust known sites that have been around for a long time. There are a lot of reasons to trust a site vs. not trusting a site and our job is to make our site very trustworthy. Google rewards a high-trust website with more visibility in search results.

How many backlinks do photographers need?

Before we start working on tactics, let's talk about how many your site will need. Some SEOs will be tempted to give you a straight up number here, but don't buy into that. First and foremost, it's not the quantity, it's the quality of backlinks to your website!

For photographers, it's all dependent on our competition. There are some excellent tools out there that let you look into your competitors sites to see how many backlinks they have, but more importantly, they also will show you a score calculated based on the quality.

The score is a helpful way to find out if it's a good link, but in addition to this score, consider where the link is coming from. A link with a pretty good score that's irrelevant is nowhere near as valuable as one that's relevant with an even lower score. If you teach photographers how to take better portraits in a guide, and the link comes from a site that also teaches photographers, that's relevance. But if it's from a company that sells decking products, that's not likely to help nearly as much.

When you think of this all from the search engines perspective it makes a lot of sense. They don't just want sites with tons of backlinks, they want proof that this site is being linked for the right reasons. They want to see that you have a strong high-quality profile.

Two different types of backlink: Follow vs. Nofollow

Not all backlinks are created equal. Most photographers look at a backlink that they've gained and assume it's driving SEO value and traffic their way, but it's not always the case.

There are two main backlinks: follow, and nofollow. "Follow" means that the website is telling Google, "hey, jump off my site and check out this other one - it's important for my visitors to click!" Whereas "Nofollow" tells Google, "this doesn't really matter, don't pass any value from my site here."

The way to check this is through the code on a page. In Chrome you can right-click on a site and choose "view source," or you can use the top menu and click "view>developer>view source." This will show the code behind the website you are looking at. Use CMD+F or CTRL+F to run a text search on the page. Then copy or type in the same text that you see on the page that is your link (also known as the anchor text), maybe it say's "visit here to learn more about Connor's photo services." This should bring you to the little bit of code that links to your site. If it say's rel=”nofollow” in the HTML tag it means it's a nofollow link. If it doesn't, that means the it's a good and helpful backlink.

One last note while we are on this subject. Links that are reciprocated (you link to them, they link to you) are generally considered less quality than others that just come your way. It sounds one-sided but this is so people don't game the system. If your sole approach is to trade or exchange links, you could even get penalized by Google and won't show up in rankings as high as you should.

Five effective strategies to get backlinks for your photography website

So now we know the value and importance of good, high-quality backlinks. And we know that they ideally should be relevant and strong. In addition, we know that we want "follow" links for this strategy to work. 

But the elephant in the room now is where do photographers get backlinks? Why would someone want to link to your site and how do you make it so that they even consider doing this?

Luckily, there are lots of ways to do this naturally and without a crazy amount of effort. Here are 5 ways to get started:

1. Local Directories

Every photographer should do this one. It seems like nothing, but Google likes to see that your business is legitimate, and one of the ways they do this is by checking references in local directories. Getting your site listed on Yellowpages.com, Bing Places, Google My Business, and others will help Google trust that you are in business and are actually a photographer who shoots what you claim to shoot.

The catch here is that the data needs to match between all of these. Make sure you input the data correctly so that it matches perfectly everywhere. Let's say your hours don't match from site to site, how can Google recommend your business? They have to give accurate results or people won't want to use Google (or Bing) anymore.

You can shortcut this process, and I highly recommend you do, through services like Bright Local, MOZ Local, or SEMRush Local. These services charge a yearly or monthly fee that puts you in all the major directories and syncs the data perfectly - it's a huge time-saver.

2. Friends and Family

Chances are high that you know someone with a website or a blog. If you're a good friend, then your friends and family probably want to link to you. You could create content for them, or maybe suggest that they build an article about your business or a guide covering local businesses and include you inside. Even if these aren't super related, it still helps to get search crawlers on your site more frequently to boost your rankings.

3. Guest Posting

If you like writing then this is a simple way to grow your link profile - and now, thanks to ChatGPT and AI, it's easier then ever to come up with outlines or even write entire posts.

Guest posting is where we reach out to other industry and business related websites and create an article or similar piece of content for them. It works because most site owners would love some free content that they don't have to create. In exchange they will let you link back to your site in the article or author bio.

For photographers there are a lot of different ways to do this although it varies by photography niche. If you're a wedding photographer you could write articles for specific venues or vendors you've worked with in the past. Think deeply about any type of partnership or site related to what and where you shoot. Every photographer can also write tips articles and insights for educational photography blogs showing how to get great shots or use certain gear. Anything photography related should be a fairly good link.

One great method for finding places to guest post is by searching on Google or Bing. Simply type in a search target plus words like "guest post," "write for us," or "contributor." An example would be "photoshop blog guest post." The results will consist of websites that have pages dedicated to guest posting - exactly what you're looking to do. A pet photographer could type in "Pet blog contributor."

4. Competitive Research to Find Valuable Backlinks

Why spend all your time scouring the internet and trying to come up with ideas when there are so many you could find in just a few minutes? Using SEO tools like SEMRush, AHREFs, and SERanking you can literally see exactly who is linking to your competitors sites.

Simply type competitor websites in the domain search bar and a wealth of glorious data will be yours instantly. These tools will show you a full backlink profile including follow links, nofollow links, and even some directory links. In addition, they all use proprietary scoring approaches to calculate the domain authority of each link and each site. This way you could see what it will really take to outrank the competition. The higher the DA (domain authority) the more valuable the link in general. But keep in mind a lot of the top DA links are going to be from directories or places that actually won't carry much SEO juice over to your site.

From this data you can check out each link that has a good domain authority and niche relevance, and create a list of sites that you could partner with, write for, or reach out to be included in.

One additional tip is to build backlinks through photographers who are not in direct competition by scanning the search engine results of top photographers in a different major city and checking their site profiles. This is a simple link building approach that will give you more than enough to go after in a very short time frame.

5. Create Helpful Content

Of all the ways out there, this is one of the very best (and most indirect) link building strategies. It's a way to earn backlinks instead of doing outreach to build them. The idea here is that we create content that is highly shareable. Things like infographics, funny niche memes, helpful lists, etc... The type of stuff that is linkable. Here's an in-depth backlink building guide from Backlinko that should help here.

When we make content that is very shareable it can help do the work for us, assuming that it get's discovered. That part will likely take some promotional efforts on your end.

Summing up Backlinks for Photographers

If you read articles online like I do, you likely skip to the very end first to see what you're in for. So if this is the first thing you're reading, I'd suggest scrolling back up, but in case this is the only part you want to see... here goes my attempt on summing up backlinks for your photography business in a few short sentences, here goes nothing:

Backlinks are where sites link to yours. Google needs to see this to trust your site. When you get trust, you get rankings. Trust comes from niche related, authoritative, and quality websites. Give other sites a reason to link to you by creating content for them or creating shareable content. Find opportunities through competitive research with good SEO tools. Continue building backlinks and your site will become stronger than your competitors. With other best SEO practices and your authoritative link profile you'll outrank the competition and get more traffic to your website - leading to more clients.