Most wedding photographers' websites are not badly built. They are badly connected. Beautiful galleries that Google has never crawled, three pages fighting each other for the same venue name, a head term pointing at a page that no longer exists. Nothing on the surface looks wrong, which is exactly why it goes unfixed for years.
I know because mine was the same, and I am the one who built it.
"I had 163 published pages. Google could reach 69 of them."
The ProofWhat happened to my own site
This is not a case study I bought or a client I am quoting. It is nicholasteal.com, the site you are on, and you can check every page of it yourself.
- iClicks went from 59 a week to 87. Search Console, the week the rebuilt pages went live. The three weeks before it had run 70, 65, 59 — falling. I cannot prove the rebuild caused the turn, and I will not pretend otherwise, but that is when it happened.
- ii69 reachable pages became 127. Sixty-seven orphans and thirty-three ghost pages, found by crawling my own site properly rather than trusting the sitemap.
- iiiVenue pages on page one. Checked by hand on 7 September: Bagden Hall first, Leeds Civic Hall first, Hornington Manor second, Waterton Park third, Sneaton Castle third, Holmfirth Vineyard fourth from about tenth.
- ivFour bookings traced to one widget. The date checker in my footer — four weddings on the books came through it, and four more enquiries besides.
None of that came from new content. It came from auditing what was already there. One advice post I wrote years ago brings 126 clicks every four weeks on its own, because it answers a question properly and nothing was stopping Google reading it.
Step OneThe audit — £195
A full crawl of your site with my own crawler, a cannibalisation report showing which of your pages are competing with each other, a read of your Search Console, a backlink check, and a written report of what Google cannot see on your site — in plain English, not a tool export.
Then a prioritised fix list: what to do first, what it is worth, and what to ignore. We go through it on a call, recorded so you can watch it again.
Any platform. Showit, Squarespace, WordPress, Pixieset. The findings are about your site's structure, not its builder.
Step TwoI fix it
This is the part nobody else offers, and it is the reason the audit is worth having. Most SEO reports end with a list of jobs you will never do. Half of them need someone comfortable in the guts of a website, and you did not get into this to learn about canonical tags on a Tuesday night.
So I do them. Titles and descriptions rewritten, orphan pages wired back in, pages that fight each other separated, dead redirects repaired, galleries that Google cannot see made visible. The same work, in the same order, that took my own site from 69 reachable pages to 127.
"Quoted after the audit, once we both know the size of the job. I am not going to ask you to buy a fix before anyone has looked at what is broken."
Some sites need a morning. Some need a fortnight. You will know which yours is before you spend anything beyond the £195, and you are free to take the report and do it all yourself — plenty do, and it still works.
After ThatKeeping it up, if you want to
Audit and fix is a job with an end. Most photographers stop there. If you would rather someone kept an eye on it month to month, these are the options — no contracts, cancel whenever.
- iVisibility Snapshot — £40 a month. Five to twenty keywords tracked, local and national positions, a visual report each month, and a voice note walking through it if you want one. The low-commitment way to know whether anything is moving.
- iiIgnite — £125 a month. Everything above, plus a full SEO health report, competitor comparison, a keyword list built for your area and your venues, and blog topics worth writing.
- iiiElevate — £225 a month. Everything in Ignite, and I start making changes: titles and descriptions tuned, page-by-page content edits, and an internal linking plan. This is the tier that moved my own venue pages.
- ivShine — from £350 a month. Everything in Elevate, plus new pages built from your draft copy and underperforming pages rebuilt rather than left to rot.
"Start with the audit. If it finds nothing worth fixing, I will tell you that, and you will have spent £195 finding out your site is fine."
Why MeWhat a photographer knows that an agency does not
"An SEO agency will tell you to target 'wedding photographer yorkshire'. I will tell you that the venue names are where the bookings are, because I have shot at them and I know which ones send enquiries."
I have photographed weddings for years and I built the site that ranks for them. That means I know which queries a real couple types, which venue is worth a page and which one closed to weddings last year, and what a supplier list is actually for. I also know what your time is worth on a Sunday, which is why the report tells you the three things to do rather than the thirty.
QuestionsThe ones I get asked
- iHow long until anything moves? One to three months is the usual answer, depending on where you are starting and who you are up against — but that is an estimate, not a promise, and anyone giving you a date is guessing.
- iiDo I need to understand any of it? No. I read the data and write it in English. You carry on shooting.
- iiiWill it change how my site looks? No. This is structure, copy and links. Your design stays exactly as it is unless you ask me to touch it.
- ivWill it actually get me enquiries? Ranking is not booking. Better positions put you in front of more couples; whether they enquire depends on your work and your page. The audit tells you honestly which of the two is your problem.