A photographer's website is often the most beautiful website in town. Full-width images, soft transitions, a gallery that makes you want to get married again. And almost no words. A menu with "Weddings", "Portraits", "Contact", a line of text on the homepage, and then pictures.
For a visitor who already knows your name, this is perfect. For a stranger searching "family photographer Kelowna" at eleven at night, it is invisible, because search engines and AI assistants read words, and your site has given them almost none. The truth is that the photographs will always do the convincing. The words are what bring the right person to see them.
In short: clients search by type of shoot and place, and search engines match those words to text on the page. A photographer gets found by writing a page for each type of work, adding a short story and a descriptive caption beside each gallery, naming image files and writing alt text as Google's image guide recommends, keeping files small enough for a phone, setting up a Google Business Profile as a service-area business if there is no studio, and asking for reviews that name the occasion and the place.
How do clients search for a photographer?
The searches almost always carry two things: the type of shoot and a place. "Wedding photographer Whistler". "Newborn photographer Burnaby". "Family photos Stanley Park". "Headshot photographer Vancouver". "Elopement photographer Tofino". Some carry a style ("candid wedding photographer", "film photographer"), and some carry a worry ("photographer good with kids", "affordable wedding photographer").
Then there are the longer questions typed into AI assistants. A mother may ask "who is a patient family photographer in Langley for a toddler who won't sit still". A small company may ask "headshot photographer who comes to the office in Richmond". The assistant builds its answer from pages, captions and reviews that say those things in words. A gallery of fifty lovely photographs, with no text, cannot answer.
Each of these searches deserves a page, or at least a paragraph, that uses the same words. That is most of the method.
Why does search need words on a photography site?
Google's own image guide is direct about it. It asks site owners to "make sure images are placed near relevant text and on pages that are relevant to the image subject matter". The photograph shows a couple under a cedar tree. The text beside it tells Google that this was a September wedding at a lodge near Squamish, with a first look by the river. Without that text, Google has to guess, and it has many other photographers' pages that do not make it guess.
This is also where your voice as a photographer comes through. Write a short story beside each featured gallery: the place, the season, the light, what the couple or the family wanted, one thing that went wrong and how you handled it. Three or four paragraphs is enough. It gives the next client a reason to trust you, and it gives search engines the words they need.
What do alt text and file names do?
Alt text is a short description of an image, written into the page's code. A screen reader reads it aloud to a person who cannot see the image, and search engines read it to understand what the image shows. Most website builders have a field for it, often called "alt text" or "image description", beside each uploaded photo.
Google's guide gives a clear example. For a photo of a dog, "puppy" is better than nothing, and "Dalmatian puppy playing fetch" is best. It also warns against filling the description with keywords. So for a wedding image, write what is there: "bride and groom walking through a forest trail at a Squamish lodge". Do not write "Vancouver wedding photographer best wedding photos BC" on every image.
File names matter too. Google's guide says that "my-new-black-kitten.jpg is better than IMG00023.JPG". Files come out of the camera with names like DSC_4471.jpg. Rename them before upload, with the type of shoot and the place.
We wrote a longer guide on image descriptions and how AI reads images, if you want to go further.
Why does image file size matter so much?
A camera file can be larger than a whole website page should be. Upload twenty of them to a gallery, and the page takes a long time to open on a phone, where many clients first see your work.
Google's image guide asks for image optimization and "responsive image techniques", which means the site sends a smaller file to a phone and a larger one to a big screen. It lists the formats Google Search supports, including JPEG, WebP and AVIF. WebP and AVIF are newer formats that keep the same look in a smaller file. Export your web images at the width your website shows them, in one of those formats, and keep the full files for printing and for clients. If your website builder resizes images automatically, check that it does, by opening your gallery on your own phone on mobile data.
Which pages should a photographer write?
One page for each type of work. Weddings, family sessions, newborns, business headshots, events: each type has a different client with different questions. A couple wants to know about travel, the timeline of the day, second shooters, and how long until they see the photos. A parent wants to know how you handle a toddler, what to wear, and what happens if it rains. A business wants to know whether you come to the office, how many people you can photograph in a morning, and who owns the rights to use the images. Write those answers on the page, in your own words, with a gallery of that work only.
A page about pricing, or how pricing works. Clients compare photographers, and a price, or a clear explanation of how the price is set, lets them compare you. Publish your packages, or at least what decides the price and what each package includes.
Pages for the places you work most. If you shoot many weddings at particular venues or towns, a page about working there (the light at different times, where to shoot if it rains, the permits some parks require) helps couples planning a wedding there. Write only what you know from real shoots, and read how to build pages for the towns you serve before you write the same page with a different town name twenty times.
An About page with your face. People hire a photographer they feel comfortable with. A real photo of you, how you started, and how you work with nervous people in front of the camera.
How does a photographer without a studio use Google Business Profile?
Many photographers work from home and travel to clients. Google allows this. Its guidelines say that businesses that serve customers at the customer's location should "hide your business address from customers" and set a service area. Google's help page on service areas says "you can have up to 20 service areas", and its guidelines ask that the overall area stay within a two hour drive of where you are based. A rented mailing address where you do not work, which Google calls a virtual office, is not eligible for a profile.
Name the business with your real business name only. Google's guidelines forbid adding keywords or places to the name, so the profile carries "Your Name Photography" exactly as the business is registered, with no list of services after it.
Then use the profile's photo section for what it does well. Google's photo guidelines ask for JPG or PNG files between 10 KB and 5 MB, with a recommended size of 720 by 720 pixels. Add your best work, and add photos of yourself at work, because a client wants to see the person who will be at their wedding. Our guide on what Google rewards in profile photos explains the rest.
How should a photographer ask for reviews?
The best moment is the day the client receives the photographs, when the feeling is strongest. Send the review link from your Google profile, and suggest they mention the occasion, the place and how the session felt. "She made our two-year-old laugh for an hour at Queen Elizabeth Park" helps the next parent more than five stars with no text.
Google's content policy forbids offering "payment, discounts, free goods and/or services" in exchange for a review, so no free prints for reviews. It also forbids asking only the clients you expect to be happy. Ask every client, in the same way.
Which mistakes keep photographers invisible?
The homepage slideshow with no words. The gallery of fifty images with no captions. File names from the camera. Full-size files that make the site slow on a phone. One "Services" page that mixes weddings, newborns and corporate work. A Google profile with a home address visible, or no profile at all. And the whole business living on Instagram, which search engines and assistants read poorly, so the work never reaches the stranger searching tonight.
Where should a photographer start?
Pick the type of work you most want more of. Write its page this week: who it is for, how a session runs, what it costs, a gallery of that work only, and a short story beside the gallery. Rename those files and write their alt text. Then set up or fix the Google profile.
Licheo builds the website, search and AI work that big companies pay whole teams for, for small businesses like a photography studio. To see what a client and an assistant find when they look for you, run the free Get Found Check. It reads your homepage, your domain settings and your security certificate, and returns a grade in under 60 seconds.
Sources
- Google image SEO best practices, Google Search Central, last updated 2 March 2026, accessed 29 September 2026.
- Guidelines for representing your business on Google, Google Business Profile Help, Google, accessed 29 September 2026.
- Manage your service areas for service-area & hybrid businesses, Google Business Profile Help, Google, accessed 29 September 2026.
- Manage your Business Profile photos & videos, Google Business Profile Help, Google, accessed 29 September 2026.
- Prohibited and restricted content, Maps User Generated Content Policy Help, Google, accessed 29 September 2026.