Make no mistake: a huge portion of your business as a photo booth owner will come from search engine traffic. 48 percent of mobile users start their researching businesses through a search engine, and 50 percent of people searching for local businesses end up at a business location within the next 24 hours.
Therefore, if people can find you easily through search engines, you stand a higher chance at obtaining a new customer. How do you get found easily through search engines? Using SEO, or search engine optimization, best practices and techniques will help your site get found easily. We have touched on SEO briefly as a component in our last few blog posts, but this post will serve as a fairly comprehensive guide on SEO for photo booth owners.
Your ultimate goal is to build out keyword use within your website pages. That way, search engines like Google connect your website to crucial phrases that a search user is likely to query, such as “photo booth rental in Cityville.” Of course, your approach must be a bit more strategic and nuanced than repeating the same phrases over and over again. Instead, you have to use natural language and build out your content in order to slowly climb the search engine rankings over time.
Here is how you can get started with SEO, and some best practices you can use to raise your chances of success.
Start With Keyword Research
The whole goal of SEO is to have your website appear close to the top of search engine results pages (SERPs) in connection with certain phrases a potential customer is likely to use.
These phrases vary greatly from business to business. You can feel free to pick options from a generic list, but your local market and your particular business model may be better suited towards emphasizing certain keywords over others. If, for instance, your photo booth is not really ready for weddings, you may not want to prioritize “wedding photo booth rental for now.”
You can use keyword tools like Google Keyword Planner or UberSuggest to get a slew of suggestions, but the best ways are even simpler. Namely, just type “photo booth” into your personal browser’s search engine box and then scroll all the way to the bottom. There, right above the pages navigation, you will see similar phrases others may have used, especially “photo booth in (your current town).” Go ahead and pop some of these into your browser again, and take note of further suggestions.
These suggestions offered will be a great founding basis for you to write content for your website.
How SEO Keyword Use Works
Using keywords in your website content in order to boost SEO is a delicate dance. The #1 rule is to write naturally. Use normal sentences that flow well, and try not to include a keyword more than 2-3 times every 250 words.
You will want to pick one main keyword to use in most of the following:
- Your H1 headline or page header text
- Within the first 100 words of your page
- On an H2 subheader
- Within alt-text that displays when you hover over an image
- Within your meta description
- On your title tag, aka the page title that shows on the browser tab when the page is open
Keep in mind that you don’t have to use your keyword phrase in every single one of these areas, just enough to signal to Google and other search engines that there is a connection. You can also add variety, such as saying “Miami photo booth” as well as “photo booth in Miami” if your keyword phrase is just “photo booth Miami.”
Diversifying your page keyword emphasis is a great strategy for ensuring that your pages read naturally while covering a lot of SEO ground. For instance, your homepage can be centered around the phrase “photo booth in (your town)” while your services page can emphasize “photo booth rental.”
Links are also an important signal to search engines, so you can often use a separate keyword in a phrase like “we provide photo booth rentals for weddings” to help people navigate to that page easier while also boosting SEO.
Building Out More Content for SEO
So, you have your existing web pages optimized for a handful of relevant keywords after a round of research. Now what?
You make more pages! Adding regular content is the best way to essentially pad out your keyword strategy with new ranking signals. For instance, you can add dedicated pages for each of the events you do as an excuse to highlight keywords like “kids birthday photo booth” and “photo booth for bar mitzvahs.”
If your site feels full already, you can also start a blog. Blog content is one of the most handy tools you can have for keeping your site updated with fresh content, which encourages sites to index it and check for stronger keyword relevance. Start by writing general tips for using a photo booth or throwing an event. Then, feel free to get more creative with advice on photography, coverage of recent local events or anything you think people would want to read.
Optimize each post for a chosen keyword, but ensure that every blog post is well-written and interesting. Algorithms for Google and other search engines can detect content with poor grammar and bad layout, so put effort into each piece as if it represented your company. As a bonus, this blog content can be shared via social media or email campaigns to keep people engaged through those channels.
Monitoring and Optimizing SEO for Photo Booths
SEO is an ongoing process, not a one-time project. You will want to keep adding to site content through blogs and new pages to keep everything fresh. You may also want to overhaul your site’s text after four or five years to ensure your content stays fresh and relevant over time.
Your ranking will also change quite frequently, in all likelihood. Keep an eye out for competitors by regularly searching for key phrases and seeing how you rank compared to others. You can also monitor traffic through Google Analytics to identify new keyphrases and the type of content that brings in the most visitors.
You can also work on improving the more technical aspects of SEO. For instance, page load speed can affect your ranking, so analyzing pagespeed through Google’s tools can give you suggestions for areas of improvement.
Include Great Photos Thanks to Hilarious Photo Booth Props
Photos serve as a strong signal to both search engine algorithms and humans that your site content is worth reading. What’s the best way to have engaging photos for your site pages and blog? Wacky props, of course!
Fun and funny photo booth props add interest to your photos while giving potential customers a taste of just how amazing their booth will be. You can explore options for adding amazing discount photo booth props or high-end photo booth backgrounds to give your photos — and your booth — the extra edge it deserves.
Meta: Learn all the basics of SEO for photo booth owners, including how to research your most important keywords and build content to power your ranking goals.
KWs: SEO for photo booth owners