Meet Michelle, a family & wedding photographer ready to grow her studio online.
In this article, we’ll explore the profile of our main clients: talented family and wedding photographers. They deliver beautiful work, their clients love them,but when it comes to building a strong online presence, many of them struggle.
The starting point
Michelle is a photographer living and working in Clay County, Florida. Her customers love her professionalism, but she noticed that her online presence is weak and wants to expand it.
Her challenge?
Despite her reputation and glowing client reviews, her website wasn’t generating consistent bookings. She was popular offline, but almost invisible online.
Like many photographers, Michelle simply didn’t have the time, or the expertise to manage SEO and digital marketing on her own.
That’s when she received a cold email from us and accepted a free SEO analysis to see what could be done.
What She Discovered After Talking to Us
When Michelle created her website, she didn’t have a clear plan for how to manage it. Building a website felt intuitive, if everyone had one, she needed one too, right?
Of course. But as I mentioned before, she had no idea how to properly manage her website. During our video call, we showed her exactly how a website can be optimized to attract more clients and grow her business.
Now let’s talk what she discovered in our previous talk.
Her Potential Reach of Clients
At first, Michelle thought that creating a website would be a wonderful way to expand her reach around her town and county — and she was completely right! Her county alone, Clay County, has a population of over 232,000 people. This means that if only 5% of them are searching for a family or wedding photographer on Google annually, that’s at least 11,600 potential clients!
And… what if her website doesn’t just appear for people in her own county, but in surrounding areas too? It would make it even easier for her to move around and book clients nearby. Let’s take a look at what that could mean.
Estimative population of each nearby County
In total, the population of Clay County and neighboring counties is 1.754.126 people. If only 5% are actively searching annually on Google for a wedding, baby, or family photographer, that means 87.706 potential leads! If Michelle succeeds in getting her website to appear at least in the local 3-pack for these counties, which is actually not that hard outside of big cities, where marketing for independent professionals is less competitive, she could capture a huge share of this demand. You just need to approach it in a smart way. Now, let me explain why SEO is the smartest way.
Clay County → 232.439
Duval County → 1.055.159
St. Johns County → 334.928
Putnam County → 74.600
Bradford County → 29.000
Baker County → 28.000
Why SEO?
First, when you want to expand your potential client base on Google, many people think of PPC (pay-per-click) campaigns at first. Yes, you can generate leads quickly, but the problem is that the more clicks you get (which don’t necessarily convert into clients), the higher the cost per click becomes. This can quickly affect the ability of a small-to-medium business owner like Michelle to consistently grow visibility and maintain sustainable results.
When it comes to SEO, the game is completely different. SEO ranks your website based on three pillars:
Quality Content
Optimization
Consistency
It means you don’t need a lot of money to appear in the #1 position for the services your clients are actively searching for, like ‘family portrait photographer’ or ‘smash cake baby photographer.’
For example, if your website loads quickly, is well-structured with a clear header, organized sections, a phone number, a contact page, and a portfolio, and if you’re consistently creating blog posts and adding new photos with proper meta tags, your site can very realistically reach the top rankings.
Instead of spending on ads every month, SEO builds long-term visibility. Once you’re ranked, inquiries keep coming without ongoing ad costs.
With this information in mind, let’s move on to the next step.
Michelle’s website was amateur and static. The photos were high quality, true, but there was no clear path to guide clients and no calls to action. Basically, her leads were zero, nobody was accessing her website because it was buried on the second page, around position #25. That’s completely normal for a new website. Because of this, we listened to her needs and tailored a 3-month plan. Let’s take a look.
But before it, as we always do, let’s take a look at Michelle’s website performance prior to our team’s work, its ranking, leads, and organic traffic.
Remember that Michelle’s website is new, so it’s completely acceptable that she is ranking low. For example, she’s in position 20+ for keywords like ‘family photographers in Clay County’ and barely appears in searches.
As expected, there is no organic traffic.
You can think the same for leads, there are none.
Our 3-Month Roadmap
Let’s see what our plan was for the first three months.
Month 1 - Audit & Foundations
Full SEO audit (site speed, titles, headings, content, backlinks).
Google Business Profile optimization.
Cleanup of citations in online directories.
Technical fixes (schema markup, on-page SEO, meta descriptions).
Month 2 - Content & Visibility
Blog posts tailored to local keywords (e.g., “Best Family Photo Locations in Clay County”).
Service page refinements to capture more local searches.
Local backlinks through collaborations with vendors and community pages.
Internal linking improvements for better authority flow.
The first image on the left is an example of an article we created. We built a keyword list using an SEO tool like Google Keyword Planner, and on the right, you can see how we selected the best keywords to create our article, helping it rank better and attract organic traffic.
Month 3 - Reviews & Visibility
Review acquisition strategy with clients (using keyword-rich feedback).
Ongoing monitoring in BrightLocal to track local rankings.
Adjustments to CTAs and on-page layout for higher conversions.
Monthly reporting to show what’s working and what’s next.
The Results After 3 months
In just 3 months, the website began to show improvements, going from 0 leads and 0 visits when we started to increasing traffic and leads. See below.
“The ‘visits’ graph shows that after the first month we were already ranking better, and visits started coming from people interested in Michelle’s work. With that, leads also began to grow month after month. But this was just the beginning, SEO is a consistent process, and 3 months is only the start of the work.
Three months were enough to place our website in the local three-pack for many areas of Clay County and neighboring counties, for the keyword “family photographers in Clay County”.
Continuous Improvement
The first three months are just the beginning of the work. As I mentioned before, over time we can target more keywords and more counties by creating additional blog posts, such as ‘Best Family Photographer in Duval County’ or ‘Best Areas to Shoot Baby Photos in Putnam County.’ These neighboring counties are now within our reach,after 6 months, we saw more visits and more leads.
Our Work Doesn't Stop
SEO doesn’t stop. By targeting more counties and towns within them, and with high-quality website content and blog posts, Michelle’s website saw massive improvement in 12 months.
Conclusion
Michelle’s story is hypothetical, but it reflects the average photographer we work with. Talented, busy, respected in her community, but underrepresented online.
This 3-month roadmap shows what’s possible when SEO is done right: more visibility, more bookings, less stress.
Not only that, we showed you our improvements at 6 months and even 12 months, SEO is a continuous process.
👉 Want to see what a similar transformation could look like for your studio? Let’s talk.