Photography To Remember
Photography To Remember is a well-established photography business based in Cape Town (Fish Hoek area).
The website was struggling in a crowded market. Despite having a beautifully designed website, Amy Green, the owner and photographer, noticed a significant drop in website traffic and leads. Especially for her popular keyword phrases, such as “birth” and “newborn photography services”.
With over 12 years of experience, Amy knew her skills were unmatched, but the competition was fierce and the market was getting crowded.
She needed help with SEO and, as well as a new digital marketing strategy to get her business growing again and generate consistent leads.
Lead Time: 6 months
Sector: Photography services - specializing in maternity, birth, newborn, family, wedding, and corporate event photography.
Target Type: Local customers in Cape Town and the Western Cape
Demographic: Primary demographic consisted of young families, expectant parents, and couples in the Western Cape
Website Goal: Increase website traffic, Improve conversion rates, and Generate qualified leads for Photography To Remember’s services.
Services: SEO Keyword Research, On-page optimization, Local SEO, Link Building, Content Marketing, and ongoing SEO strategy implementation.
Technologies: Google Analytics, SEMrush, Ahrefs, Google Search Console
65% Increase
in Qualified leads within a year
The Challenge
Photography To Remember, a well established photography business in Cape Town, was in trouble. Despite having years of experience and a beautiful website, the business was not getting new clients and qualified leads.
The competitive photography market, especially for niche services like maternity and newborn photography, was making it hard for Amy Green to stand out online.
To grow the business she needed a clear plan to increase visibility, attract the right audience and convert website visitors into clients.
Problems:
- Website traffic was declining despite having a great website.
- Not visible in search engines for birth and newborn photography.
- High competition in the local photography market.
- No leads coming from the website.
- Poor local SEO making it hard for Cape Town clients to find the business.
- No targeted keyword strategy for niche services.
- No backlinks and online authority to boost search rankings.
- No content marketing strategy to engage and nurture potential clients.
The EcoSEO’s Solution
We at EcoSEO knew that an attractive website wasn’t enough in such a competitive industry.
Our SEO team decided to start out by focusing on revamping both the website and creating a new marketing strategy.
The goal was to increase conversion rates while driving more qualified traffic to the site.
First, we redesigned and redeveloped the Photography To Remember website with the help of our design friends.
We implemented conversion rate optimisation (CRO) techniques to make the website more user-friendly, fast, and a bit easier to navigate.
We also did thorough onsite SEO to make the site more visible in search engine results, targeting Amy’s key services like maternity, newborn, and wedding photography in the Cape Town area.
With onsite SEO in place, we didn’t stop there. We launched an ongoing content marketing strategy to build the brand, attract new visitors, and nurture those leads into paying clients.
This two pronged approach – optimising the website and launching a long term SEO and content marketing campaign – was designed to get sustainable growth and customer engagement.
SEO Audit Services
Pretty websites are all well and good, but there’s not much point if Google can’t actually find it. That was the story of Photography To Remember. The website looked great, but something under the hood wasn’t doing its job. And, to make matters worse, new competition was popping up every five minutes. They didn’t have time to second-guess themselves.
So, we put on our hard hats and got to work. We began with a comprehensive SEO audit. No smoke and mirrors — just a thorough investigation to work out, precisely, what was holding the site back. We covered the usual bases: on-page content that didn’t fully resolve user intent, a tangled page architecture and the unseen technical pieces like speed, mobile-friendliness, crawling and indexability.
We also covered off-site signals. Backlinks, engagement data, analytics anomalies — all the stuff that often goes unnoticed (usually until too late) but which can really hobble a site. It’s amazing how often the cause of a problem is hiding in plain sight, in data you thought you knew.
To me, an SEO audit is like a website check-up at the doctor. It sounds stupid, but it’s an analogy that helps people understand. Which part is “unwell”? What is actually treatable? An audit will highlight broken links, slow-loading pages, missing metadata and other odd little technical gremlins.
On the content side, it will highlight things like clumsy keyword insertion or pages that just don’t look like they’ve been assembled by a human. Clean those up and, not only does the website start to make more sense (to search engines and, more importantly, actual people) but you’ve gone a long way to putting the ship right.
From there, we got stuck in. We resolved technical issues, sped the site up, made it play nicer with mobile and settled those keywords into their new homes. The results were, frankly, no-brainers.
The site became more findable, started to rank in the search results and, crucially, began to attract the kind of organic traffic the business had been missing. It’s one of those changes that reminds you why an audit is so important.
SEO Keyword Research
Strange but true, the “keyword problem” in the Photography To Remember case wasn’t really keywords at all. It was visibility. Amy was producing great work — beautiful, authentic, technically clean. But the web did not want to know about it. Or, to put it more accurately, it didn’t know it. When you’re trying to run a business that needs people to actually find you online, that sort of invisibility is more than a little painful.
Her core services — birth, newborn, weddings — should have been all over the place for local searches, but were way, way down the list somewhere where, frankly, nobody would look. It was almost as if people walking past the store in the real world were doing the same thing online: passing by without realising there was a whole studio’s worth of work behind the glass.
So we dug in. We didn’t just look at a list of keywords and think “Yeah, sounds about right.” We wanted to know what local people were actually typing into Google when they were ready to look for a photographer. Because the thing about keywords is that the ones that people think they’re using are often not the ones they’re actually typing. I’ve made that mistake before, myself.
There was some competitor analysis, some search behaviour examination, some fiddling with search volumes, and some gut-feel work to try and figure out what the intention was behind certain phrases. Because this wasn’t about capturing the most traffic possible. It was about getting the right kind of visitor. The one who’s actually on their way to making a booking.
The long-tail terms jumped out almost straight away. “Newborn photography Cape Town” or “wedding photographer Western Cape” — very specific searches which people only really type when they’re more or less ready to commit. As opposed to “should I get a photographer?” type queries.
Once we’d got an idea of what was important, we started incorporating those keywords into the site: service pages, blog posts, meta descriptions, etc.
The result? As you might expect, traffic started to increase. But you could also just tell that the visitors that were coming to the site were the ones that were actually likely to book a session. Almost as if the website realised what it was there to do for the first time.
Local SEO Services
Photography To Remember is a locally owned business, so naturally it depends heavily on people from Cape Town and other regions within the Western Cape. The real, family-friendly soul of what she does happens right here, in our backyard.
However, Amy had a recurring source of frustration. Her website did not show up as a local result when people searched for photographers in her area. In fact, she felt like she was handing people a menu across the street while they walked by and someone else’s window.
Enquiries? They were definitely getting enquiries, but many were landing in another photographer’s inbox…
The solution was local SEO. Basic, unsexy work that actually matters. We dug into local, location-focused keywords like “Cape Town wedding photographer” or “newborn photography Western Cape” and we started incorporating them into the decision-making pages of the website.
We also took her Google My Business profile, dusted it off and made sure it was displaying her actual services. We uploaded some new photos, updated the categories, clarified the service area in her description and ensured that her NAP (name, address, phone number) were uniform throughout.
Local SEO is about being found in the same place you’re in. It’s when a local person gets their phone out to find something nearby that you want to be there in front of them before their coffee has cooled.
The difference once everything was set up correctly was immediately apparent. She was getting local views, more clicks to her listing, and an increase in inquiries. The business found its local audience.
Link Building SEO (High DA Website and NAP Profiles)
Amy’s website was a good one. It had a professional feel, the copywriting had been solid, and, to be honest, you could just tell she cared about her work. But even so, there was one glaring issue — there were next to no backlinks. And when there aren’t any backlinks, search engines tend to see a website as if it were a stranger you’ve just met. Nice, but not someone you trust yet.
It was time to build her a backlink strategy. No overnight stunts, no gimmicks. We started contacting local websites, photography blogs, small businesses in adjacent niches, really anyone who had an audience that would naturally have an interest in Amy’s work. A couple of guest posts, some collaborations, some friendly outreach to real people who actually ran these sites. And almost before we knew it, we started to get links.
Good backlinks, like personal recommendations, are a signal to others that you’re worth their time. If someone else links to you, they’re effectively saying, “Look at these guys, they’re pretty legit.” Search engines understand that. They may not understand a photograph, but they can understand (or at least, they try to understand) trust.
And the key part? It’s not about volume. It’s not about a thousand random links. It’s about the right links. One well considered mention on a respected local site can do more for you than ten irrelevant links from anywhere.
And as those quality backlinks rolled in, Photography To Remember started to get into higher and higher positions in search results. Gradually at first, then more and more confidently. And as the ranking got higher, so did click-through rate. More people were visiting Amy’s website, not just because of a stray Google search, but because they were on photography blogs, and local guides, and listing pages of photography niches they weren’t even directly involved in.
The numbers are always satisfying to see rise, but they’re even more satisfying to know that those numbers are real families who are booking their photography sessions.
The Results
I remember looking back at the first few months, and it was a bizarre experience to see how quickly everything changed for Photography To Remember after the new site and SEO was live.
It wasn’t explosive — not like there was a massive spike overnight. It was different. You could sense the slow, steady climb with confidence week on week.
- Amy started to get more pings in her inbox within the first 3 months. People started to actually contact her, with genuine questions, rather than searching, finding no answer, and leaving. She noticed an increase in traffic, as if the site had emerged from the shadows.
- The leads were something that I think neither of us were expecting. The number of qualified enquiries increased by 65% within the first year. This was at the height of COVID when many small businesses were being lost in the noise and having real difficulty being seen and found, let alone growing.
- The total number of visits to the website increased by 163%, which is a staggering number to read back out loud. The growth hasn’t stopped there, either. As we continue to refine based on the data and what is working — those small tweaks and changes — the traffic (and the bookings) have kept growing.
Technical Tools:
Screaming Frog SEO Spider, Google Search Console, Google PageSpeed Insights, Structured Data Testing Tool (Google), Mobile-Friendly Test (Google), Yoast SEO, SEMrush, Surfer SEO, Ahrefs Keywords Explorer, Rank Math, Google My Business Dashboard, BrightLocal, Moz Local, Whitespark, SEMrush Local SEO
SEO Services
On-Page SEO, Technical SEO, Content Strategy, Link Building, Local SEO, EEAT Optimization
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