How to Blog About a Newborn Photography Session for SEO
I know blogging about a recent session isn’t always as easy as it sounds. Because once you sit there, you’ve uploaded a few pictures from the gallery to your post, but what do you say? It was just an ordinary session, but what are you actually supposed to say about it? What can possibly be interesting to read about it?
Well, there are more things than you might think, and in this post, I will show you with examples how to make all your posts about your sessions useful for your SEO and for the future client who finds them.
Where to start when blogging about a newborn session?
Yes, you are blogging for Google. You want the post to help you rank. But one thing that is easy to forget is that it’s not enough to “just rank.” When someone finds the blog post, it actually needs to help do the job of getting new sessions booked.
This means that the blog needs to be both optimized for SEO and written for the mothers who read it.
Google cares about keywords and links to other pages on your website (internal linking), but the mother who finds it has a lot of things in her head.
She might be looking through your photographs while wondering whether her house is nice enough for an in-home session. She might have a three-year-old who never sits still. And she might be worried that her baby will cry through the whole thing, or that she’ll spend the entire session stressed because nothing is going the way it was supposed to.
Basically, she is worried that what she has isn’t enough to get beautiful pictures like the ones you show in your posts.
And this is why blogging about past sessions is so brilliant, because there is no other place on your website where you have enough room to show exactly what a session with you looks like. In the post, you can address all her worries.
Instead of writing another sentence on your website telling her “don’t worry, your baby doesn’t have to behave perfecty” you can show her a session where the baby actually did cry. You can tell her what happened, how you handled it and what the session looked like anyway.
So we’re not just blogging a gallery because we need another blog post.
I’m gonna show you how to write a post like this, but instead of giving you a list of things you should include, we’re going to pretend we have a real session to blog and write it together.
First, what do you actually want this post to be found for?
Before you start writing, think about what makes this particular session different when writing the title.
Add the thing that makes this session different. Because if you photograph newborns in Richmond all year, you might eventually have ten in-home newborn sessions on your blog, and they can’t all be called An In-Home Newborn Session in Richmond, Virginia.
For this one, Sophie was fussy during the session. So we can use that in the title to address one concern a mother might have about a newborn session, but also to help us differentiate it. So for our blog, it could be something like A Richmond In-Home Newborn Session With a Fussy Baby.
The next one might be about a newborn session with three older siblings, a tiny nursery, twins, or a baby who stayed awake for almost the whole session.
I would also always include the location in the title, because that is important for SEO. It could be your city, or sometimes even the neighborhood. Just be a little careful with how specific you get. You never want to include so much information that someone could easily figure out where your client lives.
Now let’s actually start writing the session post
Start with the family and why they chose this kind of session, or a bit about how the discussion was when you were planning together.
You could write:
When the Miller family welcomed Sophie, they knew they wanted their newborn session to happen at home. It’s the same Richmond townhouse they brought Emma home to four years ago, and Mom loved the idea of photographing this new season in a place that already holds so much of their family life.
And with a newborn and a four-year-old, staying home also meant nobody had to be packed up and out the door at a certain time. Emma could wander off to play when she needed a break, Sophie could feed whenever she needed to, and we could let the morning move at their pace.
Why are we adding this?
Because you’ve naturally told Google that this is a newborn session, at home, in Richmond without trying to squeeze your keyword into every other sentence.
But you’re also showing the mother reading why she might want an in-home newborn session too. Maybe she also has a toddler. Maybe getting everyone dressed and out of the house with a two-week-old baby already sounds exhausting.
Now she isn’t only looking at another newborn session you photographed. She’s starting to understand how an in-home session could work for her own family too.
Talk about the house, especially if it wasn’t “perfect”
You know that the final gallery might not always show exactly what the location really looked like. Especially with in-home sessions, because as photographers, we are very good at posing, positioning, and finding angles that create beautiful galleries.
But the mom looking at those photos only sees the gorgeous gallery. She doesn’t see what was outside the frame.
She doesn’t know that you moved a laundry basket out of the corner and photographed almost the entire family within three feet of one small window.
And that’s what you should tell her.
For our pretend session, the Miller family’s townhouse doesn’t have tons of natural light. The windows are small, and some rooms are quite dark. And that’s actually a really helpful thing to talk about.
You could write:
Their townhouse doesn’t have large windows or light pouring into every room, and it didn’t need to. When I arrived, I walked through the house and looked at where we had the best natural light. We found it beside one small living room window, in one corner of Mom and Dad’s bedroom and beside the nursery window. That was enough.
And no, the house didn’t need to be perfectly cleaned before I arrived either. We moved a few things when we needed to, ignored everything that wasn’t going to be in the photographs and used the parts of their home that worked beautifully.
Why are we adding this?
One of the things that can stop a mother from considering an in-home newborn session is looking around her own house and thinking, mine doesn’t look like that.
Maybe her home is darker, maybe it’s small, maybe there are toys everywhere and bottles on the counter and a pile of laundry waiting upstairs. Your blog post has just shown her that she doesn’t need a perfect, picture-ready home for an in-home newborn session to work.
And tell her when things didn’t go perfectly during the newborn session
If something happened during the session that you know mothers worry about, don’t automatically leave it out because it doesn’t sound like the picture-perfect version of a newborn session.
Use it.
Remember, Sophie was fussy that morning. She cried, she wanted Mom, and she needed to feed twice. That’s incredibly normal for a three-week-old baby, but a first-time mom booking a newborn session might not know that it is completely okay.
You could write:
Sophie wasn’t particularly interested in sleeping through her newborn session. She wanted to be held, stopped for two feeds and let us know very clearly whenever she’d had enough.
So that’s what we worked with. We photographed her in Mom’s arms while she settled, gave her time to feed when she needed it and brought Emma in whenever she was ready. There was no clock we were trying to beat and no reason Sophie needed to behave any differently than a three-week-old baby.
Why are we adding this?
Because imagine reading that when you’re pregnant and worrying, What if the baby cries the entire time?
In your post, you can tell her what happened, explain what you did and then show her how the pictures still turned out beautifully.
The same goes for the toddler who won’t participate, the baby who needs feeding, the house that isn’t perfectly tidy, or Mom needing a break halfway through.
When you blog about a session, you have the opportunity to back up everything you promise on the rest of your website. Your blog post can actually show someone that the experience you talk about is still there when real life happens.
And always end your blog post with a call to action
Don’t let the blog post just end after the last photograph.
If someone has made it all the way through the post and is thinking, this actually sounds like what I want, make it really easy for her to know what to do next.
You could write:
If an in-home newborn session feels like the right fit for your family, I’d love to hear from you. You can get in touch here and tell me a little about your baby and what you’re hoping to remember from this season.
Then link directly to your contact page. It doesn’t need to be a huge button that say “book your session”, for a blog post it’s enough with a gentle invitation.
Once the post is written, add the SEO pieces
Now that the actual blog post is written, go back through it and add your internal links.
Google loves internal links because they help it understand how the pages on your website connect to each other. So if this is an in-home newborn session, link back to your main newborn photography page at different places in the text.
You can also link to your contact page, another related blog post, or anything else that helps the reader keep moving through your website.
You could write:
If you’re wondering what an in-home newborn session could look like for your own family, you can read more about my Richmond newborn photography sessions here.
For this example, don’t just add the link at the word here, add the link for the whole part “Richmond newborn photography sessions here“. It will help Google understand the connection between the pages better.
And while you’re there, don’t forget the images. Add alt text to the photos in the post so Google can understand what is in them too. I have a whole post about writing alt text for photography websites, so I’ll link that here if you want help with that part.
And if you’re realizing your website needs a little more than a new blog post…
Maybe this post has also made you look at your website a little differently. Maybe there are parts you’ve been meaning to fix, or you know it’s time for something that feels more like you and makes it easier for the right clients to find you.
If that’s where you are, you can have a look at my custom Showit website service, or if you’d rather start with something you can make your own, my Showit templates might be a better fit.
Either way, I’ve created both specifically for newborn, maternity and family photographers, with the copy, design and SEO all thought through from the start.
Be the first to comment