How to rank your photo booth company on page 1 of Google
You have a photo booth rental company and you want to generate leads without having to be constantly paying for ads, or giving money to the big sites like TheKnot and Wedding Wire.
That means that you really want to generate organic traffic with photo booth SEO, or “Search Engine Optimization” for your photobooth rental business.
Getting Organic Traffic
Google is still king when it comes to organic search traffic, and when customers are searching for terms like “photo booth rental near me”, you want to make sure that your website appears on the first page of results.
Even more importantly, if people are searching within your city, you want to make sure that your photo booth company shows up in the top 3 local results in the “Map Pack”.
And if you are located in a major city or metropolitan area, there is most probably a lot of competition with multiple companies fighting for those top spaces.
Local SEO is KING!
When potential customers are searching for a provider of tangible services, such as “photo booth rental”… the local map pack has the highest volume of clicks to both the website, and direct links to call the business.
People who click on your site through the local pack are already qualifying themselves as potential customers, more-so than someone who clicks through to your website via a blog post or article.
Why SEO vs Paid Ads?
If you’re just starting your photo booth rental company and you want to generate traffic and leads to your website, the fastest way is with paid ads.
Whether through Google Adwords or Meta Ads, you can turn on the “traffic faucet” and get people to your website by paying for it.
But when you have to be constantly paying the advertising bills for your traffic and leads, it eats into your profitability and margins.
If you are charging a high enough price to be able to continue paying for ads, by all means, you should do so and continue using paid ads, even if you rank organically.
But the best part, and biggest reason why photo booth SEO is so important is because of several key factors.
- It gives you even more exposure and visibility to potential clients.
- If you can dominate the first page of search results with your company, people are not finding and requesting quotes from your competitors.
- If you are ranking organically, you’re not spending money to generate leads, which gives you more margin to spend elsewhere.
Understanding Photo Booth SEO
We get it, you wanted to start a fun photo booth business to supplement your income as a side hustle, or you went all-in and have a full-time business with multiple photo booths and working at hundreds of events per year.
You didn’t get into photo booths because you wanted to have to learn all of the technical details of websites, coding, backlinks, and everything else that goes into ranking your company on Google.
That’s OK, we’re here to help! And we’ll start out by helping you get familiar with the different terms and jargon related to SEO, so as you shop around for an SEO specialist, you’ll have a better idea of what to look for.
Common SEO Terms and what they mean
On-Page SEO
On-Page SEO means the work done on the actual pages of your photo booth website. Things like proper use of h1/h2/h3 tags, bulleted lists, and bold & italicized text.
Years and years ago, this meant “keyword stuffing”, meta tags, and other tactics that no longer apply.
On-Page SEO for photo booth companies also means updating your websites core structure to ensure that you have good internal linking, and things like breadcrumbs.
Off-Page SEO
Off-page SEO is the all-encompassing term for work done externally from your website. Things like building backlinks and local citations.
What is a backlink? A backlink is any link from another website to your website or a page on your website.
The “world wide web” is an interconnected digital spiderweb of links from different pages and domains to other pages and domains.
Google, Bing, Yahoo, and the other search engines can only find you if you have links to your website from other websites, who also have links to their sites from other websites, and so on.
The more links to your photo booth website, the more authority your domain has, and the more relevant it is when compared to other sites that are trying to rank for the same search terms.
BUT NOT ALL BACKLINKS ARE CREATED EQUAL
When early SEO wizards discovered the power of backlinks and domain authority, it was quickly abused and the website with the most links “won”.
Today, Google and other search engines are smart, and they can tell the difference between a spammy backlink on a low-quality website, forum, or blog comment… and a high quality relevant link from a similar website.
This is why you want too make sure that your company and website is building organic links naturally from other relevant sites within your industry.
GMB (Google My Business) Listing
A GMB or Google My Business listing is a free listing on Google maps for your business. EVERY photo booth company should have a GMB listing, and should be sure to take the time and effort to optimize it.
Log in at https://business.google.com to manager your GMB profile for your photo booth company.
Citations
A citation is a listing on a business directory that includes your NAP (Name, Address, Phone). Citations, in conjunction with your GMB listing are critical to local SEO for photo booth companies.
Consider this, if you are a real business, then your business should be listed in as many “phone books” or business directories as possible, with matching Name, Address, and Phone Number.
This sends a signal that you are legitimate, and exist at your physical place of business, which further helps your local photo booth SEO rankings.
SERP
SERP stands for “Search Engine Results Page”, and it is the page that you see after searching for a keyword.
The SERPs contain the local map pack, paid ad placements, organic search placements, and other rich SERP features (such as “people also ask” or AI answers).
As you take on optimizing your photo booth website for SEO, you need to keep in mind and consider how and where your website shows up in the SERPs.
Once your site is ranking, it is now competing against everything else on the page for the attention of the viewer, so it is important to be mindful when writing your page titles, and excerpt descriptions to entice searchers to click on your site instead of anyone elses.
Black Hat / White Hat / Grey Hat
When it comes to SEO, especially for photo booth and event rental companies, there are a number of tactics that can be employed.
Black hat tactics are the practices that violate Google’s quality guidelines. Such as spammy backlinks, or low quality AI generated content.
White hat tactics are the practices that wholly comply with Googles quality guidelines.
Grey hat tactics are the practices that combine both White & Black techniques and operate in a grey area.
Page speed
In the world of SEO, speed is king. Google favors highly websites that perform well and are optimized for speed of delivery.
You can use Google’s Page Speed insights to analyze your website for both desktop and mobile to see how it stacks up.
Slow page load times cause people to bounce away from your site.
If your website is not passing the page speed test, then you should work with an expert to make tweaks to your site to speed it up.
