5. Setting Up Services Page

Services pages may be a new concept to you. But this is where we start to gain real SEO advantages over other photography sites and themes. So, if you want to rank better than everyone else, pay attention.

Let’s talk a little about what Services pages are, and we can put that and their SEO benefits into context.
Services pages collect all your info about each Service you provide (Wedding Photography, Portrait Photography, Lifestyle, Newborn, Maternity, etc), and brings it all in to one page.
This does a couple things:

• From a User point of view, consolidating Gallery, General Info, Rates Info, and Areas Served Info into one page makes it WAY easier for your potential clients to get what they’re looking for (as opposed to looking on 4 pages for the same info).
• From an SEO point of view, consolidating keywords about each specific Service, makes it clear to Google and other search engines that when someone searches “Wedding Photographer in San Diego” to show results for that page, and not your others.

 In our experience, the Services pages rank better, and lead to higher inquiries and bookings.

OK, let’s look at the example, and start adding your own info.

1. In the Admin menu, click on Services.
2. On the Services list page, click Weddings (If you don’t shoot weddings, you’ll rename this once inside).
3. Services look just like Posts or Pages, and work pretty much the same.
4. The first thing we’ll look at is the Title. If you would like to change it, you can do so here.
5. Next is the Permalink. This is just the URL for the page. To gain a little SEO advantage, we can add a location based keyword in here like “san-diego-wedding-photography”. Don’t forget to use dashes between words.
6. The next session is Slideshow. if you hover over the example photos, you will see a little X pop up in the upper right of each. Go ahead and delete them.
   To add your own, click on the “Add to gallery” button. If you have photos in the Media Library already, you can use those.
   Or if you haven’t loaded your photos yet, click on the Upload Files tab, and upload your photos.
   1. For your Slideshow, your photos should be the same orientation (Horizontal/Vertical), and the same proportion (3:2, 5:4, 2:1, etc). This will prevent the page from adjusting up and down between different sized photos.
   2. As with all photos, use Lightroom or Photoshop to export your photos at 3000 pixels on the long dimension, and save as JPG at 90 quality, and run through a program like JPEGMini.
7. Below Slideshows, you’ll see a section with three tabs labeled “General Info, Areas Served, and Rates.
8. In General Info, you’ll write some general information about you, your business, your shooting style… Anything you think people would want to know when they are looking into hiring you. If you’re a Wedding photographer, maybe talk about how you approach weddings. If you’re a Portrait photographer, you can discuss the process you go through with each portrait.
   You can also change the General Info title to anything you like.
   And below the text area is General Info Photo. You can add a photo here.
9. Now, click on Areas Served, and go through the same process. Add your city information, and where else you photograph. This is a huge benefit for SEO, as you’re providing more location based keywords on this page.
10. The next tab is Rates. Most people want at the very least a “Starting at price” so you can add that here. If you have packages, or specials, this is the place to put them.
11. The final thing you want to do, is tweak your Yoast SEO settting.
    1. Scroll down to the Yoast SEO section, and click on Edit Snippet.
    2. SEO Title is VERY important, so think about the keywords you want to rank for here, and type that in. “San Diego Wedding Photographer – William Bay Photography” is a good starting place. You can always adjust this later.
    3. You’ve already modified your “Slug” in Step 5 above, so you can ignore this.
    4. Meta Description: You have about 150 words to give a good description on this specific page, and this specific Service. When your site pops up in Google’s search results, people will read this. If it’s good, it can entice someone to click through.

That’s it! Make sure you click Update or Publish, and look at your new Service page.