SEO for Photographers: How One Photographer Went from 3 Google Clicks to 198

I often talk about how SEO can help photographers get discovered online, but it's even better when someone shares their real-world experience applying it.

The following guest post comes from a Cleveland-based photographer who took my SEO for Photographers course and documented the results after implementing the strategies.

Guest Contributor: Andrey Boltyansky
Andrey Boltyansky is a Cleveland-based photographer, offering wedding, portrait, and commercial photography services.

Website: Swanky Bolt Studios
Instagram: Swanky Bolt Studios

SEO for Photographers: How Matt Rutter's Course Helped Me Actually Show Up on Google

If you're a photographer with a website, you've probably heard the term SEO thrown around enough times to make your eyes glaze over. Search engine optimization sounds like the kind of thing that requires a computer science degree, a marketing budget, and about forty hours a week you definitely don't have. At least, that's what I assumed.

I'm a Cleveland-based wedding and commercial photographer, and like a lot of photographers, I built my website, put my work on it, and more or less hoped for the best. Spoiler: hoping for the best is not an SEO strategy. My site was getting minimal traffic from Google and I had no real idea why or what to do about it. I also felt like I simply didn’t have the time that getting real results would require.

In November 2025, I enrolled in Matt Rutter's SEO course for photographers. Matt is a fellow Cleveland photographer with years of experience in marketing and advertising in the corporate world. He told me that he wanted to put together a course that boiled all of his knowledge down into a straight-shooting crash course, and as someone who always looks for a magic pill solution, that sounded great to me. 

In other words, it's built specifically for photographers, by a photographer who figured this stuff out firsthand. 

What the Course Is Actually Like

The thing that stood out most to me was how approachable Matt kept the material. SEO has a reputation for being dense and boring, but Matt breaks it down in a way that's digestible without dumbing it down. Each unit comes with direct, specific tasks to actually perform on your website as well as tools that help you track your site’s traffic growth over time. 

He avoids vague advice like "optimize your content," and instead uses concrete action items that you can knock out and move on from. He defines the terminology in a practical way without getting bogged down in technical details that aren’t relevant to your business’ growth.

As a working photographer with a full schedule (and brutal ADHD), I didn't have time for a course that was going to require me to block out entire weekends. The format respects your time. I was able to work through it in manageable chunks and implement changes incrementally, which made it feel a lot less overwhelming than I expected. 

I’ve taken marketing and business courses from various professionals, influencers, and business owners and this is the first class that I’ve actually completed and applied with visible results.

The Results

I'll let the numbers do the talking here. When I started the course in mid-November, I was pulling in a pretty pathetic number of clicks from Google Search: we're talking 1 to 3 on a good day. By November 30th, just two weeks in, I had hit 40 clicks in a rolling 30-day window. As of now, I'm at 198 clicks in the last 30 days and still climbing.

Beyond clicks, my impressions (how often Google is actually surfacing my site in search results) jumped from roughly 200 per day to consistently hitting 500 to 750. My average ranking position improved from around page 2 into the top 10 for several key searches. One blog post alone has driven 171 clicks and over 12,000 impressions. That post didn't exist before I took this course, and I only wrote it because it was an action item for a chapter.

What’s pretty crazy is that I'm still implementing Matt’s guidelines. While I did finish the course itself, I haven't finished applying all of the SEO best practices it covered yet. These are early results, and I spend maybe 2 hours a week on site updates in between my actual client work.

Is It Worth It?

If you're a photographer who has been putting off dealing with SEO because it sounds overwhelming or time-consuming, this course removes both of those excuses. It's straightforward, the tasks are clearly defined, and the results are real. 

My website is showing up on Google in ways it wasn't three months ago, and I'm booking inquiries from people who found me through search rather than referrals. For a working photographer trying to grow their business, that's a pretty meaningful shift.

Learn SEO for Photography

If you're a photographer who wants your website to show up on Google and bring in consistent inquiries, you can learn the exact strategies used in this case study.

Explore the SEO for Photographers Course