SEO for Photographers on Pixieset

Pixieset started as a client gallery and proofing tool, and that's still what it does best — it was built for delivering photos to clients, not for winning search rankings. The Pixieset Websites builder has closed a lot of that gap, but there are still some platform-specific things worth knowing if you're running your marketing site on it.

Keep your galleries and your marketing site mentally separate

This is the most important Pixieset-specific concept: your client galleries (the password-protected delivery pages you send finished photos through) are not the same as your Pixieset website (the public marketing site with your portfolio, pricing, and contact page). Client galleries are often password-protected or set to unlisted, which is correct for client privacy — but it also means they're not indexable by Google, and shouldn't be treated as an SEO asset. All of your SEO effort belongs on the public website side, not the delivery side.

Fill in the SEO fields Pixieset gives you

In the Pixieset Websites editor, each page has its own SEO settings — a page title and meta description you can customize, usually under the page's settings panel. Don't leave these on the auto-generated default. Write a title that includes your specialty and city (“Newborn Photographer in Denver | [Your Studio Name]”) and a one-sentence meta description that would make someone want to click.

Use real filenames and alt text before you upload to your portfolio

Pixieset's portfolio pages pull directly from images you upload, so the filename and any caption/alt field you fill in at upload time matters. Rename files before uploading — austin-boudoir-photographer-studio-session.jpg instead of whatever your camera named it — and use the caption or alt text field if the theme provides one. For the full rationale, see Image SEO for Photographers.

Write actual text on your homepage and About page

A lot of Pixieset portfolio themes are extremely image-forward, which looks beautiful and gives search engines almost nothing to read. Make sure your homepage and About page have real sentences — not just a hero image and a name — that spell out your specialty and service area in plain language. This matters more on a highly visual builder like Pixieset than almost anywhere else on this list.

Connect a custom domain

If your site is still on a free Pixieset subdomain (something like yourname.pixieset.com), moving to a custom domain (yourstudio.com) is worth doing early — it looks more credible to both visitors and search engines, and it's the foundation everything else on this list builds on. This is a paid plan feature on Pixieset, but it's a one-time setup, not an ongoing SEO task.

Know what Pixieset can't do, and plan around it

Compared to Squarespace or WordPress, Pixieset's website builder has fewer deep SEO controls — no native blog with categories and tags, limited structured data options, and less flexibility for custom code. If content marketing (blogging about weddings you've shot, local venues, style guides) is a big part of your strategy, some photographers pair a Pixieset site with a separate, simple blog elsewhere and link between them. If that sounds like overkill for where you are right now, it's fine to skip it — the fundamentals (clear specialty and location text, proper image filenames, a filled-in Google Business Profile) matter more than having a blog at all.

Don't forget the basics that have nothing to do with your website builder

Your Google Business Profile, your local listing consistency, and your presence in AI search answers all live outside Pixieset entirely, and none of it depends on which site builder you use. See Google Business Profile Tips for Photographers and Local SEO Tips for Photographers for the parts of this that are the same no matter what your site is built on.