Ready to Tag a Whole Gallery in Minutes?
Let PhotoScanr generate alt text, captions, and keywords for your Squarespace portfolio
Try PhotoScanr FreeFree to use • No sign-up required • Instant results
Photo Keywords for SEO on a Squarespace Portfolio
By Duncan Rawlinson · Updated
A Squarespace portfolio looks great out of the box, but visual polish does not automatically translate into search traffic. Google still relies on text to understand your images, and most photographers leave that text empty. Filling it in carefully is one of the highest-leverage SEO improvements you can make on a portfolio site.
This guide walks through the fields Squarespace gives you, what each one actually does, and how to choose keywords that match the way real people search for photographers. The aim is not to game the algorithm. It is to give Google enough context to confidently surface your work to people who would love it.
If you have a few hundred images in galleries and product blocks, the work adds up. We will look at how to batch the boring parts so you can spend your time editing photos instead of typing keywords.
Alt Text vs Title vs Filename: What Each One Does
Squarespace exposes several text fields per image, and they are not interchangeable. Understanding the role of each prevents the common mistake of stuffing the same phrase into every box.
Alt Text Is for Meaning
The alt attribute describes what the image shows. Screen readers read it aloud. Google uses it as the strongest single signal about the image's content. Write a sentence that conveys the subject, action, and notable context.
Good: "A bride and groom walking through a misty forest in Tofino, holding hands." Bad: "wedding photo wedding photographer Tofino BC weddings".
Image Title Is for the Caption
Squarespace's image title shows up as the on-page caption when you enable it in gallery and image block settings. Treat it as visible content. It can be shorter and more poetic than the alt text. Search engines do read it, but its primary job is to support the visitor experience.
Filename Is the Quiet Signal
"DSC_4821.jpg" tells Google nothing. Rename your files before upload to something descriptive and hyphenated, like "tofino-elopement-misty-forest.jpg". Squarespace preserves the original filename in the image URL, so this is one of the few SEO levers you cannot fix after the fact without re-uploading.
Squarespace's Photo Block Fields in Detail
Different blocks expose different fields. Knowing where each one lives saves a lot of clicking through the editor.
Image Block
Single image blocks let you set alt text under the image's edit panel. The "filename" field controls both the visible caption (when caption display is enabled) and feeds into the alt attribute when no separate alt is provided. For best results, set both explicitly.
Gallery Block and Section
Gallery blocks pull the alt text from the image's "Image Title" field by default unless you override it. If you have hundreds of gallery images, the fastest workflow is to upload images with descriptive filenames and then add alt text in the asset library.
Product Image
For print sales and prints-on-demand, product images use the alt text field tied to the variant. Each angle and color variant deserves its own descriptive alt. Generic "product photo" alt text wastes the most valuable real estate on your store.
Background and Banner Images
Hero banners are typically considered decorative and should have empty or very minimal alt text. Do not stuff your homepage banner with keywords. Squarespace renders these as CSS backgrounds in many templates, which means Google often does not index them at all.
Keyword Research for Photo Blogs and Portfolios
Photographers tend to think about keywords the way clients do not. A wedding photographer might tag every image "wedding photography," but real searchers type things like "small wedding venue Vancouver Island" or "elopement dress for hiking."
Start With the Search Intent
Open Google in an incognito window and type the kind of query a client might use. Look at the autocomplete suggestions. Look at the "People also ask" panel. Look at the related searches at the bottom of the page. This is free, real-world keyword research that costs nothing and reveals the actual phrasing your audience uses.
Long Tail Beats Short Tail for Portfolios
You will not outrank Vogue for "fashion photography." You can absolutely rank for "editorial fashion photographer studio space Toronto Junction." Long, specific phrases convert better, attract clients who already know what they want, and face far less competition.
One Primary Keyword Per Page, Many Per Gallery
Each gallery page should target a clear primary keyword in the H1, the page title, and the URL. Within that page, individual images can support related secondary keywords through their alt text. A "Tofino Elopements" gallery can have alt text mentioning specific beaches, weather conditions, and seasons without diluting the primary topic.
How Google Actually Reads Your Images
Google's image understanding has improved dramatically. Computer vision models can identify subjects, scenes, and even style attributes without any text at all. That does not mean text is obsolete. It means text now confirms or refines what the model already sees.
The Three Things Google Looks At
- The image itself through visual analysis. Google can tell a sunset from a portrait without help.
- The text directly attached through alt text, filename, image title, and surrounding caption.
- The text on the page including the H1, body copy, and headings near the image. An image at the top of a "Tofino Wedding Photographer" page is implicitly tagged with that context.
The implication for portfolio owners is that you do not need to repeat keywords obsessively in every alt. You need to make sure each image lives on a page whose copy reinforces what you want to rank for.
JSON-LD ImageObject for Featured Images
Squarespace handles basic structured data automatically, but for hero images and gallery cover photos that you want to surface in Google Images and discovery feeds, adding explicit ImageObject markup helps. You can inject this through the "Code Injection" section under Settings.
Minimum Useful Fields
An ImageObject for a portfolio image benefits from at least a contentUrl, a name, a description (your alt text), the creator, the copyrightNotice, and the license. Adding the creator field is especially valuable for photographers because it associates your name with the work in Google's knowledge graph.
If you do not want to hand-edit JSON-LD, focus on filling the alt and image title fields well. Google generates much of this metadata automatically when those are present.
How PhotoScanr Speeds Up Squarespace SEO
The hardest part of image SEO is not understanding the rules. It is finding the patience to fill in three fields for every one of three hundred photos. PhotoScanr handles the bulk work so you can spend your time on the editorial decisions that actually matter.
Batch Processing for Whole Galleries
Drop a gallery's worth of exports onto PhotoScanr and let it work through them. Pro handles 100 images per day with batches of 25, and Studio handles 600 per day with batches of 100. That covers most portfolio updates in a single session.
Style Preferences for Consistent Voice
Set a style preference that matches your brand voice once, and every alt and caption will follow it. A wedding photographer might pick a warm, narrative tone. A commercial photographer might pick clean and factual. The point is consistency across hundreds of images without manually tuning each one.
ZIP Export for Easy Upload
PhotoScanr exports a ZIP containing your images alongside a CSV of generated metadata. You can use the CSV to bulk-update Squarespace fields or to populate IPTC metadata before upload. If you shoot in Lightroom, the Lightroom mode produces output formatted for import as keywords and titles.
Grounding for Accurate Subject Detection
For client work where accuracy matters, PhotoScanr's grounding feature checks the AI's interpretation against verifiable visual evidence in the image. This avoids the common AI failure of confidently mislabeling a venue, a flower variety, or a regional landmark.
If you want a primer on writing alt text that works for both screen readers and search engines, see our alt text accessibility guide.
Putting It All Together
Photo SEO on Squarespace is mostly about doing a few simple things consistently. Rename your files before upload. Write alt text that describes the image as you would describe it to a friend on the phone. Pick one primary keyword per page and let the surrounding copy reinforce it. Use image titles as captions when they add to the visitor's experience.
None of this is technically hard. The challenge is volume. A working photographer adds dozens or hundreds of new images a year, and unless you build the metadata habit into your post-processing workflow, the backlog grows faster than you can clear it.
Tools like PhotoScanr exist to break that bottleneck. Generate the first draft of your metadata automatically, edit the handful of entries that need a personal touch, and ship the gallery the same day you finished editing. That is the workflow that keeps a portfolio actually current.