Who you're up against in Maine.
Six other photographers analyzed. One is a clear market leader; the rest carve up specific niches.
The Maine photography market has one clear leader— LAD Photography — and five others occupying defensible niches. You sit closer to LAD than anyone on portfolio depth, but she has built a credential moat (5x Maine Wedding Photographer of the Year) that pays SEO dividends. Below: each rival's footprint and what they own.
Keyword footprint across the field
All seven sites scored on the metric below. LAD leads by every measure. Focus is solidly second in raw keyword count but trails badly on top-10 visibility — meaning you rank for a lot of things, but mostly on page two or three.
LAD Photography
⚠ market leaderThe market incumbent. Ranks #1 for both 'maine wedding photographer' (320 vol) and 'maine wedding photographers' (590 vol). 5-time Maine Wedding Photographer of the Year is a credential moat — not a keyword you can outrank, but a story they sell against. Also does portraits, family, seniors, boudoir/dudoir.
Stone Tree Creative
high threatOwns the 'portrait near me' category. Strong rankings for 'portrait photographer near me', 'portrait photographers near me', and creative portrait terms. Also ranks (oddly) for software/tool terms like 17hats and CrumplePop — appears to publish review content as a traffic strategy.
Lindsay Murphy Photography
high threatStrong all-around competitor with the best average ranking position (38.4). Owns 'portland maine photographers' #1 and 'maine family photographer' #4. Direct geographic overlap with Focus.
Jen Dean Photo
medium threatNiche player with strong boudoir rankings. Owns 'professional headshots near me' #4 and several boudoir terms. Less overlap with weddings, more with portrait/headshot work.
Renee Griffith Photography
medium threatAcadia-focused photographer. Owns several Acadia-specific terms including Hunter's Beach elopements. Limited geographic overlap outside coastal Maine.
Carrie Pellerin
medium threatFamily-focused photographer with strong 'in-home' and lifestyle session rankings. Also appears in boudoir searches. Direct competitor for family portrait work.
What is Focus Photography online?
The shape of your current keyword footprint, in numbers.
You are a Maine venue-wedding photographer in Google's eyes — very good at specific venues like Wentworth and Fort Williams. But you're almost invisiblefor the broad service searches that drive the most volume: generic "Maine wedding photographer", headshots, family, and "near me." That's the opportunity.
The five moves that matter most.
Concrete, ordered by leverage — biggest impact per hour of work first.
Build a real headshots page.
"Professional headshots near me" alone is 8,100 searches per month and you do not appear in the top 100. Only Jen Dean is meaningfully competing here. Your LA actor-headshot background is genuine differentiation. This page could meaningfully shift your traffic mix in 6–9 months.
Open a /portraits/ hub with a family sub-page.
You have no top-level portrait hub. Carrie Pellerin and Lindsay Murphy own "Maine family photographer" because they have dedicated pages. Build the hub, then a family page, and the senior page lifts with it.
Split weddings into Maine / NH / Boston.
You photograph all three; you only have one wedding hub. Three dedicated geo pages capture geo-modified searches you're currently ranking 42–78 for. Wentworth NH and Castle Hill MA are already in your portfolio — exploit them. NH is the weakest competitive field; that's where the fastest wins live.
Build a Maine wedding venues index page.
You have 63 venue-specific keywords ranking with 9,600 combined monthly volume — but they're scattered across /recent/ galleries with no hub. LAD has built her venue posts into a real topic cluster. An index page tying them together creates the same effect and lifts every venue gallery.
Claim Acadia / Maine elopements.
"Acadia national park elopement" — 260 vol/mo, difficulty 3. "Maine elopement photographer" — 140 vol/mo, difficulty 21. Renee Griffith partially owns Hunter's Beach. LAD does Acadia proposals but doesn't optimize for elopement terms. Genuinely open territory.
Decide what to do about /free-rings/.
You rank #9 for "free wedding rings" (140 vol). The traffic is real but unlikely to convert into wedding bookings. Either redirect to /weddings/engagement-portraits/ with a bona fide engagement-shoot offer, or noindex. Don't leave it ranking pure dead weight.
The full sitemap, page by page, with target keywords.
Click any row to expand. Keywords are sorted by monthly search volume, with your current position noted.
Core
2 pages · 440 monthly search volumeWeddings
5 pages · 5,400 monthly search volumePortraits
3 pages · 17,330 monthly search volumeCommercial
1 pages · 120 monthly search volumeLocations
1 pages · 560 monthly search volumeContent
2 pages · 30 monthly search volumeAudit
1 pages · 140 monthly search volumeThe largest gap we found — but it's not for everyone.
6,260 monthly searches sitting at near-zero difficulty.
Three competitors (Jen Dean, Carrie Pellerin, and LAD herself with "boudoir & dudoir") have built rankings in the boudoir category. "Boudoir portraits" pulls 1,300/mo at KD 13. "Boudoir photo near me" pulls 480/mo at KD 0. "Maine boudoir" pulls 90/mo at KD 3 — nearly unranked space. This is statistically the highest-volume, lowest-difficulty opportunity in your competitive set.
But: But: boudoir is a stylistically and operationally distinct service. Different studio setup, different consent dynamics, different client communication, different portfolio. We are flagging this as a decision, not a recommendation — only worth pursuing if you and Lucia genuinely want this as a service line.
TOP BOUDOIR KEYWORDS IN THE COMPETITIVE SET7 keywords · 3,930 total vol/mo
| Keyword | Vol/mo | KD | Best comp pos |
|---|---|---|---|
| boudoir portraits | 1.3K | 13 | #8 |
| boudoir photographer near me | 880 | 8 | #12 |
| boudoir photography near me | 720 | 5 | #9 |
| boudoir photo near me | 480 | 0 | #15 |
| professional boudoir photography | 390 | 11 | #18 |
| maine boudoir | 90 | 3 | #22 |
| boudoir maine | 70 | 2 | #28 |
How this was built.
1,409 ranking data points.
Pulled organic keyword positions for focusphotography.com plus six regional competitors: LAD Photography, Stone Tree Creative, Lindsay Murphy Photography, Carrie Pellerin, Renee Griffith Photography, and Jen Dean Photo. Combined into a single dataset.
Each keyword tagged by intent.
Every keyword was categorized by service type (wedding, family, headshot, etc.), geography (Maine / NH / Boston sub-regions), and intent (pricing, local, informational, branded). This produced topic clusters that map directly onto pages.
Competitor-wins-where-you-lose.
For each keyword: if a competitor ranks in the top 20 and Focus ranks below 30 (or not at all), and search volume is ≥ 30/mo, it's a gap. With LAD added, this produced 654 qualified gaps — the basis for which pages need to exist.
Read your actual website.
Your About, Reviews, Recent Weddings, and Complete Galleries pages were reviewed, plus LAD Photography's portfolio structure, to understand voice, services, geographic coverage, and existing URL structure. The proposed sitemap respects what's already working.
Each keyword routed to one (or few) pages.
Pattern matching by phrase type assigns each keyword to a target page on the proposed sitemap. Keywords with multiple plausible homes (e.g. venue + wedding) are assigned to all applicable pages so internal linking can route appropriately.
The honest caveats.
This is keyword data from a single point in time, US-only. It tells you what people search for, not whether they'd hire you. Use it as architecture, not gospel. Conversion still comes from portfolio, voice, and trust — none of which a sitemap can fix.