FREE TRAINING

BEYOND SEO: How to future-proof your photography website in the AI Era.

Together with Andrew Hellmich, I’m co-hosting a free training session for PhotoBizX on Tuesday, April 22nd.

Understand the impact of AI on the photography industry, and how AISO (AI search optimization) differs from traditional SEO!

AI search tools focus on user intent and experience, rather than just keyword density and backlinks. This is a big opportunity for smaller and newer websites to rank well, even with fewer backlinks, if their content is high-quality and relevant.

It's not even about "ranking" well, but about being "surfaced" by AI tools, being mentioned and recommended in their answers to your target audience. That's because many signs point to a "zero-click marketing" future: AI tools don't send direct visits to websites, but they do influence people to choose and to buy.

You will learn:

• How optimizing for AI tools is different than traditional SEO

• What ChatGPT / Google Gemini / Claude "care" about when surfacing photographers

• The must-haves for future-proofing your photography website

• What to pivot to if your niche is in danger from "AI takeover"

Topics covered:

• Explosion of AI

• How AI is being used now (and in the near future)

• Artificial Intelligence Search Optimization (AISO)

• AISO best practices for photography websites

• Detailed AI search case studies (traditional Google searches vs prompts in major AI chatbots, experimenting with longer AI prompts, ChatGPT Search & more...)

• Imagining how AI shapes website experiences... 🤯

• Pro tips for AI-proofing your website

• AI-replacement risk & pivot ideas for each main photography niche

• Conclusions + Q&A

👆 All of this specifically for professional photographers

QUICK TIPS

1. 👆 Decide how your top-level dropdown items behave

When using dropdowns, you have two main choices for top-level links:

1. Clickable + dropdown: They link to a page and show a submenu

2. Dropdown only: They just expand the submenu, no direct link

If you go with option #1, always repeat that link inside the dropdown, as the first item.

Why? Because users often skip the top-level link entirely once they see a dropdown. Repeating it ensures they still find that main page.

Whenever you add or remove content from your site, be sure to also update your navigation accordingly.

This is especially important for hybrid sites (integrating two or more different platforms, like PhotoDeck and WordPress): changes in one area need to also be made (or synced) in the other site area, so the navigation is consistent and up-to-date throughout the site.

This is even more important for people changing domains: double-check your entire site. And if you have outside links pointing to previously removed content, at least try redirecting people to other relevant pages instead of letting them hit a 404-error page.

People running into broken links immediately lose trust and patience. You don’t want to look like you don’t care.

Oh, almost forgot: if you have a contact form, please make sure it’s working (from a phone/tablet too), that’s probably the most important website functionality you need.