QUICK TIPS

One of the best takeaways from the webinar I did with copywriter Zoe Barnett: forget writing your site copy in Word documents.

When you isolate the words from their intended layout, you lose sight of how they actually function on the page. Websites aren’t just digital flyers. They’re dynamic and layered. Think about how people scan them: they jump around, they skim, they click.

Writing copy directly in a wireframe — or at least thinking visually while you write — helps ensure:

So ditch the flat docs. Think like a designer.

Most photographers think their online galleries are “good enough.”

But clunky navigation or poor image organization silently kills conversions.

Here’s what I’ve seen in 100+ audits:

A well-structured gallery system — with nested folders, intuitive navigation, and clear calls to action — makes all the difference.

If your galleries don’t guide visitors to buy, they’ll just browse and bounce.

I can help you redesign your gallery UX and integrate seamless sales tools that actually convert.

If you're grounded in one location and want more local clients, your competition is probably leaving money on the table. Most photographers don’t take full advantage of a Google Business Profile (formerly called Google My Business), yet it’s a free and powerful visibility booster.

Be one of the few who do it right, and you'll stand out — especially in local search results.

DEEP DIVE

If you’ve read that Google wants every image to have its own landing page, you might be wondering: “Wait, doesn’t that create hundreds of thin, duplicate pages?”

You’re absolutely right to question it. It’s a nuanced SEO topic, especially for photography sites, and while there’s a grain of truth in Google’s advice, it’s also easy to take it too far.

Let’s break this down from a photographer’s perspective and talk about when unique image pages help, when they hurt, and what actually works best for portfolio SEO.

The article from Search Engine Journal (and the podcast it references) is technically correct, but context is everything.

Yes, John Mueller from Google said that embedding images in galleries or using lightboxes can limit how Google crawls and ranks them. So having a unique landing page with crawlable content for each image can help.

But that doesn't mean every single photo on your site needs its own full-blown page. That's a shortcut to thin content, index bloat, and a messy site that users hate to navigate.

This kind of advice, while well-intentioned, gets dangerous when applied blindly. It’s like saying “blog more” without clarifying that garbage blog posts can tank your rankings and user trust.

So let’s break it down and figure out what actually works for photographers.

Photographers love their images, and rightfully so. But turning each one into a unique URL with just a caption and some tags? That’s SEO poison.

Here’s why that strategy backfires fast:

That’s why most SEO plugins (like Yoast and RankMath) now redirect image attachment pages by default, because those pages historically added zero value.

So don’t reverse that progress without a solid reason.

All that said, there are valid use cases for image-level landing pages, just not for your entire portfolio.

Here’s when they make sense:

Think of these pages as “featurettes”: not your standard operating procedure, but a special treatment for select stars.

For 95% of photographers, the best SEO structure looks more like this:

Why this works:

Basically, this structure hits the sweet spot between SEO value and user engagement, without turning your site into a landfill of low-value image pages.

Let’s say you shoot travel and landscape photography.

Instead of /images/mountain-1, /images/mountain-2, /images/mountain-3, build a single page: /portfolio/iceland-mountains/

That page can include:

You’ve now created a robust, context-rich page that can rank for “Iceland mountain photography” and offer a better experience for visitors.

That’s what Google wants to promote.

If you’re determined to create single-image pages, do it with care:

A handful of high-quality image landing pages can absolutely be a smart SEO play, but only if you have the bandwidth to do them justice.

Photography websites aren’t just art galleries. They’re business tools. So every structural decision, including whether or not to build image landing pages, should ladder up to your core business goals.

Ask yourself:

In most cases, you’ll get more ROI from enhancing your main site structure than from creating hundreds of new image pages that go nowhere.

Here’s what I recommend to most clients:

That’s how you stay lean, maintainable, and SEO-smart, without overwhelming yourself or your visitors.

You don’t need a unique landing page for every image.

You need unique value for every page.

Creating hundreds of image pages might sound like a visibility boost, but it usually leads to diluted SEO and a worse user experience.

Instead:

And if you’re still unsure about how to structure your portfolio for SEO, that’s exactly the kind of thing I help photographers figure out.

TESTIMONIAL

QUOTE OF THE WEEK