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ForegroundWeb Newsletter
YOUR WEEKLY DOSE OF PHOTO WEBSITE ADVICE & INSPIRATION.
IN TODAY’S EMAIL:
⚡️ 3 Quick tips: 5 second rule, PhotoDeck galleries, nav menu UX
🎙️ Interview on the Commercial Photographer Podcast: Is SEO Dead for Photographers?
🔍 SEO: WordPress vs other platforms
QUICK TIPS
1. ⚡ The 5 second rule
If your homepage doesn’t answer these in 5 seconds:
Who you shoot
Where you’re based
How to book
… you’re losing inquiries, fast.
Your website isn’t a guessing game — it’s a conversion funnel.
Visitors won’t dig around to understand what you do. They’ll just leave.
Clarity beats clever every time. Simplify, declutter, and make the path to booking painfully obvious.
How fast can someone figure out how to hire you?
2. 📸 New gallery styles on PhotoDeck
PhotoDeck recently rolled out a huge update to their gallery styles, and it could seriously streamline how you display, sell, and manage your work.
The new styles (E-shop, Stock Photography, File Management) offer way more flexibility and let you tailor the layout to match your brand and workflow.
If you're already on PhotoDeck, it's time to rethink your gallery UX:
Are clients finding what they need quickly?
Are your galleries optimized for conversions?
Are you taking full advantage of layout options?
I’ve customized many PhotoDeck sites already, and know how much power these new tools give you. If used strategically.
3. 🚨 Your navigation menu is secretly killing conversions
Photographers often get clever with their menu labels:
“The Goods” (instead of “Info”)
“Raves” (instead of “Testimonials” or “Reviews”)
“Moments” (instead of “Portfolio”)
Sounds fun. But users have no idea what those pages are about.
Here's what works instead:
✅ Stick with intuitive, clear terms: About, Contact, Pricing, Reviews
✅ Avoid cleverness in your nav — save creativity for your imagery
✅ Put important pages in the top-level nav (not buried in dropdowns)
People scan menus fast. If they can’t figure out what to click, they’ll bounce.
Let clarity do the heavy lifting.
INTERVIEW
Is SEO Dead for Photographers? How to Beat AI and Win Premium Clients
I was recently invited onto the Commercial Photographer Podcast to talk about something most photographers are quietly worrying about right now: is SEO basically dead in the age of AI, and what actually works instead?
In the episode we dig into what I’m seeing across dozens of photography sites and analytics accounts, and how you can still win premium clients even though Google, social media and AI are all stealing your clicks.
Here’s what we cover:
Why traditional SEO traffic has been shrinking for photographers – and the one metric you should obsess over instead of pageviews
How “zero-click marketing” and tools like ChatGPT actually choose which photographers to surface
EEAT in plain English: what AI needs to understand about you before it will confidently recommend you
The positioning mistake that instantly makes you look like a generalist – and a simple way to niche/specialize without killing your income
Practical website fixes: portfolio size, copy, navigation and small UX tweaks that make inquiries more likely
If you’ve been feeling like “I just need more traffic”, this conversation might flip that thinking on its head.
Listed to the full episode here:
HOW I CAN HELP
Need a reliable webmaster for your photography site?
If your site feels slow, fragile, or slightly neglected, I’ve just opened up a few spots in my Website Support Plans for photographers.
I act as your dedicated webmaster, keeping your site fast, secure, and up to date, fixing issues, and proactively improving performance and SEO, so you don’t have to think about tech at all.
Pick the level that fits where your business is now:
Essential – Core updates, security, backups, uptime monitoring and quarterly improvement ideas. Perfect if you just want peace of mind.
Advanced – Everything in Essential, plus quarterly SEO mini-audits, strategy calls, speed & broken link monitoring, and small monthly fixes.
Premium – Fully managed, hands-off website support with unlimited small tasks, content management, analytics/Search Console monitoring, and email marketing help.
One year of support costs less than a single good booking lost to a broken or slow site.
TESTIMONIAL
“You're a legend. thank you so much. Appreciated.
I think you fix problems faster than it takes me to log into the server.”
SEO TIP
Your website platform can empower or limit your SEO
If you’re serious on getting high in Google results, WordPress is definitely your strongest option.
Here what you can’t accomplish with most photography-specific tools:
add text to more parts of your site
setting up redirects
controlling social previews (how your post snippets look when shared on social media sites)
more control over permalinks (to include keywords in the URLs)
setting more advanced technical stuff (like setting canonical URLs, control over the sitemap XML and robots.txt files, RSS feed enhancements)
advanced analysis over your tags (things like setting focus keywords to help you write your content, readability checks, SEO title and meta-description length counters)
being able to build a full-featured blog area (bringing a huge SEO boost in the long run)
and generally, the ability to control the source code (to add the proper heading tags, image ALT tags, etc.) and to optimize the site performance and mobile-friendliness (which in turn affect SEO)
To be able to rank well for a competitive phrase like “[City] photographer” you need to do many things right. The power and flexibility of WordPress give you a better chance.
That being said, there are many successful photographers that use portfolio services and they’re doing fine. That’s because on-site SEO is only part of the equation.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
"Never offend people with style when you can offend them with substance."
How was today's newsletter?
When you’re ready, here’s how I can help:
Website audit for photographers: I’ll manually review every aspect of your site—design, SEO, speed, UX, and backend—and walk you through my findings live on a Zoom call. You’ll get a personalized action plan, the full recording, and practical steps to turn your site into a client-converting machine. Book your site audit »
Private 1:1 consulting call: get specific, actionable advice, answering your most pressing questions questions on how to improve your photography website. Book a call »
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