FOUND BY SEARCH. QUOTED BY Ai.
Search engines still send people to your website. Increasingly, an assistant answers for them first. We build for both, so when someone asks who to hire, your name gets suggested.
There are two ways people search for a photographer now.
They search
They type something into a box, scan a page of links, open two or three, and decide about you from whatever loads first.
What it needs: an indexed site for crawlers, clean structure, pages that load fast, and words it can read.
They ask
They ask an assistant, which searches the web on their behalf, reads more pages than it will ever show, and comes back with a few names and the sources it used.
What it needs: a site an Ai assistant can quote, with your services, your area, and your pricing stated clearly, so that it can be repeated without guessing.
We build for both. The outcome is a site that is legible, structured so it can be read, and specific enough to be trusted.
The same page, read two ways.
<div class="hero">
<img src="header-final-2.jpg">
<!-- studio name, services and prices -->
<!-- all live inside the image -->
</div>
Reads as: an image, no name, no location, no service.
<h1>Élise Marchand</h1>
<p>Wedding photographer, Colorado</p>
"priceRange": "$4,500+",
"areaServed": "Colorado, Rocky Mountains",
"image": "Ceremony at Piney River Ranch"
Reads as: a wedding photographer in Colorado, from $4,500.
Nothing on the left is broken. It looks fine to a person. But a search engine and an assistant both read a page before they will recommend it, and many read only the HTML your server sends. A 2024 study by Vercel and MERJ found that the crawlers behind ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity do not run JavaScript, so anything a template draws with scripts or bakes into a picture is simply not there for them. An Image Salon site puts the facts in the page itself, so your name, your location and what you charge come back inside the answer.
One page, three readers.
Every page on an Image Salon site carries the same facts in three forms, and each reader gets the one it can use.
elisemarchand.com/weddings
A person
Weddings
Élise Marchand
Wedding photographer in Colorado, from $4,500.
An AI assistant
# Weddings Wedding photographer in Colorado, from $4,500.
A search engine
"@type": "LocalBusiness", "areaServed": "Colorado", "priceRange": "$4,500+"
Included with every site.
- 01
Clean markup, readable without scripts
One heading per page that says what the page is, and the headings beneath it in order. Real text where text belongs, in the HTML the server sends, so it is there for a crawler that never runs a script. It sounds obvious. Most photography templates fail it, because they were built to look right in a page builder rather than to be read by anything else.
- 02
Structured data about your business
We describe your studio in JSON-LD, the schema.org format search engines and assistants parse: what you photograph, where you work, what a booking starts at, how to reach you. It links to your Google Business PROFILE and your other listings, so an engine can connect your site to your reviews. This is the difference between an assistant saying “they shoot weddings in Colorado, from around $4,500” and “visit their website to learn more.”
- 03
An open door for search engines and assistants
Your robots.txt invites search and AI crawlers in by name, from Googlebot and Bingbot to the ones behind ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity. A full sitemap lists every page with an honest last-updated date. An llms.txt file gives assistants a short map of who you are and which pages matter, and every page is served as plain markdown to any agent that asks for it.
- 04
Indexed promptly, on Google and Bing
A site nobody has crawled cannot be found. At launch we submit your sitemap to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, and when a page changes we tell Bing through IndexNow rather than waiting for a recrawl. Bing matters more than it used to: Microsoft says Copilot answers by sending a query to Bing, so a page Bing has not indexed is a page Copilot cannot cite.
- 05
Every image described, and sized for its spot
Every image gets a caption and alt text. It is how a gallery becomes searchable, and how a screen reader or a crawler that cannot see knows what is in the frame. We draft them as you upload and you approve them. Each image is also converted to WebP and sized for the spot it sits in, with the versions a phone and a desktop each need. You drag in the JPEG straight out of Lightroom and never export a web copy.
- 06
Links that keep working
Moving from an old site, or bringing a blog with you? We map the old URLs and redirect each one to its new home, so the visitors and the ranking those pages earned carry across instead of landing on an error. The same happens whenever a URL changes later. Posts live on real URLs on your own domain, not parked on a subdomain lending its authority to somebody else.
It does not stop at launch.
We keep it current
Search engines and assistants keep changing what they read. A new crawler appears, a format catches on, a rule changes. Because your site runs on our platform, we update it when that happens, and you do not have to follow any of it.
You hear how it is going
Basic analytics run on every site, and once a month you get an email with plain counts: visits, what people searched to find you, and the inquiries that came through the site. No “AI visibility score”. Nobody has a standard way to measure one yet, so we report what we can count.
Visits
1,284
Inquiries
9
What people searched
- colorado wedding photographer
- estes park elopement photographer
- élise marchand
Nobody can promise you a ranking.
Anyone who does is guessing, or selling. Here is the goal we work towards.
What we control
- How the site is built and structured
- Whether every page can be crawled, read and indexed
- The facts your pages publish about you
- Load speed and image handling
- Keeping all of it current
What nobody controls
- How Google ranks any given page
- Which sources an assistant chooses to cite
- What your competitors are doing
- How many people search in your market
What we can tell you is that the build will not be the reason you are not found. Be wary of anyone selling an AI trick, too. Google says there are “no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary.” Its AI answers run on the same systems as ordinary search. The fundamentals on this page are the work, and we do all of it.
Frequently asked questions.
What SEO is included?
A real, structural approach is included on every site we build, at no extra cost. There is no SEO tier and no upsell; a site that cannot be found is not finished, so we do not treat it as optional.
In practice that means clean, hand-written markup with a clear heading on each page, structured data describing your business, captions and alt text on your images, fast-loading images converted to WebP, and a blog that is properly indexed on your own site. If a URL ever has to change, we add a redirect so the traffic and ranking it earned carry across.
What is AEO?
AEO stands for Answer Engine Optimisation: building your site so that AI assistants can read it, understand it, and recommend you. It overlaps with SEO but is not the same job. Search engines rank pages; assistants summarise and cite them.
A site can rank well and still be useless to an assistant, usually because the important facts (what you shoot, where, and roughly what you charge) only exist inside images or scripts. We publish those facts in a form both can read, so when someone asks an assistant who to hire, your site is what comes back.
Do you guarantee I'll rank first on Google?
No, and we would be wary of anyone who does. We do not guarantee any particular search ranking, traffic level, position in an AI assistant's answer, or business outcome. Search engines and AI systems change their behaviour without notice and are outside anyone's control.
What we can promise is that the build will not be the reason you are not found. We control how the site is built and structured, how fast it loads, the data it publishes about you, and whether every page can be crawled and read, and we keep those up to date as standards change.
What is structured markup, and why does it matter?
Structured markup is the language an Ai assistant (Chat GPT, Claude, Gemini, etc...) needs in order to talk about you in it's replies.
We hand-write clean markup and describe your studio in the format machines parse: what you photograph, where you work, what a booking starts at, and how to reach you. That is what lets an assistant say "they cover weddings in Colorado, starting around $4,500" instead of "visit their website to learn more."
Do I have to write my own SEO copy?
Only if you want to. We will write the structural copy for you (page titles, descriptions, captions and location pages) from your onboarding answers. If you would rather write your own, the editing tools will let you edit your SEO title, meta description and social share image yourself.
How are my images handled for search and speed?
Every image is optimized during the upload. Our platform reads each photograph and drafts its caption and alt text.
Alt text is how a gallery becomes searchable, how your work is understood by something that cannot see it, and how a screen reader describes your portfolio. You can edit alt text as needed.
Images are also converted to WebP, a highly efficient format meant for the web. We will create separate versions for phone and desktop to ensure optimal load speeds. All of this means is that you point us to a folder of high resolution images, and our uploader takes care of the rest.
Will I keep my search rankings if I move my site to you?
We work to protect the authority you have already built, and we will migrate your existing URLs and add 301 redirects for anything that has to change, so links and rankings carry across.
While no one can ever guarantee exact rankings, we ensure that the work you've put into your SEO carries over to your new site.
Get started
Ready to be found?
SEO & AEO included with every site, right from the beginning.