Progress Report
Everything we have found, sorted by what matters most. What was in the plan you signed, what your own data has since changed about it, and what turned up that nobody could have known at the start.
The short version. The research phase is finished. We now have your brand voice, a competitor review, sixteen months of your Google search data, sixteen months of your website visitor data, a read through your WordPress site, and a first measurement of what ChatGPT actually says when someone looks for a photographer like you. Most of the original plan held up. Six items changed. Three things turned up that were never in the plan, and one of them is the largest single opportunity we have found in this engagement.
Your plan was written from one source. It has since been checked against four more. This is why some items moved.
| When | What we looked at | What it told us |
|---|---|---|
| July 20 | Full review of your website The original plan was built entirely from this. | Found the contradictions in your business details, the missing answer formatting, the thin pages, and the blocked AI reader. Thirteen items, eight named pages. |
| Aug 17 | Your Google Search data Sixteen months, the full history Google keeps. | 12,889 visits from 2.7 million appearances. Showed which of your pages people actually want, and revealed that two of the eight pages in the plan have almost no demand while others are starved. |
| Aug 18 | What ChatGPT actually recommends Twenty five real questions, run live. | You were named in two. It showed us the rule behind every answer, and it corrected our competitor list. The photographers we had researched were not the ones winning. |
| Aug 19 | Inside your WordPress site | Found nineteen deleted posts that were still earning real traffic. This changed the priority order more than anything else. |
| Aug 22 | Your website visitor data Sixteen months, matched to the same window. | ChatGPT is already sending you more visitors than Bing. It also showed that nothing on your site is measuring enquiries at all. |
Five items. Together these are the difference between being found and being overlooked. Four of the five need an answer or an access from you before we can move.
Nineteen posts sitting in your website's trash earned 1,125 visits and 260,846 appearances in Google over the last sixteen months. That is roughly one visit in every eleven. The three biggest are Burden Kahn Mansion, Marriage Proposals at 620 and 610 Loft and Garden, and 12 Christian Wedding Traditions.
We checked the live addresses. Someone who searches for Burden Kahn Mansion, clicks your result, and expects that article now arrives on your homepage instead, with no explanation. This also explains something that puzzled us for weeks. Your best converting search of all is "620 loft and garden proposal", and the article that answered it is one of the deleted ones. That is why your live 620 Loft page never mentions proposals.
What we need: was this deliberate? If you removed them on purpose we will leave them alone. We will not restore anything without your word.
In our ChatGPT test, every single cost question was answered with photographers who publish a number. The ones who do not publish were simply not mentioned. You have approved a range of $15,000 to $20,000 for full day collections, with the upper end including video.
Your existing cost guide has been shown 66,100 times and is already one of the pages AI assistants send people to. It has not been updated since September 2024, and the figure it does carry sits below several paragraphs of scene setting. We move the number to the top and refresh it. No new page needed.
One thing to confirm: the current guide shows a much wider range than the one you gave us. We will use your $15,000 to $20,000 figure unless you tell us otherwise.
You asked why ChatGPT does not seem to pick up your reviews. It does. One of the only two questions where it named you was answered because of what your couples wrote about you being calm and taking charge. It found that language somewhere else on the internet, not on your website.
You have 103 reviews at a perfect five, and across all eleven competitors we looked at, not one publishes their review count. This is sitting unused. We put the reviews and the words in them on your own pages as readable text.
What we need: your current review numbers so we can confirm them, and your blessing on which reviews go where. We will not publish a rating we have not verified.
One of the AI systems is being turned away by the security layer at your hosting company before it ever reaches your site. This is the single most certain improvement in the whole engagement, because it is a straightforward permission rather than a judgement call.
Your hosting invitation was sent on August 18 and is still waiting to be activated. Until that is done we cannot see inside the account or make the change. Everything else in this section can proceed without it.
Your site currently gives two different addresses and four different lengths of experience. The address in your footer and your Google listing is 401 Park Avenue South. The address buried in the information AI systems read is 287 Park Avenue South.
This matters more than it sounds. AI systems cross check details like these, and when the details disagree they quietly set the business aside rather than risk repeating something wrong. Your experience question is already settled from your answers, since 2005. The address is not.
What we need: confirmation that 401 Park Avenue South is correct, and an upgrade to full administrator on WordPress. We currently have editor access, which cannot reach the settings where the wrong address lives.
These pages already attract people. Small, additive changes. We are not rewriting anything you have written.
Your guide to top NYC wedding venues accounts for 11,123 of the 45,500 times you have appeared in Google's own AI answers. That is nearly a quarter of everything, from one page. It is also the page AI assistants send the most visitors to after your homepage, and those visitors stay more than a minute.
It has no main heading at all, and around 110 words of scene setting before the first useful fact. This was a lower priority in the original plan. The data moved it up.
"620 loft and garden proposal" is your best converting search in the entire dataset. Nearly one in ten people who see it click through. The page they arrive at never mentions proposals, because the proposal article is one of the nineteen in the trash.
You asked for weddings and proposals both. This is the page where that pays off fastest.
You told us this is a speciality you want to be known for. It is currently nowhere on your website.
Our ChatGPT test showed this is not a small thing. When asked how to vet a photographer, ChatGPT told couples to ask how they handle dark churches and candlelit receptions. A competitor won a cathedral question partly by writing about low light. We add this to Rainbow Room, Cipriani, Weylin and the Plaza ballroom. Not to 620 Loft, which is a glass rooftop and rightly leads on natural light.
Your Plaza page currently refers to you in the third person, as though somebody else wrote it about you. Your 620 Loft page does the opposite and is genuinely lovely. We bring the Plaza up to match, add how long you have shot there, and link to your pricing.
Your FAQ page has sixteen real questions with real answers. They are written as plain paragraphs, which means AI systems and Google cannot lift them cleanly. The content is already there and already good. This is formatting, not writing.
Four pages have no main title at all. Three others have several competing with each other, including your Services page which has fifteen. This is how a machine works out what a page is about.
Your site already creates a file that tells AI systems what is on it, but it lists only ten of your ninety one pages, and it leaves out the FAQ, which is your most quotable page of all.
Your event photography page has been shown 24,691 times and your cinematography page 23,133 times. Both are short, and both convert poorly against that level of interest. This is real demand you are not capturing.
This replaces two pages in the original plan. See section 06.
Your service pages carry none of the underlying description that tells an AI system what you offer and roughly what it costs.
Your site presents itself four ways, including "Shek Studios" on the cinematography page. Splitting your name splits your reputation, because AI systems can read them as different businesses. Your own Google data is clear that "Susan Shek Photography" is the stronger name, with 451 visits against 321.
What we need: your confirmation that "Susan Shek Photography" is the business name and "Susan Shek" is how you are known.
Your published privacy policy still contains template placeholders that any visitor can read, including "[Insert Email Address]". Four addresses on your site lead nowhere, including your reviews and testimonials pages.
What we need: the details to fill the privacy policy in. The missing reviews page matters more now than it did, given item 3.
See section 06. Nothing on your website currently counts an enquiry.
This is the plan you signed, checked line by line against everything we have learned since. Seven are unchanged. Six moved. Nothing has been quietly dropped without being replaced.
| # | Original item | Where it stands now |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Fix conflicting business details | Unchanged, still the most important. Experience is settled. Address needs your confirmation and administrator access. |
| 2 | FAQ answer formatting | Unchanged. Ready to start. |
| 3 | Reviews and ratings | More important than we thought. One of your only two ChatGPT wins came from your reviews. Now priority one. |
| 4 | Restructure the pricing guide | Sharpened. Every cost question in our test went to a photographer who publishes a number. Now priority one. |
| 5 | Broken and placeholder content | Unchanged. The missing reviews page now matters more. |
| 6 | Standardise your business name | Unchanged, now backed by your data. |
| 7 | Unblock the AI readers | Needs checking. The plan says one reader already has access. Our review found it blocked. We cannot settle this until the hosting access is activated. |
| 8 | Complete the AI navigation file | Unchanged. |
| 9 | Describe your services | Unchanged. |
| 10 | Restructure the venues guide | Moved up. It is a quarter of all your appearances in Google's AI answers. |
| 11 | Expand eight thin pages | Changed, and this one needs a conversation. Headshots and albums have almost no demand. Two others, New York Athletic Club and Old Westbury, are in the trash and no longer exist. See section 06. |
| 12 | Fix page titles | Unchanged. |
| 13 | Monthly visibility reporting | Expanded. Twenty five questions became forty, at no extra cost, and the first measurement is already done. |
Three things. None of them could have been seen from the outside of your website.
The plan committed us to expanding eight specific pages. Your own data has since shown that this list needs revisiting.
| Page | Times shown in Google | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| Corporate event photography | 24,691 | Strong demand. Keep. |
| Cinematography | 23,133 | Strong demand. Keep. |
| Lotos Club | Photos only, no text | Keep. |
| About | 25,194 | Keep. |
| New York Athletic Club | 8,045 | In the trash. Cannot be expanded. |
| Old Westbury | 4,806 | In the trash. Cannot be expanded. |
| Headshots | 177 | Almost no demand. Recommend replacing. |
| Wedding albums | 198 | Almost no demand. Recommend replacing. |
Our recommendation is a straight swap at no extra cost. We keep the four that are working, we restore and expand the two in the trash if you tell us the deletion was accidental, and we put the effort that would have gone into headshots and albums into your venue pages and your reviews instead. This is your call, not ours.
Over the last sixteen months ChatGPT sent 346 visits to your site. Bing sent 288. Pinterest sent 293. Instagram sent 197. ChatGPT is now your fifth largest source of visitors, ahead of a major search engine.
Two honest notes. This is still small next to Google, which sent 18,854. And it is not currently growing. That is exactly what we would expect while the site still says nothing that would make an AI system choose you, and it is the case for doing this work rather than an argument against it.
Where those visitors land is the interesting part. Forty two percent of them arrive on your homepage and leave after about thirty seconds. The ones who land on your venues guide or your engagement locations guide stay between one and two minutes. Part of that homepage figure is very likely the deleted posts from item 1, since those addresses now send people to your homepage.
Your Inquire page was visited by 1,456 people in sixteen months. We can see them arrive. We cannot see what happened next, because no enquiry tracking has ever been set up.
This is good news in one respect. Those 1,456 people almost all came from elsewhere on your own site, which proves your guides are doing their job and feeding people towards you. But it means neither you nor we can currently say how many enquiries your website produces, or which pages produce them.
This is not in your plan and we are not charging for it. It is a short piece of setup and we would rather do it early, so that when we report to you in six months we can talk about enquiries rather than only about rankings.
This sits outside your signed agreement, which specifically excludes this kind of cleanup. We are raising it because it is the largest recoverable thing we have found.
Bringing the deleted articles back, checking each one still reads well, and making sure every old address leads to the right article instead of your homepage.
Estimated additional investment: [FEE TO BE CONFIRMED]. For comparison, the content involved brought around 1,125 visits from Google in the last year.
Building the reviews page your site currently links to but does not have, and placing your review wording on the venue and service pages where it will do the most work.
Estimated additional investment: [FEE TO BE CONFIRMED].
Seven things. The first three unlock the most.
Were the nineteen posts deleted on purpose?
Nothing gets restored until you tell us. This is the largest single item in the report.
Please upgrade our WordPress access to administrator.
We currently have editor access. It cannot reach the settings that hold your wrong address, which blocks the most important item in your plan.
Which address is correct?
We believe it is 401 Park Avenue South, since that matches your footer and your Google listing. We would like that confirmed rather than assumed.
Your current review numbers.
We will not publish a rating we have not verified with you first.
Approve the forty searches we will track.
They are in your shared document. Once approved they are locked, so that every monthly report measures the same thing.
The details to finish your privacy policy.
A contact email address and how long you keep client records.
Your decision on the eight pages.
Whether you are happy for us to swap headshots and albums for work with more demand behind it, at no change to your fee.