Expert Tips for Maintaining an Up-to-Date and Relevant Photography Portfolio

Intro

A digital portfolio is one of the most important tools any photographer—or visual artist, for that matter— can have in today’s online-obsessed culture. Having a professional, beautiful portfolio means giving the world an easy way to view your photos and hopefully buy prints or hire you to create new work for them.

But it’s no longer just enough to have a good-looking portfolio. Keeping it fresh, updated, and relevant to changing photographic trends is every bit as important as its overall aesthetics.

Maintaining an up-to-date photography portfolio shows that you are a talented visual artist and understand the importance of relevance in a competitive field. So, how can you keep your portfolio crisp and current and ensure your digital presence gets you noticed? Let’s take a look.

10 Tips For Photographers

Use these tips to keep your online portfolio relevant:

1. Follow photography portfolio trends

If you want to revitalize your photography portfolio, staying on top of relevant industry trends and themes is essential. They’ll expose you to what other people in your lexicon are up to and inspire you to build your portfolio as a whole.

Of course, maintaining your unique sense of visual style is still important, but don’t let it stifle your potential for taking part in exciting new trends that may be happening around you.

You can do this by following plenty of other photographers on social media, checking out their websites, going on visual sites like Pinterest, and gathering inspo for your portfolio. This can help alert you to emerging trends and keep your finger on the current photography pulse.

2. Define your photography niche

When building any portfolio, one of the best things you can do for yourself is to know who you are and what you’re doing with your work.

Ask yourself the following questions:

• What is your photography niche?
• Do you have more than one niche?
• How can you use your niche to inform your portfolio design decisions?
• How does your niche help you curate a selection of relevant images?

It’s absolutely fine to acknowledge that your niches may be varied. You can specialize in more than one style of photography. However, defining and expanding on each niche while still tying them together conceptually is crucial for building an up-to-date portfolio.

If you do cover more than one niche, don’t be afraid to update your portfolio in different sections. Any update is a good update, and the more you add to your work, the better you’ll establish yourself as a brand with a diverse reach.

3. Be diverse yet selective

Speaking of diverse…range is everything in the world of creative professionalism, especially when it comes to visual arts like photography. People want to see various examples of your work to know you can handle different clients, settings, and briefs.

Taking a varied approach to your portfolio can give it vibrancy and life, showcasing your connection to your work and the greater world.

That said, don’t allow the diversity of your work to detract from its underlying consistency of style. Choose your uploads carefully so that your portfolio retains its quintessential “you” quality and people know how to interpret your work.

Don’t forget to optimize every image for visual search, as this will help you attract more organic web traffic. This means including alt image text, title tags, and your URL, ensuring that your images are the right size and file type and that they are responsive for mobile viewing.

4. Ask peers to evaluate your portfolio

When in doubt, ask a qualified friend for their opinion. Sometimes, it’s hard to spot the weaker points of your own portfolio, but a fresh pair of eyes may be able to detect them for you.

When you update your photography portfolio, reach out to another photographer you respect (peers, mentors, anyone you have good rapport with) and ask for their honest perspective. They can give you their informed take on bringing out its best side and help you build your personal brand successfully.

If possible, ask someone with marketing experience how they view your portfolio. This can give you a good idea of what direction to take it in and if there are any areas that are out of date. For example, a marketing expert will immediately notice overly promotional calls to action or outdated or old-school automation options.

5. Know your audience

What kind of clients are you hoping to attract through your photography portfolio? This is an important question to ask when cultivating an up-to-date selection of work.

Different audiences are in tune with varying genres of photography and trends. So, it makes sense to factor them into your layout and selection process.

For instance, if your client base is largely family portraits, research other family photography websites and find out what people in that demographic might find interesting or relevant to them.

Not only can you shape your image selection and content to suit your audience, but you can also use this to inform your SEO. You can choose keywords that target a specific audience and that are more likely to get your portfolio ranked for their use. This will ensure the people you want to find you, do!

6. Put the hours in

Good portfolios take time to build.

Don’t rush into making your portfolio—it can lead to ineffective design decisions. Your work deserves to have a proper platform to be exhibited. And that kind of effort requires more than just a couple of hours of uploading.

Spend time actively searching for new portfolio design ideas and enjoying the process of contemplating how you want to present your work.

This exercise is beneficial on a number of levels—not only will it ensure you pay full attention to all the details of your portfolio, but it will also bring you closer to your work and the kind of photographer you want to be.

7. Choose the right platform

The platform where you upload your portfolio plays a huge role in how it’s perceived. Different sites offer different layouts, styles, fonts, and image arrangements, so you want to pick one whose overall aesthetic is adaptable to current trends and that you can manage and update.

Many great options are available, but if you’re not a designer or developer, a fully customizable photography portfolio website is one of the best. This option makes creating a professional-looking digital space to showcase your work easy.

There are also quite a few factors to consider when choosing a platform, including price point, loading speed, layout, credibility, and navigation are a few examples. Allow these factors to influence which site you showcase your work on.

8. Keep your SEO up to date

If no one can find it, there’s no point in having an amazing online portfolio. A major part of staying relevant means ensuring that your SEO strategy updates, too.

This means implementing SEO strategies that change as trends and algorithms do, ensuring your site is optimized for the right keywords, runs smoothly on mobile, and makes the best use of tags and links.

Tools like RankTracker can help you optimize your SEO. Simply enter a word or phrase to see a list of relevant keywords.

You can use these keywords throughout your portfolio, and it’s also a good idea to create a blog where you can include them. You can direct portfolio visitors to your blog and vice versa, helping drive increased traffic toward your work.

Google’s E-E-A-T guidelines prioritize real-world, first-hand experience and expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness, and a regularly updated blog ticks all these boxes.

9. Use data to guide your decisions

Staying on-trend and keeping your portfolio up to date is so much easier when you can make data-driven decisions.

Whether it’s using RankTracker to optimize your keywords and SEO strategy, seeing which photos get the most traction when posted on social media, or using your website’s metrics to review bounce rate to determine where people leave from and where they linger, you can make decisions based on accurate information and facts.

Use whatever metrics, reports, and data you have available to determine how best to keep your portfolio current, and watch what happens when you do so. If you can see you’ve made a change and it’s not working, make another. Or, if a change is suddenly getting you noticed, determine what else you can do to maintain this interest and retain traction.

10. Let your portfolio evolve with your work

The most important point to remember when maintaining an up-to-date portfolio is that it should never stagnate. Similarly to your practice as a photographer, your portfolio should reflect the transient nature of your work, changing and evolving over time.

When you produce new work, upload it.

If your style or niche moves into new territory, adjust your portfolio accordingly. This will help keep it dynamic and interesting, showcasing your range as a photographer and your knowledge of industry standards.

You can also archive your work on your portfolio and make it clear to clients that this is work you have done in the past. This highlights your progress and professional evolution and enhances your site’s SEO, especially if you index all your archived pages in your sitemap.

The Bottom Line

As a photographer, your work deserves to be showcased at its best.

An up-to-date portfolio helps keep your work relevant and connect with clients perennially. No matter what style, genre, or photography niche you produce, these expert tips can help you craft an online portfolio that is visually stunning and consistently fresh.