Amy Marlan Photography — A Rebrand That Gained: 557% Impressions Growth and Position 12.4 → 10.4 in the Last 28 Days

The Challenge

Amy Marlan Photography is a luxury portrait studio in Grover Beach, on California's Central Coast. The work is family portraits, high school senior sessions, pet photography, headshots and branding, and editorial agriculture work for the farms that define the region. The business model is not volume shooting — it is a consultation, a planned session, and a guided artwork reveal that ends in museum-quality wall art and designer albums. 20+ years behind the camera, a graphic communications degree and a former career as an art director sit behind it.

And the whole thing was changing its name.

The photographer rebranded, which meant a website problem most agencies quietly bungle: a domain with roughly two decades of accumulated Google history — amywellenkamp.com — had to become amymarlan.com without throwing away what the old one had earned. Established local businesses lose years of search presence to exactly this moment. Redirects get skipped, the old domain gets parked, the brand-name searches that used to convert start returning nothing, and six months later nobody can work out where the enquiries went.

Meanwhile the new domain was effectively a stranger to Google. Across the ten pre-launch days captured in the chart above, amymarlan.com earned 193 impressions and 10 clicks — about 19 impressions a day, almost all of it name-shaped searching, at average position 12.4.

The brief was not "grow a photography site." It was: carry twenty years across, and then grow.

What We Built

We built amymarlan.com from scratch — 64 URLs in the sitemap today — and treated the migration as a first-class part of the build rather than a launch-day afterthought.

The Rebrand & Redirect

• Every legacy URL permanently redirects. amywellenkamp.com now answers with a 308 Permanent Redirect into amymarlan.com — Google treats that exactly as it treats a 301 for consolidating ranking signals — and the mapping is page-aware where equivalents exist: the old /about lands on the new /about, the old /contact on the new /contact. Unmapped legacy paths fall back to the homepage rather than returning a 404.
• The old entity is still disclosed. The site footer reads "Amy Marlan DBA Amy Wellenkamp Photographers," so returning clients and Google both get an explicit link between the two names instead of having to infer one.
• The new brand name owns its own results. "Amy Marlan Photography" sits at position 1.0, and the site also captures the misspelling "amy marlin" at position 6.8 — the kind of coverage a rebranded business needs in its first year, when half the people looking for it are not yet sure how it is spelled.

Technical Foundation

• Next.js with server-side rendering for fast mobile pages — portrait research is overwhelmingly phone-first
• Core Web Vitals optimised — LCP under 2.5 seconds on mobile, zero cumulative layout shift, which matters more than usual on a site this image-heavy
• Vercel deployment with a global CDN

SEO Architecture

• A landing page per Central Coast city — ten of them: San Luis Obispo, Pismo Beach, Avila Beach, Shell Beach, Arroyo Grande, Grover Beach, Oceano, Nipomo, Santa Maria and Paso Robles. Clients search for a photographer by their own town, not by studio name.
• A service hub per discipline, with city children underneath it — /family-photography/ and /senior-portraits/ each carry their own per-city pages, so "family photographer Santa Maria" and "senior portraits Arroyo Grande" have real destinations instead of being anchors on one generic services page.
• JSON-LD structured data — PhotographyBusiness and Organization schema with full NAP, geo-coordinates, opening hours, an OfferCatalog of all five services, and areaServed covering the ten Central Coast cities; plus WebSite with a SearchAction
• llms.txt and llms-full.txt so AI search systems can read the studio's services and service area directly
• XML sitemap submitted to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools on day one

Content & Conversion

• 21 guide posts built around the questions that come before a booking — what senior portraits actually cost, what a photography investment covers, when to book senior photos, the best photo locations in San Luis Obispo and Pismo Beach, mini session vs full session, professional photos vs phone photos, how to prepare for a headshot session, what branding photography is
• Pricing transparency, deliberately — the single highest-traffic page on the site is the senior portrait investment guide. Studios usually hide pricing behind an enquiry form. Publishing it is what gets the studio found during the research phase.
• A dedicated experience page walking the consultation → creative planning → session → artwork reveal sequence, because the differentiator here is the process, not the shutter
• An In The Press page and a community section covering Pet Portraits with Purpose, the studio's annual fundraiser, which has raised just shy of $10,000 for the New Life U-Pick Pantry in Pismo Beach

The Results

The site went live on June 24, 2026. The figures below compare the ten pre-launch days captured in the chart (June 14–23) against the post-launch data through October 3 — 102 days. Position figures are impression-weighted daily averages, calculated the same way on both sides of the launch, and every Search Console figure here is reproducible from the chart above.

Search Visibility

We lead with the most recent 28 days because this site has improved every month since launch; the full-window average describes a figure it passed through in August, not where it sits now. The full-window position is the one number that reads worse than the baseline, and it is in the table rather than left out.

Traffic Totals

At the old run rate, 102 days would have produced roughly 1,969 impressions and 102 clicks. The site delivered 8,899 and 280.

The Climb, Month by Month

Impressions and clicks improved in every calendar month since launch. Position bottomed out in July at 25.1 — the migration dip — then climbed back through August and September to beat the pre-launch baseline by month three. The most recent fourteen days of data averaged 4.2 clicks and 157 impressions a day at position 10.2, the best fortnight on record.

Top Search Queries (28 days, September 6 – October 4, 2026)

Pulled live from Google Search Console for this entry:

The brand term is locked at 1.0 and the misspelling is covered at 6.8 — the rebrand has landed. Underneath it, the discovery queries the old site never competed for are on page 1: "central coast photographer" at 2.0, "photographer near me" at 3.8, "photography studio near me" at 5.0, "senior pictures photographers near me" at 5.8, "photographers near me" at 8.2. The Santa Maria commercial pair at 6.0 and 6.6 is the city-page strategy working. And the research-stage questions the guides were written for are placing: "when are senior pictures due" at 8.3, "what are branding photos" at 10.3, "dog portrait photography" at 10.4.

Two rows show where the work still is. "Paso robles family photographer" sits at 25.5 despite a dedicated page existing, and "high school senior photographer huntington beach" at 37.2 is a Southern California query five hours from the studio — the kind of broad match that generates impressions without ever generating a booking.

One caveat on this table. Search Console names only 223 queries for this site across the window, totalling 14 clicks and 681 impressions, against roughly 110 clicks and 3,817 impressions sitewide. It withholds the query string for rare searches, and most of this site's traffic is rare phrasing — so the query table understates volume badly. The page report below is the better evidence.

Where the Impressions Live

By section across that window: 17 blog posts produced 2,028 impressions — 53% of the site's total — against 673 from the ten city landing pages, 188 from the family photography set, 152 from senior portraits and 149 from pet photography. The homepage is still the biggest single click earner at 39, but the two pricing guides are the biggest visibility earners by a factor of two, and both sit on page 1.

That is the finding worth taking away from this build. In a market where a client researches for weeks and then books once, the pages that answer "what does this cost" and "when should I book" get found long before the page that says "photographer in your town."

An Honest Note on Average Position

The full-window average position is 15.6, against a pre-launch 12.4 — meaningfully worse. Here is the whole of why.

The pre-launch 12.4 came off 193 impressions across ten days. That is a very small, very branded sample: a handful of name searches the business had owned for two decades, ranking where you would expect them to rank. It was never a measure of competitive visibility.

What followed was a domain consolidation and a content expansion at the same time. Google spent weeks re-crawling and re-attributing twenty years of redirected URLs, and simultaneously began showing a site that now had ten city pages, five service lines and 21 guides for hundreds of queries it had never appeared for. New queries enter the rankings deep. Position went to 22.2 in the first week, 25.1 in July, and anyone reading only that would have called the rebrand a failure.

Then it climbed: 19.4 in August, 10.5 in September, 10.9 across the first days of October. The most recent fourteen days average 10.2. That is two full positions better than the pre-launch baseline, achieved on roughly seven times the impression volume and a vastly broader query set.

We publish the full-window figure because leaving it out would hide the shape of the thing. The shape is the lesson: a rebrand plus a content expansion makes your average position worse for about two months. That is not a reason to panic in week six.

A Note on Click-Through Rate

Click-through rate fell from 5.18% before launch to 3.04% across the last 28 days. Impressions grew about 6.6x while clicks grew about 3.9x, and those cannot both be true without the rate dropping.

The query table shows where it went. The pre-launch rate came almost entirely from people searching the photographer's name — the highest-converting query type there is. Today a large share of impressions come from broad research and discovery searches where the site appears on page 1 but is one of ten options, and from matches like the Huntington Beach query that were never going to click. A lower percentage of a six-times-larger number is still four times the clicks.

A Note on the GA4 Numbers

Google Analytics recorded 1,100 sessions from launch through October 6, 2026 — 104 days, about 10.6 a day. The channel split: Direct 569, organic search 371, organic social 122, referral 21, AI assistants 17 (ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity between them).

Direct leading at 52% is what a rebrand looks like from the inside. Existing clients type the new name, follow it from an Instagram bio or a printed card, or arrive through the redirect from the old domain. It is a sign the name change reached the existing audience, not a sign the SEO worked.

The 371 organic sessions are the SEO number, and we will not dress the comparison up: the pre-launch baseline of 0.9 sessions a day was measured on a domain that was not yet the live brand site, so multiplying one by the other produces a number that measures a migration, not growth. The figures worth quoting are the absolutes — 1,100 sessions, 371 of them from search, in a little over three months on a domain that was a stranger to Google in June.

Key Takeaways

1. A twenty-year domain history survived the rebrand. amywellenkamp.com permanently redirects into amymarlan.com, the new brand name holds position 1.0, and the misspelling is covered at 6.8.
2. Impressions up 557% in the last 28 days — 19.3/day became 126.8/day. Full-window: 87.2/day, up 352%, with 8,899 impressions banked.
3. Clicks up 286% in the last 28 days, 175% full-window — 1.0/day became 3.9/day, with the last fortnight running at 4.2.
4. Position got worse for two months, then beat the baseline. 12.4 → 25.1 in July → 10.5 in September. The full-window average is still 15.6 and that is in the results table, not hidden.
5. Pricing transparency outperformed location pages 3:1. Two investment guides produced 1,491 impressions at positions 6.9 and 7.9 — more than all ten city pages combined.

Why It Worked

The temptation with a rebrand is to treat it as a design project: new name, new logo, new site, launch it and hope. That is how established businesses disappear from search for a year.

We treated it as a migration with a content expansion attached. The redirects were mapped before launch, not after. The old entity stayed disclosed so Google and returning clients could connect the two names. And the new site was built with far more surface area than the one it replaced — ten city pages, five service lines with city-level children, and 21 guides answering what clients actually research — so that once Google had finished re-settling the consolidated domain, there was materially more for it to rank.

The result is a studio that came out of its rebrand with four times the clicks, six times the impressions and a better average position than it went in with. For a business whose name changed three months ago, being the first result for the new name while also sitting at position 2.0 for "central coast photographer" is the outcome the whole exercise was for.