Catriona Rowbotham is a South London based garden designer and Course Director at The English Gardening School in Chelsea. She transforms urban plots and courtyards into calm, liveable spaces. By rebuilding her portfolio for visual search & replacing phone snaps with professional photography, her craft now shines online.
Deliverables
The site showcased strong projects, but images were mostly phone snapshots: flat light, limited dynamic range, and little material texture. Search results reflected that: few thumbnails, low click-throughs, & established competitors owning London’s most valuable terms.
Seven on-site shoots for depth & materials, then a portfolio rebuild so each project can rank on its own.
Balanced natural light reveals richer tones and separates layers; shallow depth of field draws the eye to planting.
Drag to reveal the transformation from phone snapshot to professionally shot image.
Beyond taking the photographs, I curated how the work is presented on the website. The order, cropping, and rhythm of images help visitors quickly understand the designer’s range & style.
A subtle retouch to remove distracting stacked chairs behind the glass doors, keeping attention on the garden.
Drag to compare: the stacked chairs behind the glass doors are removed in the final retouch.
Let’s work together
I help garden designers get clear, true-to-life photos and tidy image setup, so the work feels premium, loads fast, & is easier to find in search.
Web design projects are available year-round. Garden photography is limited to a small number of projects each year.
For this project, image SEO was about preparing the photos properly for the website. That meant writing clear alt text, exporting files at the right size, making sure images load quickly. The aim was not to “rank in Google Images,” but to help search engines understand what each photo shows and how it relates to the page.
How people actually search
Most clients don’t begin with a designer’s name. They search by space type, style, planting, or materials.
Preparing images properly helps search engines connect visual work to these kinds of real-world queries.
Simple rule: if you can describe the photo in one clear sentence, you can name the file and write the alt text.
What we changed on this site
Small technical details that compound across a portfolio.
Alt text also improves accessibility, making the work clearer for people who use screen readers as well as search engines.
Project Scope
My role in this project focused on the imagery: professional garden photography, preparing images so they were web-ready, and adding clear, descriptive image details so both visitors and search engines could understand what each photo shows.
The website design was created by Gemma Andrews, and the broader SEO strategy was led by the client’s SEO specialist, 99 Social.
“I don’t know any other photographers who combine photography with proper SEO and web-ready file preparation.”
Example, using a real image on this page
Filename
gravel-garden-steel-edging-london.jpg
Alt text
Steel-edged rectangular planting set into pale gravel with low green groundcover and tiny white flowers.
The wording stays simple, visual, and true to what is in the frame. That is the goal.
The combination of professional photography + image SEO increased visual presence in search results and improved rankings across high-intent garden design queries.
#1
“London townhouse garden”
15+
Keywords in the Top 10
25+
Keywords in the Top 20
100%
Results showing image features
Snapshot from an SEO review (Google UK, desktop), checked Oct 2025. Rankings vary by location, device, and time.
Market domination clusters
Why the images mattered
