Weddings & Wedding Photographers – Search and Image Stats & Insights
Posted on December 16th, 2009 in General, SEO, keywording, lookstat, stats | 9 Comments »
I was chatting with the CEO of Nearlyweds.com, a Seattle startup that provides wedding web sites for newly engaged couples and he mentioned to me that peak wedding planning season is January – May. This is because there are a ton of engagements around New Year’s and another small spike around Valentine’s Day. I decided to dig around to see if I could come up with any useful insights for wedding photographers since they would be selected in the planning phases. While the data and the conclusions may be well known to pro wedding photographers and stock shooters, I felt they were worth sharing.
Wedding Photographers – Peak Searches Occur In January
The peak of search volume for ‘wedding photographers’ occurs in January as you can see from the Google Insight chart above. The top keywords associated with ‘wedding photographers are:
Top Search Terms Related to ‘Wedding Photographer’
If you are a wedding photographer and you don’t yet have an SEO-friendly page that talks about the keyword terms above, you should create one immediately. Write a blog post, put up a simple about page – it doesn’t matter how simple it is, something is better than nothing.
Dresses & Cakes Rule when it comes to Image data
In addition to looking at data on ‘wedding photographers,’ I also looked at search & image trends around ‘wedding’. The main thing that jumped out at me was the importance of dresses & cakes.
Searches for wedding dresses and wedding cakes account for 47% and 33% of the top 10 searches respectively. I’m assuming that wedding photographers know this already. It’s probably worth taking into account from a microstock perspective as well.
2009 Image Search Data for ‘Wedding’
As you can see, in 2009 searches for images related to ‘wedding’ have a spike in January and then climb steadily until July. From a microstock perspective, it’s probably time to start thinking about and planning your wedding-themed shoots.
Brides are More Important than Grooms (much more important.)
I think we all knew this, but the spread in search volume is impressive. The Google Insights data shows roughly 5.5x more searches for brides than grooms. I’m not married, but I’m sure that this search data can be corroborated from primary sources…
Conclusions & Microstock Implications
- Wedding Photographers – get an SEO-friendly page online ASAP. No flash, use text, use the keywords shown above and do it now!
- Brides, Dresses, Cakes are the most searched for images
- Jan-July is the time to be uploading your microstock images (I’ll post later on microstock data related to weddings)
Download your Free Guide Now!
9 Responses
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by joe heitzeberg, Rahul Pathak. Rahul Pathak said: new blog post on wedding & wedding photographer search trends http://bit.ly/6BY3Qy – brides, dresses & cakes rule! #togs [...]
Very interesting. I guess the recession is over? Do you have a link by any chance?
INteresting article in Sunday NYTimes. Many brides are buying at least two dresses and some four or five! I know there is a stock shot somewhere in that information
Hi Rahul,
I'd like to point out the different Italian "timing" for wedding. Peak is in May, June and then after the big hot summer, September. This behavior is confirmed in Google Insights (word "matrimonio" = wedding), see the slope March–> June and the other peak in September:
http://www.google.com/insights/search/?hl=en-US#q...
Cheers,
r.
Roberto,
Thanks for sharing that. The reasons make complete sense and it is important to highlight the international variance. Much appreciated!
Rahul
I think I found the link, Ellen:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/13/fashion/wedding... />
Thanks for the pointer!
I had three dresses – a photo dress, a wedding ceremony dress and a reception dress – it was surprisingly easy to get that many dresses when there were so many great ones to choose from!
This is really interesting data – especially the part about when the searches trend upwards and what they're searching for (dresses, dresses and dresses!)
3 dresses? Wow. I am clearly not tuned in to how this works. That and guys have it relatively easy
I only had one dress (only?) which I adored. It was tricky to dance in though, so maybe something slinky for the evening would have been a good idea.
The wedding photography search trend is interesting. In the UK there seems to be a double spike – one in January and one in August. If anything the August one is bigger. Maybe the good weather puts people more in a wedding organisation mood. When I narrowed the location to Scotland the spike in August is much more pronounced.
Very interesting. Thanks for the article.