After my surprising discovery that hunting was the sport with the highest per participant spend in the USA, I decided that a quick snapshot of the activity and the search results for ‘hunting’ on stock photography and image websites was in order.

Google Insights for ‘Hunting’

To get a sense for seasonality, I checked Google Insights for Search for hunting search trends from 2008 to the present.

Google Insights for Hunting

There’s a clear seasonal trend that starts in July and peaks in November. From a stock perspective, 2-3 months is the lead time so April/May is when you want to be uploading hunting related images.

Global Monthly Search Volume (in Millions) for ‘Hunting’ via the Adwords Query Tool

Hunting searches...

As you can see from the chart above, ‘deer hunting’ as a group of two terms (hunting deer & deer hunting) accounts for 2 million monthly searches. Taken together, these two terms are almost three times larger than the search term immediately below them. It’s also instructive to look at the related keywords.

Global Monthly Volume (in Millions) – Related Keywords (via Adwords Query Tool)

It’s useful to look at not just the term itself, but also related terms:

hunting_related_searches

Clearly, ‘rifles’ and ‘outdoors’ are where the action is. One point to note – given that ‘rifle’ is so much more prevalent than ‘rifles’ you may want to consider using the singular form in your title and description. This is because of the fact that those two IPTC fields become the Page Title which is important for SEO.

Show me the Searches

I decided to search a handful of stock photo sites and order the results by downloads (where possible) to see what turned up.

iStockphoto search for ‘hunting’

istock

Fotolia Search for ‘Hunting’

fotolia

Dreamstime Search for ‘Hunting’

dreamstime

I found it fascinating that both Dreamstime & Fotolia had business shots in their top search results. The keywords in question were related to ‘job hunting.’ I checked a couple of other USA based sites and they all had recreational hunting related imagery on their top search results. I would guess that this is a reflection of a cultural difference. Another interesting thing is that the most download image from Fotolia & Dreamstime is the same one (but almost 6 times as many downloads on Fotolia than on Dreamstime.)

Conclusions & Impact on Stock Shoots

  • Hunting, outdoors, rifles, deer – these are your top terms in the USA (for your title & description, ‘rifle’ may be better than ‘rifles’)
  • The growth in search volume begins in June. As a result, you should start uploading in March/April
  • Don’t fixate on the meaning of a term that’s most familiar or you might miss other interpretations e.g. ‘house-hunting’ or ‘job-hunting.’