About This Post

This is the second post in a two-post series about Walking for exercise. The first post focused on general search & demographic trends. This post is focused on stock photography trends relating to walking for exercise.
_
Stock Photography Trends for ‘Walking for Exercise’
In order to isolate images around walking for exercise, I decided to look at the search results for ‘exercise walking’ as opposed to just walking. As a test, I also tried searching for ‘walking exercise’ and got back exactly the same number of results in the same order so it appears that search term order is not significant. This was true across all sites.
_
If you just search for ‘walking’, you get an order of magnitude more images returned, but this because walking is an activity commonly photographed in a range of stock image categories. For the purposes of this discussion, exercise and walking are most relevant.
_
Number of Images in Search Results for ‘exercise walking’
_
_
The chart above shows the number of results obtained when searching for the terms ‘exercise walking’ on each of the sites listed. The biggest takeaway here was that iStock & Shutterstock returned almost the same number of results and that Getty actually had more images in that category than Fotolia. The normal pattern is that Shutterstock has by far the most results, followed by Dreamstime & Fotolia with iStock and then Getty & Corbis with the fewest images. I’m not sure what’s behind this, but this may be some art direction at work.
_
Links to Default Stock Site Search Results for ‘exercise walking’
_
Bestsellers
_
The top result for the search on istock is an active senior woman which lines up well with our conclusions from the first post on ‘walking’. Most of the rest of the first page contains more lifestyle and relaxation oriented walking shots as opposed to walking for exercise. In fact, there is only one image on the first page which shows an older woman walking for exercise.
_
An Image That Sells Well on Multiple Sites
_
_
The image above is on the first page of iStock, Dreamstime & Fotolia when you search for ‘exercise walking’ and order the searches by downloads. Interestingly enough, this covers walking, but also hits assisted-living concepts and multi-generational concepts. As a stock image, it definitely spans a range of potential search terms and is well chosen and executed. The image has been downloaded over 1,000 times at iStock (where it is ranked #7) and over 700 times at Fotolia (where it is ranked #1).
_
One point to note is that the title chosen was ‘One Step At a Time’ – I think this image could have seen more traffic if the title had been something like ‘Granddaughter helping Grandmother with Walker’ – less interesting to read, but more keyword dense. As I’ve written about before, titles matter a great deal in keywording.
_
Conclusions from Part 2
__
  • There does appear to be a relative lack of imagery around the sweet spot of the demographics for walking for exercise. It is probably worth testing this topic the next time you do a shoot involving seniors.
  • I saw no shots for walking seniors on white for this topic and that is somewhat surprising to me. This is another area that is probably worth exploring further.
  • Finding ways to cover a range of search terms can help broaden the potential uses for an image. Worth considering, but just be careful that you don’t compromise how well your image illustrates each individual concept.
Conclusions from Part 1 (for reference)
_
  • Walking for exercise is the top leisure activity in the USA in terms of participation with close to 100 million people taking part in 2008!
  • Demographically speaking, the participants skew older & female; the top age segment is 45-64 years old.
  • Walking shoes represent the top footwear category in the USA and the demographics (not surprisingly) map closely with walkers.
  • ‘Walking shoes’ should be part of your keywording strategy since they are a high volume search query
  • Top related keywords are: “exercise, weight loss, calories, walking shoes”