LookStat – Microstock Analytics

About This Post
Yoga was ranked #2 in the data on our fastest growing recreational activities post. I’m breaking this profile into 2 parts for brevity’s sake. This post will cover the following:

• General Search Trends
• Popular Forms of Yoga
• Top Search Keywords
• Demographics of Particpants

Part 2 will cover stock photography search results and trends and will link to this one.

General Search Trends – 2004 – Present; USA

The chart above shows Google Insights for Search data  for ‘yoga’ from 2004 to the present day for the USA. There is a clear upward trend which you can see if you connect the peaks of the chart. In addition, like a lot of fitness-related terms (see our post on ‘weight loss’), there is a peak in January (resolutions anyone?) but a relatively steady volume of interest throughout the year.

Popular Forms of Yoga

The above chart shows Google Insights data for 2009 – Present for some popular forms of yoga. If you consider that Bikram & Hot yoga are thought of as the same thing then Bikram accounts for 84% of the above searches in Jan 2010.

Top 10 Search Keywords

Using the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, I ran a quick search on yoga and sorted the results by global monthly search volume. The Top 10 are plotted below:

Participant Demographics

According to the Statistical Abstract  of the United States, there were 10.7 million yoga participants in 2007. In the charts below, the data are broken out by gender & age.

2007 Participation by Gender

As anyone who has ever set foot in a yoga studio will attest to, the data above are not surprising. It would be interesting to track this breakdown over time and see how it is changing.

2007 Participation by Age Group

The peak age group is 25-34 but there is strong participation in the older bands as well. Over 30% of participants were 45 or older.

Conclusions

• Yoga searches peak in January.
• Bikram/hot yoga is by far the most searched for form of yoga (15x more popular than the next highest term which was: ‘hatha yoga’.
• ‘Mats’ , ‘fitness’ , ‘classes’ are all in the top 10 in terms of keywords. Don’t ignore them on your images.
• Women outnumber men by roughly 6 to 1 in terms of yoga participation.
• The peak age segment is 25-34, but there are plenty of older (45+ particpants) as well.

Other Posts in This Series

• Top 10 Recreational Activities
• Top 5 Activities by Consumer Spending
• Activity Profiles
  • Running
  • Hunting
  • Weight Loss

Summer is just around the corner, from a shoot planning perspective.

Since the time to begin uploading seasonal images seems to be 2-3 months ahead of an event (see our Thanksgiving & Easter posts) and shoots need to happen well before that, we will be profiling the top leisure activities in the USA early. Similar to our hunting post, I’ll be looking at search trends and highlighting the best-selling stock images associated with those activities.

When deciding to post a list of the top activities, the metric you choose to rank on is important. I’ve included the fastest growing as well as those with the highest number of participants in this post. (We looked at the top activities based on consumer spending last week.)

Fastest Growing Leisure Activities in the USA

The chart below shows the ten fastest growing leisure activities in the USA, measured by the % increase in participation from 2007 to 2008 (2009 data is not yet available.) These data are from the National Sporting Goods Association.

Since growth rates by themselves aren’t meaningful, I’ve included a data table which lists the number of participants and the number added from 2007 to 2008. The data are ranked by growth rate and the top activities in terms of participation are highlighted in bold.

• Running didn’t surprise me much since it’s so easy to get started.
• I was a little surprised by the popularity of ‘exercising with equipment’ especially as it is not the same as ‘working out at a club/gym’ as you can see from the table below.
• Snowboarding grew a lot, but off a small base.
• Even though baseball may be ‘America’s pastime,’ soccer had more participants.
• Yoga was bigger and grew faster than baseball or soccer.

Top 10 Leisure Activities Based on Number of Participants in 2008

• I didn’t expect bowling or fishing to be that high on the list (probably my own biases at work.)
• I think age segmentation will be important. For example, I expect the participation in walking to skew older. (I’ll try and address this aspect in the individual sport profiles.)

Stay Tuned (And Share What You’re Interested In)

Over the next few weeks we’ll be publishing activity profiles regularly. I’ll be focusing on the fastest-growing list but will leave out winter sports for now since they won’t be of much use from a shoot planning perspective. (If you’d like to see them anyway, let me know.)

As always, if there’s a specific topic you’d like to see covered, please let me know and I’ll see if we can work it in.

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.

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

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:

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’

Fotolia Search for ‘Hunting’

Dreamstime Search for ‘Hunting’

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.’

Which of Title, Description & Keywords matter for search? The short answer is:

“All of them”

Here’s why.

As you can see from the table above, all of the fields have a role to play in either the Page Title or a site’s search. As a result, so you need to make sure that they all contain the top keywords for your image.

Page Title Tag
This is the sentence that shows in the top of your browser when viewing a web page. If you view the source of a web page, it is the <Title> element

The  Page Title Tag is the most important on-page factor from a search crawler’s perspective. As a result, the words in your title tag are crucial for searches on Google and other search engines. Three of the four sites above use the IPTC title for their browser title tag and Shutterstock uses the description. So, regardless of what you think of them, those fields matter a lot. Even though iStock, Shutterstock and Fotolia ignore everything but the keywords in their search results, the fact that Google cares means you need to care.

Oh, one more thing – Dreamstime and Fotolia both have a character limit and truncate inputs. So, the bottom line? You have 50 characters in which to be relevant. Put your most important terms up front.

On-site Search
As you can see from the table, the microstock sites use some or all of the meta data fields in their search algorithms. I think we are all sold on the value of keywords, even for on-site search but Title & Description also have an important role to play. In fact, at Dreamstime, I think an exact match on title gets you the highest placement in search results (even above keywords.) I was able to get searches to return for words that only existed in the IPTC Title.

Talk is Cheap – Show Me the Searches!
All this becomes very clear with a few examples. I did a search on istock for ‘friendship’ and I picked the image highlighted below.

The title tag for this image is: “Two Women having Fun Outdoor (XXXL).” If you search google images for “two women fun outdoors”, this image is the second result. (This is a good thing.)

If you search iStock for “two women fun outdoors” the image is nowhere to be seen. While it has ‘fun’ in its keywords, it doesn’t have “two women.” And if you search for images on Google with keywords like ‘friendship’ you are not going to find that image.

Conclusions

• Title, Description & Keywords should all contain relevant terms
• Your page titles matter more than you think – for on site & for Google search; don’t ignore them
• You have 50 characters for the title – make them count; put important keywords first

As part of our Back Office Services, we pay attention to these items. You should too.

I was chatting with the CEO of Nearlyweds.com, a Seattle startup that provides beautifully designed wedding websites 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)

Environmental themes are common in microstock and I thought it would be helpful to share the top search keywords associated with ‘energy’ to aid in planning and keywording energy related microstock concepts.

Top Search Keywords (via Google Adwords Query Tool)

The big takeaways here are is that ‘solar energy’ is searched for twice as often as ‘wind energy.’ I also initially found ‘jobs’ surprising. With hindsight, it makes current sense given the current economic climate and that concept might be worth exploring as part of a shoot.

Google Insights Trends

I plotted 2008 data to get a sense for full-year seasonality and apart from a steady rise from Jan to April, there doesn’t appear to be a significant seasonality barring a decline from November to Jan which is likely due to Thanksgiving & Christmas.

While drilling into solar energy a little more, I found the regional data interesting as well. The top five regions are Nigeria, Pakistan, India & South Africa from a search volume perspective.

Implications for Microstock

Given the above data, it’s clear that solar should be at the top of your concept list and given the regional trends, varying the ethnicity of your models is probably worthwhile as well.

While playing around with Google Insights data for Valentine’s day trends, I was somewhat surprised to find that there are on average 6 times as many searches for ‘valentine’s gifts for him’ as there are for ‘valentine’s gifts for her.’

I guess men just stick to flowers, chocolates & jewelry while women have a harder time with men’s gifts. On a slightly related note, flowers peak on Valentine’s Day & Mother’s Day with jewelry ruling the roost at Christmas time. I was a little surprised to see such a small uptick for jewelry at Valentine’s day but I suppose it’s fairly soon after Christmas.

When planning your shoots for Valentine’s day, it looks like flowers & chocolates will be your friends.

We’ve had a great response to our uploading and keywording offer so we are extending it and opening up to all new takers. If you ask us, we will keyword & upload 25 images for you to up to 10 sites at no charge, with no strings. Just create an account at LookStat or fill out our contact form to request more information. We’re confident that once you get a feel for the quality of service we deliver you’ll want to continue. Regardless, we would appreciate your feedback and input.

I know it’s not yet Thanksgiving, but it’s never too early to start thinking about Christmas.

Top Keywords

I used the Google Adwords Keyword Suggestion tool to come up with a list of keywords related to ‘christmas’ and associated search volume. I’ve listed the Top 25 in the table below. Not all of them translate directly to microstock but I think there are some good image ideas in the list.

Global Searches for Christmas

In addition to using the adwords tool, I also plotted search results for ‘christmas’ on Google Trends. The chart below shows global search volume by week for the term ‘christmas’ in 2008. The vertical axis shows the volume relative to the average for the time period.

Top Cities & Countries

The graphs below show the Top 10 Countries and Top 10 Cities. 4 of the top 10 cities are in the UK and the Top country for searches is the Philippines. These data are also from Google Trends. I had expected results to be more in line with population for the top countries & cities so the lists were surprising.

I hope you found these useful. Please let me know if you’re starting to see any movement in your Christmas related imagery.

We are offering to keyword and upload 25 images for the first 25 photographers to fill out our contact form in response to this offer as a way of letting you try out our Back Office Services.

There is no obligation to continue using our services after this initial set. We’re doing this because we’re proud of the quality of service we deliver and we’re confident that once you try us out, you’ll seriously consider using us again in the future.

What You Get

• 25 images keyworded with IPTC Title, Description and 30-50 keywords (you’ll be able to download keyworded images from our system for your archives)
• Uploading, attachment of releases and final submission for these 25 images at up to 10 microstock sites
• Firsthand experience of how LookStat Back Office can help you focus on creating great images rather than the mechanics of getting them online.

Get Started By Filling out this contact form >>

PS: There really is no catch and no credit card/paypal info required. We hope you’ll continue afterwards, but it is fine if you don’t.