LookStat – Official Blog

Walking for exercise was the most popular activity in terms of number of participants and was in the top ten when it came to year over year growth on our list of top leisure activities. Given an aging population, and a tough economy, it’s not surprising that walking is a popular leisure activity. To provide some context, in 2008, there were 96.6 million people who participated in ‘walking’ compared to ‘golf’ which had 25.5 million participants. Also, the number of walkers in 2008 was 11% higher than it was in 2007 which saw 89.9 million participants.

This will be a two part series. In this post, I’m going to look at:

• Demographic & Gender Trends for Walking in the USA
• Footwear Spending by Category
• Walking Shoe Purchasers by Age & Gender
• Top Search Keywords

The second post will focus on stock photography related to ‘walking’ and will link back to this one.

Participation by Gender

Source: NSGA, Statistical Abstract of the USA

Participation by Age

Source: NSGA, Statistical Abstract of the USA

Walking as a means of exercise clearly skews older (49% of participants 45 or older) and female (62.5% female). This data is also supported by the footwear spending data as you’ll see below.

Footwear Spending by Type of Shoe

Walking shoes accounted for 33% of the $12.5 billion dollars spent on footwear in 2007 (data for 2008 were projected to be similar and 2009 data are not available yet but if anything, I’d expect this to be more pronounced.)

Walking shoe Purchasers by Gender & Age

Digging into the walking shoe purchasers show that the same trends apply as the overall participation in walking. 45-64 is the biggest age group and the percentage of female users is identical to the percentage of female walkers.

Search Trends for Walking & Walking Shoes

The chart below shows data from Google Insights for ‘exercise walking’ and ‘walking shoes’ from 2008 to 2010.

There isn’t much seasonality, but ‘walking shoes’ are searched for 5 times more often than ‘exercise walking.’ This surprised me initially, but intuitively it makes sense that people would be searching for ‘walking shoes’ as opposed to for ‘exercise walking.’ The same caveats as those in our comments on running shoes apply – be careful of trademarked designs & logos.

Top Searches Related to ‘Exercise Walking’

Conclusions

• 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”

I think the demographic trends around walking are fairly clear. This lines up well with general demand for imagery around ‘active seniors’ and this is something I’ll dive into in more detail in the second part of this post. Stay tuned and comments and feedback are always appreciated!

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.

Steve Gibson (@microstockin on Twitter) at Microstock Insider has a couple of great posts up that are well worth your time. The first is a post about popular search keywords and the second, from last year, is about seasonal stock images.

Lots of good data and exploration of the relationship between popular searches/data on Google vs. search data from a free stock site that Steve has access to. He concludes that the correlation is quite high, but there are likely to be situations where the two diverge. I think this is absolutely true. Not every search query makes sense on microstock.

Having said, that, I think it’s important to remember that just because a topic isn’t well covered already, it doesn’t mean that there isn’t demand for it. The beauty of microstock is that it is possible to test the waters by shooting some more experimental concepts and examining the results in views and sales. PicNiche can also help you figure this out.

In general, if people are looking for something, there’s a high likelihood that marketers will try and advertise it to them. (Of course, you have to figure out where in the long tail you are operating to figure out how much to invest in that image.)

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.

Keywording images is not much fun, but it’s important. This is true whether you are selling your images through microstock sites, uploading them to your own website for direct licensing or to help with traffic and brand building. Keywords need to be relevant to ensure a good user experience – you don’t want someone to land on your page and be irritated because the image has nothing to do with the keyword they searched on. Cast a wide, but relevant net. It’s far better to have 100 people visit and 20 people buy than it is to have 10,000 visit and all of them leave.

Don’t Forget About Titles and Descriptions

If you care about SEO (and you should) then keywords aren’t the only items that matter. You’ll need Titles and Descriptions to maximize your chances of getting found via search. Remember to keep things concise, relevant and focused on what people are likely to be searching for. iStock had a great post on this very topic recently and I recommend reading it. The crux of the issue is to be literal and descriptive.

“Localized Rainstorm” is not a good title for the image above. Much better to go with the more descriptive “Dog Peeing on Fire Hydrant” that the photographer chose. Titles aren’t about being witty or making potential buyers smile, they are about making sure your image can be easily found when someone is searching for the subject of your image.

Fix Your Page Titles (The Best 15 minute investment you can make in SEO)

The single most important factor that you control for your SEO is the page titles. This is the string that displays in the browser window title area (above the URL) and is controlled by the <Title> element. It is crucial that you select titles that contain high relevance search terms.

There are a ton of images online that may have keywords, but have the image filename in the title. This may come as a shock, but “DMC_33430934.jpg” is not a highly used search term for a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge at Sunset.

If you’re interested in learning more about page titles and ranking factors, check out the results of this survey on SEOmoz. Titles & Keywords are the top 2 factors listed.

There is no magic SEO bullet and it’s a process of continuous improvement. Having said that, fixing your title tags is a relatively straightforward thing to do and has a concrete benefit. (The time consuming part is making sure your images have good titles & keywords.)

Image Title First – Your Brand Second

Another important aspect to keep in mind is that you should lead with the image title, not with your own brand. The reason for this is that you want to rank highly for searches for ‘Golden Gate Bridge’ – you already rank highly for the name of your business.

As a result, “Golden Gate Bridge at Sunset Stock Photo | Eye Rock Photography” is generally better than having your business name at the front. This is even true on your home page. In general, a guiding principle with SEO is that you want to rank highly for your concept/category where possible. Those who know your name already know how to find you.

You can see this good examples of this use of “Keywords | Brand” in action at a range of sites around the web including:

• Microstock sites like: iStock, Shutterstock
• Individual photographer sites: David Sanger, John Lund

In general, as long as you have the keywords somewhere in the title, you’re ok, but having them listed first is generally considered the best approach. (Screenshot below is from the results of the SEOmoz survey mentioned earlier.)

My Images Sell Themselves

After someone arrives at your site, this is true. At that point, it is all about the image. To get people there, however, you need to make that image’s page visible to a search engine crawler. Today’s crawlers are text driven and need to be told what the page is about. Without a title, description and keywords, your images are effectively invisible.

Good keywording is critical if your images are online in any capacity whatsoever. Whether you are licensing them through microstock sites, your own website, or merely sharing them online to get them noticed, the words you use to describe them matter.

Keywords in Spreadsheets Don’t Count – Embed them in the Image

Keywords that live in spreadsheets are of no use to your images when they are online. They need to be embedded in the image file itself so that the metadata travels with the image. Microstock sites use IPTC Title, Description and Keyword fields to describe images and SEO-aware web services for image archive/display and sales, like PhotoShelter, will read these fields as well. Most photo editing and collection management applications will have ways of editing the image IPTC fields effectively.

We Can Help

As part of our Back Office Services, we offer IPTC-embedded keywording and SEO friendly titles and descriptions. If you’re interested in learning more, please contact us and we’ll get back to you to discuss your requirements.