Long Tailed Keywords and the Future of Stock Photography

The future belongs to long tailed key words.

Even images that will knock your socks off need to be found before they can work their magic.

Long key words provide a motivated audience for your images.

Long Tailed Keywords and the Future of Stock Photography

Recently a doctor contacted me about using one of my images. In the photo a patient consults a doctor in a recovery while an elephant stands in the background.  The doctor told me she found the image by doing a Google search for “elephant in the recovery room”.  I gave the same search a try and, sure enough, my image came up first.  Actually, it was the only image of an elephant in a recovery room.  But it is a perfect illustration of what I believe is the future of stock photography: the long tailed keyword.

Cut Through the Clutter

Long tailed keywords are keywords, or rather phrases, that people do Internet searches on that are combinations of three or more words.  As people become more and more Internet savvy they are doing more and more long-tailed keyword searches.  Such searches help narrow the results down to what someone really is looking for.  As the Internet becomes increasingly inundated with photographs, long tailed keywords become more necessary to cut through that clutter and find specifically what you are looking for.

Image Searches and Image Requests

Every art director I have spoken with has told me that to varying extents they do use Google image search for stock photos. I personally have had an ever-increasing stream of image requests come to me through Internet image searches.  The people who are coming to my site are getting there through long tailed keywords. As the future unfolds there will be more and more image searches by art directors, designers, art buyers and literally millions of lay people in need of photographs.  The future of stock is in getting your images seen, and a huge part of that is going to be in long tailed keywords.

Detailed Descriptive Captions

To have your images successfully found through image searches you have to have the keywords associated with your images that will help people find them.  It doesn’t mean that you should load your photos up with as many keywords as you can; rather it means you should have a sufficient quantity of appropriate keywords.  One way to do that is to add detailed descriptive captions to your images.  Remember, search engines can’t see photos, so paint a thorough and accurate picture with words.  The more appropriate words you have, the better the chance that a search engine will come across the particular combination of words that someone is searching for, and thus find your photo.

Motivated Traffic

One key benefit of having people find your photographs through the use of the long tailed key word is that you are that much more likely to have motivated traffic.  If someone comes to your site looking for “stock photos of three executives in a glass office”, and find that image, the odds are much better they are truly motivated to license that image than if they find your site looking for “executive portraits”.

Insuring Your Success

Long tailed key words are the key to attracting a motivated and targeted audience to your stock photos.  They are the key to insuring your success at getting your images to stand out from the tens of thousands, even millions, of competing photos.  They are the key to the future of stock photography.