Comments on: What Google Trends Says About Wedding & Stock Photography, and Photo Websites

By: Susan Pence

Susan Pence — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 11:51:50 +0000

Great post! Only shows that Google Trends has been playing a “role” for years now.

By: Brian

Brian — Sun, 16 Jan 2011 02:54:29 +0000

Hi GROVER, a good shot at analysis in a general sense, but two things to keep in mind. Google trends only compares your search term traffic with all other traffic (and possibly from diff servers over time). This means that the ‘Growth’ of one term is not relative to itself (but the whole of the search market) which should be going upwards, but in certain months may not. For instance if stock photos is going up, but the whole search is going down, it will appear that stock is doing much better than it is, relative to itself. To overcome this I have compared google trends for s single word, with Google keyword tool, for the same word. Of course keyword does monthly values, which are very much approximated, and include searches on affiliate sites effectively doubling the search volume. BUT comparing the same term on Keywords with Google trends ofter gives completely opposite growth trends, Google insights confuses things further. Just suggesting to keep where and how the data is extracted in mind …

By: Rahul Pathak

Rahul Pathak — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 15:35:50 +0000

Great post, Grover. I wrote a post on keywords for wedding photographers that your audience might find helpful, especially since Jan is peak wedding planning season. http://blog.lookstat.com/2009/12/16/weddings-wedding-photographers-search-and-image-stats-insights/

By: Allen Murabayashi

Allen Murabayashi — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 17:16:25 +0000

@phil i would agree that we can’t link google trends with how people are really licensing images from stock portals. but i think it’s a useful proxy. i have yet to meet a photographer who makes more money from stock today than they did before microstock and digital cameras. so in that respect, i think the trend does mirror photographer income from stock.

By: Jeff Sullivan

Jeff Sullivan — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 17:34:37 +0000

The drop in Yahoo-owned Flickr status in competitor Google’s trend ratings was probably more due to internal workings of the Goolge search engine to stop referring Google image search results over to their competitor’s site Flickr. I used to get nearly 30% of my Flickr views from Google search users, now I get close to zero. Meanwhile my Google hits on Panoramio have skyrocketed to over 5 million views on a handful of images. The same is probably true for Google’s referral to anything over on Facebook, since Facebook is now emerging as a competitor for Google’s dominance over Internet eyeballs. Facebook’s drop in Google’s ratings is far too precipitous to be attributed to a simple familiarity with Facebook’s name. It’s clearly an engineered reduction in referrals.

By: Phil Robinson

Phil Robinson — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 12:37:45 +0000

I can’t agree that the article really shows any trends, except those in Google searches. Most stock sales do not result from Google searches. Existing customers and anyone knowledgeable about the industry can bypass Google. It’s a very useful tool to find your way in a new and emerging industry (web-based stock in 2004, for example) but not so necessary when everyone has their suppliers on their favourites tab.

By: ts gentuso

ts gentuso — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 11:13:15 +0000

Extremely helpful post–well explained. I’m seconding the idea of a PhotoShelter webinar…..

By: squbg

squbg — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 18:55:13 +0000

great graphs very informative especially the wedding seo stuff

By: Lemerou

Lemerou — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 08:52:48 +0000

Great article with some interesting use of google data. Obviously photographers needs to pay more attention to classic SEO tactics and tools.

By: mystockphoto.org

mystockphoto.org — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 07:30:52 +0000

Hi Grover, really an interesting article. I made last year something similar – but smaller :-) – with Google Trends talking about microstock agencies vs traditional stock agencies. Here details if anyone interested: http://www.mystockphoto.org/microstock-agencies-google-trends/ I’m planning to re-analyse the data after one year… Cheers, Roberto