 Alright, in this video I'm going to give you 5 tricks for keywording your photos for stock photography sites. Now you're not going to be able to find these tips anywhere else because I learned these by looking at my best sellers on stock sites and seeing how buyers found those photos. Let's get into the tricks. Hi, my name is James Wheeler. I made my first stock sale on Shutterstock in August of 2012 and I've been making a passive income from my photos online ever since. You know what? I actually really still like that photo. A lot of my photos from back then I don't like, but this one I really still like. I've got it actually up on my wall. Anyway, it's back to you. Alright, there's two primary ways the buyers are going to find your photos through search engines. The first is the website search engines and that's primarily going to be Google. The second is the stock photo search engines. Now I'm going to cover them both through these trips, but the first trick is really focused on Google. And the trick is that Google can't read your keywords, so you have to focus and add keywords to your caption. Now Google has said that it can read the metadata photos where the keywords are located and it reserves the right to use those for search rankings in the future, but it doesn't use them right now. I don't think they will in the future because it would be too easy to spam. So what does this mean? Well this means that Google really uses the captions. Let me show you some real-life examples of what I mean. So here I am on one of my photos on Shutterstock. And you can kind of see how the page is laid out. My caption is down here. So the Alkylon National Park with red shares before a dramatic sunrise. Now Shutterstock and all the other stock sites, they've really spent a lot of time, a lot of work optimizing their pages for search engines. And they've optimized their pages around the caption. So if you look at the title of this particular page, it is the caption to my photo. If I hover over the photo, I will see that the caption comes up as well. And I've got the caption down here. So this caption is on this page multiple times, whereas the keywords, although they are listed down here below, they are not as prominent. So the keywords really aren't going to be picked up by Google as much as the captions are. So if you go and take a look here, if I go to Google and just type in my caption with the word stock photo on the end, then I go over to the images section. You can see that the first photo there is my photo. Let's go and take a look at another example. If I was to go here and choose this one. So if I grab the caption, Toronto City Skyline Reflection, put stock photo, on the end you can see here that my photo is actually in the first spot as well as in the third spot. So dreamstime is a stock photo site and they obviously optimize their pages a bit better than the other sites. And so they've got number one. I've got I stock photo is number three. So you can see that, you know, having that caption have strong keywords or good keywords in it are definitely will lead to bringing more people to your photos directly if they're looking for them on Google. Now, the reason this is important is that for most of the micro stock sites, you'll get a higher rate when someone goes in and buys a one off photo as opposed to a subscription. For example, on Shutterstock right now, I get $2.70. If it's a photo that is purchased as a one off sale, but it's a subscription, I only get like 33 cents. So it's a significant more. So it's really important to have good keywords in your captions so that your photos rank high on the search engines, which will drive again, higher sales for your stock photos. All right, that brings us to trick number two. Only use relevant keywords and don't worry about maxing out the keywords. Now, what a lot of people think is that because Shutterstock allows 50 keywords, you should have between 40 and 50 keywords on every image. However, that's not always the best approach because of the way that the stock search engines work on Shutterstock and other sites. Let me show you what I mean with a real example. All right, so here I am again at one of my photos on Shutterstock. Now, this particular photo has done consistently well for me for a number of years. Now, what I really want to point out here is just take a look at the caption here. So in this caption, just notice I don't have the word Canada landscape or landscape, but I've got Marine Lake, which is the name of this lake and it's in Banff National Park. And then I've got my keywords down here below. So if I go up here and I type in Marine Lake and I look for that photo, I can scroll down, scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. And it's quite a while before that photo comes up. There's a lot of photos of Marine Lake on Shutterstock and a lot of them are ranked higher than this particular photo. But what happens when I go in here and I type in Canada landscape? I don't have to scroll very far before I see that photo coming up. Also, if I type in Canada Lake, scroll down, there's that photo again. So I know from my stats and analytics of Shutterstock that most of the time that this photo sells is people searching for Canada Lake, Canada Landscape or Canada, some sort of other combination, including those types of keywords, not searching on Marine Lake. So why is that? Well, you kind of need to understand about how the search engine works on Shutterstock. So I'm going to massively oversimplify things here. But if you think about what Shutterstock wants to do, they really want to show the buyers the best photos that they're going to want to buy. Okay, so obviously they can use the keywords and captions, but a lot of people are going to have the same keywords and captions. There are thousands upon thousands of photos in Marine Lake that have been uploaded to Shutterstock. So what they do is they also look at other signals. And the other signals, the primarily one is how many times that photo has been sold. Okay, but they don't just look at how many times it's been sold. It's been how many times it's been sold for a particular search. So if someone searches for Marine Lake and then eventually buys a photo, they're probably more likely to buy this one in the top line of Marine Lake than they would in the ones below. Okay, however, if they're searching for Canada Lake, they're more likely to search and find these ones and purchase these ones. So what Shutterstock does is it links not just like the photo to the sale, but it's really the photo to the keyword to the sale. So when you upload a new photo and someone searches it and buys it, you're moving your photos up in the rankings. So what you'll find on stock sites is that once you get a certain number of sales, you will then start getting sales consistently because you'll be very high in the rankings. So why am I then saying you don't need to do 50 keywords? Isn't it obviously then better to have more keywords so there's more chance of you getting ranking? Well, not really because, again, if you think about it from Shutterstock's point of view, if they were only to look at sales, then when new good photos came up, they would never be seen by buyers. And buyers, their collection would start to look very stale to the buyers. They searched for things. They would only see the photos that had the most sales. So what Shutterstock will then do is build them to the algorithm. They will have ways to show other photos to the buyers that are new photos that have been uploaded. And if the Shutterstock of the algorithm sees that those photos start selling, they will move them up in the rankings. And if they see they don't sell them, then they just leave them at the bottom. So it's really important that all your keywords are very relevant. So someone searching for that keyword would potentially buy it because Shutterstock's only going to trial out your photo for so long before they say, you know what? This is not a photo that's going to sell. I'm not going to show it anymore. So as an example, for this particular photo here, if I include the keyword of trees, and this is showing for trees, well, if someone types in trees, they're probably not looking for this photo. Or if someone's even types in landscape trees, they're probably not looking for this photo. They're probably looking for something with more trees in it. So that might not be a good keyword to use. I really want to do the keywords like the name of the place and the things that are most prominent here, as well as the Longdale Keywords, which we'll talk about in a separate tip. So that's why you should really focus on only tagging your photos with the most relevant keywords. Now, if you're going to take a photo and upload it to Shutterstock, there is a very good chance that someone has already taken a photo of that subject or even used that keyword in another photo. And there's also a very good chance that they've already made a sale for that keyword. So based on the way the Shutterstock algorithm works, those photos will always be above yours in the search rankings. And if there's a lot of photos that have had sales for a particular keyword, your new photo, because it has no sales, will be very low in the rankings. And even though it might be the best photo and it might be the photo the buyer wants, they may never see it because they don't scroll down that far. So what do you do to get your initial sales to push yourself up into the initial search pages? Well, I guess you just give up, right? If you go on the internet and look at the comments on blog posts and videos about making money from stock photography, you'll see lots of people tell you that that's the thing you should do. But what I'm saying is that you don't. There is a solution to this and it brings us to trick number three. And that's using long tail keywords to get initial sales. Let me show you what I mean. So when you're coming up with long tail keywords, you really need to think like a buyer who is trying to go and find stock photos for a project. So as an example, let's say, you know, you had a blog post on traveling to Vancouver, British Columbia, you might come to start us off and type in Vancouver, British Columbia and then do a search. Now, if you were to do that, you would see a bunch of photos, but you may not see anything you'd like in this initial set. So maybe you would have a more descriptive keyword. So as an example, someone might want something that looks a bit more dramatic. So type in Vancouver, British Columbia. And lo and behold, they get a different set of photos. Now, this second photo here is one of mine. And I know that this does very well for dramatic Vancouver. Okay. And because of that dramatic keyword, this photo was nowhere to be found in the Vancouver, British Columbia search results. So by going and adding that, that long tail keyword of dramatic in there has gotten me a lot more sales for that photo. Another good example here is if I type in logging industry. Okay. So you type in logging industry, if I scroll down here, fairly high up, I've got this photo of mine, of some logs, you know, on a river at sunrise. Now, when I was going through in key rooms, I thought like, what types of people might want to use this, right? And obviously this is a nice photo of logging, you know, all the logs on the river. I've looked around where this photo has been used and it does get quite a few sales. And often where it's used is, it's on actually annual reports of logging companies. So let's say you're in the logging industry and you have an annual report, you need to get a stock photo for those annual reports. And if you look at the other options here, there aren't very visually pleasing photos on the logging industry here. So when they see my photo, they think, well, that's a great one. Why don't I put it on the cover of my annual report? Right. So that's one, again, that's done very well for me. But if I type in the word logging, or if I didn't include the word industry in the keywords, I probably wouldn't get any sales for that at all. Another one here is if I go up and type in Ontario travel destination, okay? So I like to use the word travel. Destination is also a good one to add in. This first photo here is a photo of mine from Niagara Falls. Now there are so many photos of Niagara Falls on Shutterstock that this photo is nowhere to be found. But when you type in Ontario travel destination, it does show up. And this particular photo gets purchased a lot by people typically overseas or in other countries writing about traveling to Ontario. And they come into Shutterstock, type in Ontario travel destination, see this photo, and buy it for their blog post. And I see that a lot. So as you're going through and keywording your photos, obviously, make sure you keep them relevant. It doesn't make any sense to have irrelevant keywords. But think about the different feelings and emotions that someone might have with a photo and add those in as keywords. If there's no people in the photo, add in no person as a keyword because a lot of photos on Shutterstock have people. So if they're looking for a photo without people, add in no person so they find it. Sometimes it's a good idea to add the lens type. If it's like an ultra wide angle shot, someone may be looking for an ultra wide angle shot. So have that as a keyword as well too. So think of those types of keywords. Keep them very relevant, but think about things that people might search on to find your photos. And that is a really good way to bump your photos up in the search rankings when there's a lot of competition for a particular subject. All right. This tip also goes against everything that I read when I first started learning about keywording your photos. And the trick is to don't spend any more time than you want to keywording your photos. Now let me tell you what I mean with this. When I first started keywording my photos and uploading to stock, I read that the keyword was the most important thing. You spent a lot of time thinking and getting the right keywords. And I did and some sales came in. But over time, I really didn't like keywording. Now some people may like keywording and if you do, you can skip this trick. But for me, I really didn't like it. And I found that because of the keywording, I was uploading less and less photos till eventually I found it as a chore and I just didn't want to upload photos anymore. So what I needed to do was take the pressure off myself by just saying, you know what? I'm only going to spend a minute or less than a minute keywording my photos. And if that's enough, it's enough. If it's not, it's not. But at least that got me back into uploading my photos regularly. And you know what I found? When I started uploading photos with keywords that I only spent a minute on, I still made more sales. A heck of a lot more than I did when I wasn't uploading photos. So don't put too much pressure on yourself to keyword photos. Right now, when I upload photos, I spend less than a minute keywording my photos per each photo. And that's enough for me to make stock sales. Now, this kind of leads into the last trick was, which is trick number five, and that's to use tools to help you with keywording. Now, there's a lot of tools out there that you can use to help you keyword your photos and do it more quickly. What I do is in Lightroom, I will keyword my entire shoot with typically the location and some other keywords that apply to the entire shoot. And then what I do is I use AI tools to add the rest of the keywords. Now, the tool that I use is called PhotoLoot, the one that I developed, obviously my favorite. But there's lots of other tools out there. Let me show you how it works. So what I'll do now is let's walk you through a couple of different ways that you can use to keyword your photos with a tool. So I want to use this photo that I took on a recent trip to Hawaii as an example. So there's two different tools that I've developed for keywording photos. The first one is a completely free tool that you don't need to sign up for. And it's called the Instagram hashtag and keyword generator. Now, I'll put a link down in the description. They'll take you directly to this. Kind of on that note, I would be able to put a link in the top right-hand corner of the video to this, but I can't because my channel is not popular enough yet. So if you're finding this video useful, it would be great if you go and give it a thumbs up and subscribe to the channel because that tells YouTube that people like my videos and they'll let me put things like links directly to the sites that I'm talking about. So what you can do here is come in. I'm just going to grab a photo and drag and drop it into this box. And then what happens is behind the scenes, what I do is I downsize the photo and then I send it to an AI tool that basically takes a look at it and suggests some stock keywords. So it also does hashtags on the right-hand side, which I'm not going to get into in today's video. But over on the left, we have keywords. So you can go through and choose how many keywords you want. 30 would probably be a good number. Typically what I do is I add five or six keywords in Lightroom to the entire shoot and then I'll add additional keywords in here. So the AI tool isn't perfect. You do need to go through and review it, but I typically go through and look at it and I'll see which ones I don't like. And I can click on the X to remove these. I'm like, plant. I probably don't want that. Flying, no. Bay, no. Travel, sitting. No person. That's probably a pretty good one. Man. Standing. And the rest of those are pretty good. So that was well under a minute and I just came up with 30 different keywords. So that's one you can use and I'll have a link down in the description. The other way that I typically use to do my keywords is the main Fortaloo app. So within this app, I can come here and upload the photo. I'll go through this fairly quickly. I have other videos off about how to use Fortaloo. So you can go through and look at those. I'll put some links in the description as well. So you can go here to go to the keyword section. Now this one's a bit more advanced. So I can see here down here, these are the keywords that I had already added to the photo. So what this does, it goes in and reads the keywords from the photo and I can see these ones I already had. So which is great because I have basically the location of the photo. You know, this is in Hawaii, you know, the United States. It was taken at sunrise. And now I can just go through and choose the keyword to the top. So I can go through and just accept all the keywords or I can click on them individually. What I'm going to do is I'll just go through and look at them, I'll probably X out the ones that I don't like, like coast, plant, island maybe bay, yeah. Those ones all look pretty good and I'll just accept those. Okay, so that was 20 keywords. Now I can go through and choose some more. I'll take sure. These ones I'll actually just go through and grab them individually. And that's probably good. I would probably say that's about 35 keywords. That's enough for me. So those are two ways that you can use tools to very quickly add relevant keywords to your photos to kind of help with your stock sales. And that's it. That's my five simple checks for key reading your photos for stock sites. Now, if you have any questions about anything I went over or any ideas for future videos, put them in the comments down below. If you found this useful, make sure you go ahead and like it as well as if you want to learn more about how much money I've made selling my photos online. I've got a video on that and I'll put a link to that up here somewhere. Also, if you want to learn about Forlew and my workflow and how I can upload to multiple sites really quickly, I've got a video on that as well and I'll put a link to that down here somewhere. Best of luck selling your photos online.