How important is it to have loads of keywords?

[PatsyCollins]

Almost all my photos are marked as 'poor discoverability' which I think is because they only have a few keywords.

Most of my photos are of plants. I use the common and Latin names, as I imagine people will search for one or other of those. I could add loads more eg flower, plant, leaf etc but it doesn't seem likely that potential customers will wade through pages of those to find my images. Would adding more help my sales?

[StokeCreative]

Hi Patsy. There's a generally accepted view amongst regular forum contributors that trying to get "into the green" is counter productive. When I started out I did that, but ended up adding things like "blue sky" "plant" to make up the numbers. I actually now have been back through most of those and slimmed down the keywords to use only the specific and very relevant. Always good advice to think what a buyer might use in a search.

Ultimately your port is currently very small and you'll need a lot more images to generate sales.

cheers

HUGH

[Steve F]

 

[Steve F]

14 minutes ago, PatsyCollins said:

I could add loads more eg flower, plant, leaf etc

 

Don't try to get green discoverability with a plant picture, there will be loads of irrelevant keywords that will hurt your CTR. You could add the month and season to the caption. And it wouldn't hurt to add if we're looking at leaves or flowers. And you could add e.g. perennial flowering... deciduous tree, evergreen bush etc.  to the caption too.

 

E.g.

An English deciduous oak tree (also known as common or pendunculate oak), Latin name Quercus Robur, in full leaf in late summer. August, England

[PatsyCollins]

Thank you!

I suspected that might be the case re keywords, so thanks for confirming that.

I'll go through and try to add more detail to my captions.

[Rebecca Ore]

23 minutes ago, PatsyCollins said:

Almost all my photos are marked as 'poor discoverability' which I think is because they only have a few keywords.

Most of my photos are of plants. I use the common and Latin names, as I imagine people will search for one or other of those. I could add loads more eg flower, plant, leaf etc but it doesn't seem likely that potential customers will wade through pages of those to find my images. Would adding more help my sales?

 

I had one license of an African violet by using "double flowers" or something like that as a keyword.  The search was for double flowers and most of Alamy's African violet photos didn't use single or double in the keywords, so this search got maybe a page of double flowered plants.   Color in some flowers that have color variants would be another example -- white roses, red roses, peach roses, etc.  Also, a lot of searches for specific cultivars.  

[PatsyCollins]

8 minutes ago, Rebecca Ore said:

 

I had one license of an African violet by using "double flowers" or something like that as a keyword.  The search was for double flowers and most of Alamy's African violet photos didn't use single or double in the keywords, so this search got maybe a page of double flowered plants.   Color in some flowers that have color variants would be another example -- white roses, red roses, peach roses, etc.  Also, a lot of searches for specific cultivars.  

Thanks.

Yes, I can see that a fairly unusual feature might be worth including.

How can we tell which words people used to search for our photos? I've only sold a few and although I can see which they are, I've not worked out how to discover what people searched for when they found them.

 

[Rebecca Ore]

5 minutes ago, PatsyCollins said:

How can we tell which words people used to search for our photos? I've only sold a few and although I can see which they are, I've not worked out how to discover what people searched for when they found them.

 

All of Alamy for things you might not have thought about, and Your Images, both under Alamy Measures.   Your Images will show what search term got views, zooms, and  sales.

[PatsyCollins]

Thanks - I'll look again.

[Mr Standfast]

Useful page.

 

https://www.alamy.com/blog/captions-and-tags

Edited January 10, 2023 by Mr Standfast
Typo

[PatsyCollins]

Thank you. Yes, that is useful.