Poor Discoverability: please help

[Eccy de Jonge]

I would be very grateful if someone could take a look at my images, which I have tagged and captioned, and let me know if I can help discover them better. I don't get many (if any) look ins and I've had no sales. I'm not particularly worried, it may well be that my photos - mainly of birds - are just outdone by others. But I would like some advise on discoverability if I'm not tagging things well enough.

 

Of course if the tags are good and it's just a matter of luck or chance or waiting, that'll be fine.

 

Many thanks folks

 

PS I tried to insert an URL from my site but it wouldn't work

[Steve F]

Hi, your captions look ok. If you search the Forum, you will see that there are lots of posts on Discoverability. We have collectively decided that trying to get images to green 'good' discoverability with 40 or more keywords is not worth it unless they are all relevant. Keyword spamming will hurt your CTR.

 

You are keyword spamming. Your pictures will appear at a certain level (e.g. first page, 10th page... etc.) in searches by clients, depending on various factors. CTR and Sales are the only factors we know about for sure in the secret formula Alamy uses to set our search ranking. Your CTR rank (on your Dashboard) is a function of the number of times a client zooms (clicks on) one of your images versus the number of times your images appear in a client search, but are not zoomed.

CTR=Zooms/Views * 100

This is basically a long way of me saying, don't spam keywords. E.g. don't put sky, blue, clouds for every single outdoors picture you shoot. There is a tendency to try to put lots of keywords for your images to try to get them seen by clients. So they may well appear in searches, but if they're not zoomed by a client, your CTR rank will drop. Which means your images won't show as high up in client searches. You don't want your images to get buried in the 350 million images on Alamy. By all means, put a lot of keywords in for certain pictures if they're relevant. Captions and keywords are almost more important than the image itself because you can have the most amazing images ever, but if they're keyworded wrong, no one will ever see them.

 

For example, this image:

Swallow (Hirundo rustica) on top of the visitor centre, RSPB Bempton Cliffs, East Riding, Yorkshire - Image ID: 2R716JE

you have lots and lots of irrelevant keywords which will return false results for client searches, so you will get lots of views potentially, but no zooms, which will lower your CTR:

 

best birds, best photography, bird lovers, bird brilliance, bird watchers, bird watching, professional images nikon d7200, female birders, female photographers, tamron 150-600, zoom lens... I could go on.

 

Keywords should describe what the photo is showing. There's no people or females or bird watchers in the picture. The sex of the photographer is irrelevant. Your photography equipment is irrelevant etc.

 

I hope this helps. You also need a lot more images uploaded. You are correct that there is a lot of competition with bird photography.

 

Steve

 

[Inchiquin]

+1 to everything Steve said.

 

Yes there is a lot of competition for bird photos, but many of yours are very good, capturing the birds very clearly in flight, in their habitat etc. I think they will sell... provided customers see them, and there's the problem. Alamy has 340 million photos, you have 134. However, all is not lost. One that stood out as I skimmed over your pics was the redwing in flight, partly because I don't think I've ever seen one in flight and so have never really appreciated how much red is under the wing. It's a beautiful shot so I did a search for redwing in flight and there are only 80, of which yours is by far the best. So if you keep taking great shots and caption them diligently as Steve has detailed above, I think you will make sales.

 

Alan

[Eccy de Jonge]

Thank you Steve F for your comments and Inchiquin for your kind words on my Redwing. For some reason I never received notification of these responses so apologies for the delayed reply. I will make some effort to edit the tabs. Much appreciated.

 

Eccy