Use SEO to Enhance Your Portfolio
Search engine optimization (SEO) is extremely important in the marketing and tech world, but is it something you need to worry about as a stock media contributor? The answer is yes. Don’t worry, you don’t need to be an SEO pro to use SEO to your advantage, but understanding some basics can help you enhance your portfolio and increase your downloads. As a stock media contributor, you have a couple of different search engines to worry about—the search engines on the sites you contribute to as well as the larger search engines (mainly Google). You might be wondering why you need to worry about Google search if your content is on our site. A large percentage of our site traffic comes directly from Google, and the better your content is optimized, the more it will be seen. We’ve shared a lot of internal data with you to help you understand trends within our library, and now it’s time to share some SEO intel to help you understand external search.
Help us Help You
SEO can be a great tool to help you improve your search visibility, but it’s important to keep in mind that stuffing all of the relevant keywords into your titles and tags isn’t for the best. Google really doesn’t like spammy-looking content—neither do our users for that matter. You should optimize the titles on your content to include the most valuable keyword and the most important descriptors, but you should also try to keep your titles between 50-75 characters to avoid looking spammy. Include some of those secondary descriptors and lower-volume keywords in your tags, but make sure not to include too many tags. We recommend using between 15-30 keyword tags. Also be sure that all of the tags you use are relevant to improve user experience on our site. Better experience in search will keep customers coming back, which results in more earnings for you. Now that you understand the best practices for SEO, let’s dig into some strategies.
Use SEO Tools to Learn Common Terminology
I’ll start by explaining how you can use common SEO keyword tools to help you optimize your tags and titles, then I’ll dive into some fun trends data that will help you cater your portfolio to what’s trending in external search.
Every SEO specialist has their favorite keyword tool. Some popular ones are Ahrefs, Moz, SEMRush, and Keyword Tool. My favorite is SEMRush, so I’ll stick with it in my examples, but I encourage you to try out some others to see which one you like best. SEMRush has a paid plan, but you can see some basics with a free account. When you go to SEMRush.com, you’ll see this page.
Type in the keyword you’re thinking about centering your title on, and you’ll be given a bunch of information. We did a search for “logo animation” for a logo reveal template. Skip straight to this section below, and focus primarily on “Volume.”
The volume listed is the estimated number of searches for that keyword each month. Logo animation has a fairly high volume compared to some of the other terms. Under the Phrase Match section, you can see keywords that are close to what you typed in. In the Related Keyword section, you can see some of the keywords that are closely related to your keyword. Now let’s do a couple of other searches to see if we can find a more popular term to target.
You can see that not too many people are searching for “video logo template.” Additionally, fewer people are searching for “After Effects logo” or “After Effects logo animation” than simply “logo animation.” There are a bunch of reasonable explanations—the main one being that “logo animation” is shorter, easier, and broader. Broader terms generally have higher search volume because they account for a broader set of intents—in this case, I would guess that people looking for information on how to create logo animations or people looking for templates who are unaware of Adobe AE templates are contributing to the high volume.
So how can you use this information to optimize your tags and titles? Understanding the volume behind different keywords can help you understand how customers are referring to content that they’re searching for. “Logo animation” is more common than “logo reveal,” and you’ll find other nuances like this when digging through search data. Keep the related keywords in mind when you’re tagging, and be sure to use the highest volume keyword in your title. Let’s say we have an After Effects logo reveal template with pink confetti in the background. A good title could be “Playful After Effects Spinning Logo Animation with a Confetti Background.”
Tags might include:
- Animated logo
- Logo animation
- AE logo template
- Logo reveal
- Adobe After Effects logo
- Playful
- Confetti
- Pink
- Spinning Logo
These keywords and a short, yet descriptive title will help not only our search but also Google search understand what the video on this page is.
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Understand Trends to Provide In-Demand Content
Glad to see you’re still with us! Now let’s move on to see how Google Trends data and even keyword data can help you cater your portfolio to more popular media trends and topics. You can use the same keyword tools listed above to see the differences in popularity of logo animation templates and slideshow templates. If SEMRush and some of the other SEO keyword tools are a little much though, you can also use Google Trends to get a general idea of what’s in higher demand. We did a comparison of aerial footage vs. 360 footage, and we can see that aerial footage is much trendier than 360 footage.
You can use the different drop-down filters to dive in deeper. Google Trends can also help you determine if the Eiffel Tower or the Empire State Building is a more popular topic—just make sure to take this data with a grain of salt. Depending on the terms you’re searching, the data might not match up with what people want within the stock media industry. For the best results, we’d suggest pairing some of this data with the internal search trends we share with you to determine what gaps you can help fill in high-demand areas.
Really, we recommend focusing on creating content that you’re passionate about. But using this data will help you determine how to get it in front of the right eyes!
