How to use Google to increase HubPages traffic and microstock sales

You’ve submitted your photography to several microstock agencies. You’ve written hubpages and used your images on those HubPages. You've joined affiliate ad programs and used acceptable methods to link to your website or portfolios. Why aren’t you making any money?

If you have activity within hubpages, your traffic will increase, but intra-HubPages traffic doesn’t much revenue. Better results come when a user links to your HubPage from outside, usually from a search engine, which is usually Google. So you’ll make more from your HubPages ads when your images and hubpages sites appear in Google’s search results. I checked the first 3 pages of results; after this, there’s less and less chance anyone will find you.

Getting good Google placement is a separate topic. Search engine optimization or SEO, is beyond the scope of this hub and there are many hubs that explain strategies.

I wanted to determine how well my images and hubpages were doing. I started by using a simple search string like ‘moose walking’ and discovered that my portfolio seemed to be invisible, although I did have some success in getting first page placement for my hubpages. This produced some results for my hubpages but not many for my microstock portfolio. (Note google search results change frequently, so any numbers mentioned here are going to be relative.) Adding the extra tags ‘stock’ and ‘image’ produced better results:

The image column shows how many of my images appeared on the first page - this requires the 'stock' and 'image' tags. (Without these words Google will not usually show many images at all.) The total column gives total references to my portfolios - almost all of these are various microstock agencies. This gives an idea of how successfully various agencies promote your images. For me, most of the references came from ShutterStock, 123RF, and Dreamstime, with very few from newer agencies like Photodune and Superhug

Common advice is to not submit many similar images to microstock agencies, since it ends up scattering downloads across several images and this will reduce income at sites like Dreamstime that price according to number of downloads. However, this research shows you can get dominance on the first Google results page – e.g., 11 different images of ‘Hindu shaman’ and ‘7’ for moose walking’, giving substantially greater exposure.

Does it matter what the tag order is? Unfortunately the answer is “yes”, since you're at the mercy of the order the user enters the keywords. Taking ‘Moose walking’ as the stem keyword string, I then added ‘stock’ and ‘image’ as additional tags. There are then 5 basic combinations possible – as shown in the table below

So the display of your images is partly at the mercy of your potential buyers’ search ability and experience. If they try to find a picture using just “moose walking” they’ll see 1 image on the first page and no additional links on pages 2 and 3 of the search results. (Often you won’t be even this lucky – there will be no links of any kind here.) So here there’s a significant difference whether the search string includes ‘image’ or ‘stock image’ and whether these tags come before or after the stem tag. Of course, I could have made even more permutations, reversing ‘stock’ and ‘image’ or using synonyms when searching for ‘image’ like ‘photo’, ’picture’ or ‘photography’ (Google automatically includes the plural of your tag.) But my testing showed there was only a small effect. Using a post-stem tag of ‘stock image’ always produced the best results, so my later searches only used 2 search strings.

Without the extra tags I was more likely to find my own hubpages though. In the the 'cascoly' column shows the page on which my royalty free images website appeared. Sometimes though the hubpages result is improved by the use of these tags. Two examples are the stem tags ‘mani rimdu’ and ‘sea lion newport’.

The column ‘cascoly’ shows the page on which my hub appears in the Google search. The column score is a total of my hub pages that are found, images that are shown, and images that are referenced, with some weighting on the first 2. As expected, the best scores are for uncommon search strings (long tail) and topics where I have several images in my portfolio

For this study I tested about 100 search strings, with about 50 different stems (‘Indian markets’, ‘famous Mexican landmarks’, etc) As I have a microstock portfolio of over 15,000 unique images and over 140 hubs, this is obviously a very small sample. But initial results are encouraging. With such dramatic results from using ‘image’ and ‘stock’ you need to ask – what is the likelihood my target audience will use ‘stock image’ in their search? If you’re just looking for traffic to your hubpages, the answer is not many. But if your main concern is promoting your microstock portfolio, then most potential buyers will add such additional tags.

Once you know which strings achieve the best results, you can also use Google AdWords to bid on those terms.