Hitwise has released some interesting data regarding photo-searching habits. The concept was conceived of as the firm noticed the popularity of the search “great north run photos”.
“This made me curious about the popularity of searches for photos related to big events and news stories,” says Hitwise’s Robin Goad.
Hitwise monitored 16,624 different UK search terms containing the word “photos” last week, and out of those, “flickr.com photos” accounted for 0.89% of all searches containing the word ‘photos’. “Great north run photos” was the second most popular photo search term. “Great north run 2009 photos” ranked fifth.
“Other topical photo searches in the top 20 included ‘good wood revival 2009 photos’, ‘marathon photos’ and ‘nurburgring photos’,” says Goad.
Look at these additional charts from Hitwise, which show the sites getting the most traffic for the queries “great north run” and “great north run photos”.
As you can see, much of the traffic is going to different places. The moral of the story is that including photos and optimizing content that includes photos when event-related can pay off in traffic. People are looking for visuals.
“Given the popularity of photos and other (often user-generated) rich media content, it will be interesting to see how larger and more mainstream sites adapt to plug this traffic gap,” says Goad.
By adding photos to content when possible, you may find that you start getting some additional traffic from image searches as well.
