How to Write Killer Keywords for your Stock Footage

Dive into agency best practices for writing optimized titles/descriptions on Shutterstock, Pond5, and Adobe Stock.

Avoid these common mistakes in your titles for better SEO ranking and agency acceptance rates.

Test what you've learned by identifying why the following titles might be rejected by the agencies.

How the right keywords can put your content in front of the RIGHT buyers.

How many keywords should I use? Does keyword order matter? I'll cover these two common questions in this video.

Here are a few quick multiple choice questions to reinforce what you've learned so far about keyword purpose, order, and ideal number.

Ready for more nuanced best practices? The answers to these frequently asked questions will make your job way easier.

That last video covered a lot - help those FAQs stick with this quiz.

Agencies are known for rejecting clips due to an issue with the keywords. I'll talk about some of the most common mistakes so you'll know what to avoid.

Let's go over a few examples of poor keywording to contextualize some of these guidelines.

Now you're familiar with best practices and what to avoid, but what if it's still hard to think of which keywords to write? Get some ideas flowing with these brainstorming methods.

It's easy to describe exactly what's in a shot and forget to also tag conceptual and technical keywords. Check out this next video for ideas on even more helpful keywords you can incorporate into your metadata.

Download my Keyword Checklist PDF to help make your brainstorming faster!

This next checklist is golden for helping me quickly check that I've covered all my bases.

It's tempting to copy and paste all your metadata across similar shots. Here are some tips to help you customize your metadata for each clip.

It's very important to go back through your metadata and remove any keywords that aren't ideal descriptions of your content. Here are some tips on how to do that.

Congratulations on finishing the course! Now you can confidently write killer keywords for your stock footage.

Learn what we'll cover in this course and get ready to say goodbye to writers' block!

In this short video, I'll explain what a CSV sheet is and show you how I use it to upload my metadata for stock footage.

Before you start brainstorming, it's important to identify the prominent features of every shot that you want to focus on.

As your first step, you can radically cut down the amount of time you spend researching online if you first gather as much information as you can about the shot.

Time to put your eyes and intuition to work!

Wikipedia is a fantastic place to begin your online research. Let's take a look at what information is valuable and what you can ignore.

Google is another solid resource. In this video, I'll cover how to quickly scan for high-performing keywords you might want to use.

Don't underestimate the value of Google Images! I'll show you how to quickly scan the results when brainstorming for ideas.

This step is a very quick one that might lead to some useful related keywords.

This step is a MUST in my brainstorming process. If you had to choose just one step of my process to follow, make it this one.

I'm a big fan of checklists and studies show that using them greatly reduces the rate at which we humans make basic errors and overlook small details.

I've included my personal technical checklist here as a downloadable resource—feel free to customize it for yourself!

Conceptual keywords are very valuable for capturing the attention of buyers who are searching for a feeling, mood, or concept rather than a concrete subject or action.

As a final resource, AI keywording tools can help you come up with keywords you might not have otherwise written on your own. I'll show you my favorites here.

One of the most important steps—make sure you're only including your strongest keywords!

Now that you're familiar with all 11 steps, I'll go through them a bit faster for a subject where I have multiple clips.

In this video, I'll explain how I differentiate my metadata for this second clip to quickly signal to potential buyers what unique details this clip has to offer.

Now that you've seen my brainstorming method broken down step by step, I'll show you what the flow of my process looks like in real time with a model clip.

If I had multiple clips in this series, metadata for subsequent clips would go much faster with the initial brainstorm already finished.

Congratulations!! I hope these strategies help you say goodbye to writers' block for your stock keywording. If you have any questions, feel free to ask them in the Q&A section and I'd be happy to answer!