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One of the top factors driving most content sharing on social media is great imagery. It’s because it’s funny, inspiring, stunning, amazing or just resonates with them in some way. When it comes to content marketing this seems to be untapped territory at least in the content marketing strategies niche.

We all know how unbelievably viral memes are, so much so that it’s being considered a cultural segment and let’s not forget that the viral success of someecards.com was one to be rivaled just a few years back.

The Importance of Social Signals As A Ranking Factor:

iPullRank’s Michael King has been on a nationwide technical SEO tour for most of 2016 and in doing all of that talking and researching and talking some more he came up with some great data to support his arguments about the importance of technical SEO that is truly amazing.

My agency is taking a step away from technical SEO for the year ahead and focusing more on bigger, broader more direct customer driving digital marketing services. I was fortunate enough to meet Michael King at the 2015 Internet Summit and watched his talk on the technical SEO revolution in Raleigh this year at #iSumm2016.

The most influential take away for me from “The Technical SEO Renaissance” had nothing to do with technical SEO at all and really is only a tiny blip in the grand scheme of that magnanimous write-up.

Michael King found a direct correlation between the number of Facebook shares and Googlebot Visits that blew me away. His data shows almost 10x more crawl frequency for content frequently shared on social media than content with frequent backlink growth.

—To me, this is totally crazy and flipped my SEO brain completely upside down.

I always knew that social shares we’re a ranking signal but I brushed it off as a minuscule ranking factor when in fact it could be an enormous ranking factor after all.

So I wanted err needed to look at the numbers…

In The SERP

And in ahrefs

It doesn’t matter how you slice it Neil has ~12x more social shares and far fewer links and guess what, he’s number one!

—I’ll bet that you will pay much more attention to social sharing signals now, won’t you?

I’m not saying dump your link building strategies, in my mind backlinks are still the top ranking factor, however, if you're so close you can taste it, double down on social media marketing tactics and drive as many shares as possible.

A good practice going forward into this sharing is ranking era, is to write with link building in mind and aggressively market with max share-ability in mind.

So how can stunning visuals put you over the top? Literally...

Finding the perfect visuals

Google Image Search…

Finding stunning visuals for your content with Google Image Search might seem crazy but it works just make sure you contact the photo's owner for usage rights/permission or use Google’s awesome image search tools to restrict your results to “labeled for reuse” as shown in the example here.

Free Image Sites:

My two favorite sites to pull great visuals from are pixabay.com and freepik.com both have quirks about photo credits but they really are free. Both sites also are wrapped up tight in ads for paid stock photo sites and related content. Neither site has extraordinarily large banks of images but there’s enough to find something great to fit your content!

Pixabay

Typically has more results than freepik and less “stock” looking images. I’m under the assumption that they are pulling their images from some form of a relationship with Shutterstock.

FreePik

Typically has fewer results for photos but much more in the way of graphics and illustrations, compared to Pixabay. Switch on the vectors filter and search for “SEO” you’ll see what I mean. You’ll also see that some of the big time bloggers on content marketing use that exact query on pixabay for their image resources.

Stock Photo Sites:

The top 2 stock photo sites for any kind of marketing are ShutterStock and iStockPhoto, in that order. There’s one really big thing you need to take note of if you’re going to use either one of these…

Both leverage user submission for content and there are a handful of really big producers using both sites to sell their content, having said that there are a few photography styles that could make your photo choice easily recognizable as stock. Take a look at the screenshot for freepik above, dead center is the perfect example of that style, regardless of the image’s content.

There is a commonality about the properties of that type of photo that screams I’m from iStock! The composition, the subject’s distance from the camera, the color quality, the room lighting, etc. browse iStockPhoto for about 3 minutes and you’ll see what I mean.

ShutterStock Pulls in over 1 million images per day so there's no shortage of fresh options. While browsing their catalog you will see droves of images you recognize from print & TV ads and digital marketing. ShutterStock could be considered the industry standard in digital marketing stock photography in that respect.

On the basic package stock images cost around $15 each the more you buy the cheaper it get's by ~10 - 20%, once you get into heavy use you'll upgrade to the pro plan where 750 images will cost you $250/month or get 20% off and pay $2,400/year, roughly $.027 per image. If you need more than just the standard license for online video, film, TV ads or large commercial print runs > 50,000 you'll have to contact ShutterStock about enterprise pricing.

A full breakdown of the ShutterStock pricing options can be found at photo buyer guide.

Getty images invented the stock marketing resource industry for news and media and goes way back, possibly all the way back. Getty started iStock to feed user-generated stock to the internet marketing industry, back then the web was starving for great photography.

iStock uses a point system for pricing, you buy credit packs and depending on the size/license you need you can get photos from $1.40 each. There's a subscription option and the highest option on the lowest package will get your cost per image down to $0.19 if you pay annually.

If you're really shopping for a stock photo provider and can't decide photo buyer guide has all the information you'll ever need when choosing the right stock photo solution for you or your agencies needs.