5 Ways Stock Photos Are Hurting Your Site

In this post we are going to examine why stock photos are bad for your site and what you can do instead.

We will be covering ways and means to make the best use of images and use them in a manner that’s relevant to your site and its branding as a whole.

Visuals enable you to tell what your blog, landing page or site is about, who it represents and who’s it for. They tend to perform well in helping people instantly make a connection and invite clicks to your call to action buttons. There’s some peer pressure to deliver a site that’s rich with images because everyone else’s blogs are overflowing with images. When you add a picture to your social media content, the number of clicks to your content improves as a result.

Doing so improves engagement. That’s the reason a large percentage of posts on social media are visuals.

A visually driven campaign improves your brand’s visibility across multiple platforms. There’s also content to write and clients to meet with.To save time and some effort you might turn your attention to using stock photos.

However stock photos have a cost beyond the price you pay for them. Brands that use a lot of stock photos on their site dilute the brand’s core positioning by reusing images spread throughout the internet. And when you share those same old and tired photos and videos on social media or when sending email campaigns you’re not creating a big impact there either. These images are all too common. They don’t help you stand out.

The brands you love on the other hand are often ones that use authentic images. That’s how you relate to them and get them to trust you. If a site can’t even use real photos how do you expect anyone to trust and transact on the site. Trust is the basis of any transaction that happens online.

1. What Do You Lose With Stock Photos

Sites like Flickr and Unsplash have images anyone can use. The pictures are available publicly and are free. This means most sites use them. You will find hundreds of sites dotted with those same images. You’re not the first person or the last one to use those images. And therein lies the problem.

With free stock photos you need to be careful about providing the citation required for each picture and use the pictures in accordance with the labelling available on them. If you use stock photos on a page where you’re selling ebooks and the images aren’t labelled for commercial use you’re breaking copyright law. This can lead to notices from a lawyer. Artists and photographers don’t list their hard work on these sites out of the goodness of their heart.

They do so to get rewarded in the form of free credits(links). For the discount you get with free stock photos you need to pay in terms of link attributions to the original creator of the post. That’s the reason for so many stock photos sticking themselves like sore thumbs everywhere online

What About Paid Photos?

There are paid stock photos available on stock imagery repositories. You can go to Shutterstock, Getty images and scores of other sites that sell paid images. Paid stock photos are less likely to be plastered all across the web. The subscriptions however don’t limit distribution of these images. However, since most people don’t pay for photos, paid stock footage isn’t as common as free photos. When you get stock photos you don’t need to link out to them or give any attribution credits.

2. Stock Photos and Their Detrimental Impact on Rankings

Stock photos can destroy SEO rankings. If your website is using every other photo that scores of other sites are using, what do you have different for the robots that crawl your site? They couple you with other sites. There’s nothing new in your site for them to pay attention to you. It won’t be a stretch to imagine that these images don’t help you rank better. You are not doing any benefits.

Second, Google recently updated its core guidelines so that it rewards pages with optimal user experience. Stock photos don’t really help you cultivate a brand identity and can be detrimental to user experience. So you risk your rankings.

3. Your Brand Appears Less Authentic

A brand that’s authentic and honest and transparent shows that trust is what makes someone loyal to a brand. You can’t start a successful blog with images that aren’t yours to begin with.

A 2016 study, showed that 83 percent of consumers surveyed said that trust drives their loyalty to a brand.

Stock photos on your site might be easy to use but they scream inauthenticity. What’s worse is your site looks like a template rather than an original creation. Stock photos are a foregone choice. Professional photos of real employees while engaged in real work boosts transparency and shows to others that yours is a real company that can be trusted.

4. Someone Might Confuse a Competitor’s Brand as Yours

It’s possible that when designing your homepage or logo, you and your competitor used the same stock images. You searched for wellness and took the most attractive picture you could find. Your competitor did the same keyword research as well. Your logo isn’t unique now and your homepage matches your competitor’s homepage. People are going to get easily confused. Customers coming to your business might get confused by what they see. Referrals from others might get confused arriving at the homepage. They just might remember the logo. This is bad news to you. And it can be easily avoided should you choose to use something else than stock photos.

5. There Are Copyright Issues

If you want to save money with either free or cheap stock photos there’s always the looming risk of lawsuits. There are many ways to make money online. Some people adopt the way of suing others for copyright infringement to make that money.

With stock photos there’s a lot of legal issues around trademarking those images. A mistake in attribution or in using the images can land you in legal trouble. Then again if you violate terms of purchase for instance most stock photos can’t be used commercially that’s another potential lawsuit in the wings.

What’s the Alternative to Stock Photos?

The reason you’re stuck with stock photos is because you don’t have images you can use or you don’t have time to edit pictures. If all you do is take a step forward and invest in photography equipment. This makes it possible for you to generate as many quality images as you want.

It’s possible you don’t have the time for this. The best way to get authentic images? Hire a professional photographer or a freelancer who can spend a day with your company and take pictures or videos.

You can use something as simple as an iPhone to take great pictures and with some editing you can get pictures you can start using readily. Then you can post these photos on your blog posts.

Conclusion

In your business to stay profitable you need to make a lot of decisions that let you recoup the investments.

Stock photos are a bad investment decision. A unique visual brand stays in the minds of visitors and makes your brand.