Overview

Keywording is the second most important factor of your success on microstocks, coming right after high-quality content. When done right, it can significantly improve your earnings and ranking of other works in your portfolio. Do you want your content to rank for only the highest competition queries or only for the long-tail ones? With this plugin, you have the power to choose.

Keyword competitiveness

“Competitiveness” means how easy can be to rank for the given keyword in the search results.

It is the aggregate factor, calculated by Xpiks, that takes into account how other artworks and authors rank for that keyword, sales potential of the keyword and customer demand. Aggregated by machine learning, these factors are presented to you as a color below the keyword:

• keywords underlined “green” are easier to rank for
• keywords underlined “red” are harder to rank for
• keywords underlined “gray” are not yet in Xpiks database

Keyword Competitiveness in the plugin interface

In addition to each keyword color, there’s a distribution shown so that you can understand your keywording in total.

Is green good or bad

Rating/Competitiveness is not “good” or “bad”. It is a tool that allows you to estimate what competition you will be targeting with your keywords.

How to use the data

Keyword competitiveness data is a gold mine, if used correctly. You might want to add some keywords specifically to target different competition. There are few strategies you can employ on which keywords to add to your content:

4 main types of keywording strategies

On the left side you can see emphasis on the easier- and harder-to-rank keywords. On the right side you can see emphasis on the uniform keywording and “middle ground” (not too easy and not too hard). These are the visual representation of the strategies discussed above.

Keywording strategies notes:

• If all of the keywords you added are “red” (tough to rank for), your content has to be of truly outstanding quality in order to quickly make it’s way to the top.
• If you content is of outstanding quality, but you rank only for the “easy” topics, sales potential might be lower than if you ranked for some of the higher-competition niches.
• If you produced content of different quality, it is now easier to repurpose “lower quality” content for “easier” topics and better content for the “harder” ones, by adding keywords skewed to the “green” side or to the “red” side.
• Most content should have keywords that vary in competitiveness, aiming to rank both for some of the long-tail topics and some of the “tough” ones. It does not have to be equalized, but it’s up to you to decide what you want to prioritize.
• If you see the keywording you’ve done for an asset is too skewed to the “red” or “green” side, you can readjust it before uploading so that it can cover wider range of competition.

About the data

The data used for the ranking will be updated frequently so that you will have visibility into current status quo. You might use some keywords that not included in the analysis (“gray”), however vast majority should be covered. If you observe large amount of “gray” keywords, please contact support.

There’s also a study published in the blog that uses this data.