Analysis of top-100 customer queries by traffic on Shutterstock

Have you ever wondered what is the most searched content by customers? If yes, you came to the right place, since we just finished analyzing top 100 queries to Shutterstock. Of course, lots of them have hundreds of thousands or even millions of search results, but did you know there are golden nuggets in there?

What is Shutterstock

Shutterstock is one the top-tier microstock websites that even despite recent earnings restructuring is staying in the 3 top-earners for fellow microstock contributors.

You can read more about Shutterstock here.

How to use the data

This is an example of data presented in the newsletters: (1K = 1,000; 456K = 456,000)

green - highlighted as “better” option
red - highlighted as “worse” option
neutral - not highlighted
★ - good potential

Search: What customer enters into the search field.

Shutterstock Traffic: (Higher number is better) Estimate of average organic search traffic per month generated by this page on Shutterstock. Calculated as estimated search volume of Search multiplied by the Click-through Rate (CTR) of the URL/website with search results. This allows to estimate how many customers are truly interested in the topic.

Existing Results: (Lower number is better) Amount of results of Search on Shutterstock (already created content) also known as “existing competition” or “niche saturation”. The more results - the harder for new content to get noticed.

Google Volume: (Higher number is better) Estimate of monthly search volume of the same Search phrase in Google. This shows total public interest in the Search (for example, on other microstocks too).

Note: data presented in the queries is not the exact data (which is available only inside Shutterstock or other microstocks), but an estimate received after analyzing ClickStream databases. While it does not show exact number, it is very useful for relative comparison inside each niche.

List of top 100 Shutterstock searches by Traffic

Analysis

There are not 1 or 2, but whooping 12 great content opportunities only within these first hundred most popular queries! Those are queries that are used by customers most of the times and still have relatively low competition. Out of these 12, there are few outstanding ones:

• large question mark, 2.2K existing results
• bmi chart, 528 existing results having 11K traffic
• whatsapp logo, 4K existing results
• pink dino, 3.4K existing results with 9K traffic
• twitter logo, 6.5K existing results and 5.9K traffic
• radha krishna, 4.6K existing results
• female pooping, 1.7K existing results
• curly braces, 3.4K existing results

Except of those, it’s interesting to see what customers are searching in general.

Color backgrounds

Backgrounds on Shutterstock

Apparently very many customers need backgrounds. Mainly blue (also light blue, royal blue), but also black (also solid black), red, white, yellow, green, orange and golden backgrounds. Sad though that there are millions of already created black backgrounds, with barely any room for creativity over there.

Non-color backgrounds

Non-color backgrounds

Also customers search for non-color backgrounds like:

• islamic
• nature
• plain
• glitter
• rainbow
• fire
• birthday
• anime
• easter
• gamer

All queries scoring hundreds of thousands existing results. As a special mention, query transparent with 5.7 million results.

Logos

Logos on Shutterstock

There are multiple popular queries with regards to logos:

• instagram
• whatsapp
• facebook
• esports gaming
• camera
• nike
• twitter

Holidays

Thanksgiving images on Shutterstock

There are few popular queries with regards to holidays:

• christmas
• thanksgiving
• new year
• diwali
• eid mubarak

People

[Old granny] images on Shutterstock

There are different popular queries with regards to people:

• old granny
• cute baby
• ugly woman
• smiley face
• mom and son
• ugly man
• kiss
• human leg
• scary face

Creatures and gods

[Pink dino] images on Shutterstock

Customers need images of various mythological creatures and gods:

• pink dino
• shiva
• dragon
• unicorn
• hindu god
• krishna
• hanuman

Signs

[Large question mark] images on Shutterstock

There’s a lack of content here, which is being searched by customers:

• large question mark
• curly braces
• red arrow

First page of results of these queries

There’s a second stage of this research published on PetaPixel. There we investigate the portfolios that rank on first page of these queries.

Conclusion

Even though we looked at only the first hundred of most popular queries, we have found lots of opportunities for high-demand and low competition content creation. This is simply nuts, given the amount of traffic that these pages receive. Now that this information is public, you might need to hurry up to fill in those gaps!