Unsplash (in case you didn’t know) is a royalty-free image sharing website that anyone can use to download and use professional photos for their website, blog or print projects (this site reeks of Unsplash images!). Starting in 2013 as a simple Tumblr blog with a mailing list that sent out a batch of new images to its subscribers each week, it’s grown massively to now host over 2 million contributions from 200,000+ photographers worldwide.
So what does an image sharing site have to do with link building? Well, from fairly early on in Unsplash’s history, SEOs and photographers have been exploring the effect of using Unsplash to build backlinks to their own website and thus improving their overall visibility in search.
In recent months, we’ve seen this tactic being used by creative agencies and even LinkedIn Sales Navigator!
Whilst not a foolproof tactic, building links from your Unsplash photos is relatively straightforward.
Step 1: Take some incredibly awesome photos. Really, they have to be great images for this to work otherwise no one will want to use them on their website.
Step 2: Wait. And wait some more. It’s going to take some time for your photos to start getting views and downloads.
Step 3: Use Google’s reverse image search to find websites that have downloaded and used your photos.
Step 4: Start contacting the website owners and, firstly thank them for choosing your images, and secondly ask if they’d be kind enough to link back to your website. Not all of them will, but most people are happy to help out and will post a link.
Hey presto, you’re building backlinks!
Now just before you rush off to dust off your old SLR, there’s a few considerations before jumping in feet first to this tactic.
Firstly, is it relevant to your business? If you’re a photographer, it probably is, but bear in mind the types of images you upload will affect the types of websites that will publish them, so your images may end up on completely irrelevant websites which may not be that helpful to your SEO efforts.
A good example would be wedding photos – you’re likely to get links from wedding related sites, so if you’re a wedding photographer, this is great news as not only does it tell Google your site is also wedding related, it also poses another opportunity to get traffic from people planning a wedding. Bonus!
A bad example would be generic landscape images. You may get lots of links, but the relevancy of these links could be somewhat tenuous (e.g. a walking blog, a hypnotherapist site, a restaurant site). This not only confuses Google about what your site is about, but it won’t sending much in the way of relevant traffic either.
Secondly, this method of building backlinks could sit in a bit of a grey area in terms of whether Google will sit by and let this happen. After all, it could easily be manipulated and abused which is when Google will take note and adjust its algorithm accordingly. So use this technique with caution, as part of a bigger overall SEO and content strategy, if you’re going to use it.
And if you’ve used this Unsplash link building technique yourself, let us know your results in the comments!
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