Get Backlinks Using Free Stock Images

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Hey there, welcome to the newsletter that wants you to get better at marketing, productivity, AI maneuvers, and Search engine optimization (SEO).

Our SEO trick week is here, and today we are sharing how you can gain backlinks and brand awareness using free stock image sites like Unsplash.com and Pexels.com.

We’ll make this trick short and sweet, so you can go ahead and put a strategy down to start using it.

In this example, we’ll use this image below we found on Unsplash by searching the keywords: “clean eating”

This image has an impressive 490k downloads, and over 91m views.

The owner of this image has a great opportunity here. There is a high chance that some of the people that downloaded this image are using it on their websites.

Now all she has to do is find those websites. Easy.

Go to Google, and search by image. Google will give you a prompt to search by image using Google Lens.

Upload your image.

Google Lens will beginning searching. The search should be done in less than 5 seconds. Here are the results for our example image:

As you can see, we just found 4 websites using Katie’s image, and yes, I checked, none of the websites provide any credits to her.

The websites have good domain authority and are very high quality too.

One good thing, there is a contact form or email for each of these websites. So what can we do here?

Reach out.

Here is an email template that we have used for one of our friends before:

Hey {name},

We saw that you are using one of our photos on your website in this article [link to article]. We appreciate that you are using it.

Would you be able to include a photo credit link under the photo to our website? You can link to this page {provide link}. Let me know if this is possible.

Kind regards, {name}

What we found out is that most of the time, the owners of these websites were more than happy to link back to our friend’s website. In fact, 50% of the websites we sent this email to, replied and gave us a backlink.

At that rate, if you uploaded about 50 images, and assuming that each image was used at least twice on a website out there every 6 months, that would mean you can get about 50 backlinks from decent websites every 6 months and 100 backlinks every year.

And every 6 months, you would do the same search and find new websites that used your images, repeat the process, and earn backlinks.

How can you as a business use this SEO trick to gain backlinks? First, it would depend which industry you’re in. Businesses that tend to use a lot of images would benefit from this SEO tip. Examples of such industries would be:

• Food

• DIY

• Fashion & Style

• Art

• Architecture

• Interior Design & Home Decor

• Photography

• Video

• Pets

• among many others

While some industries have a lot of privacy regulations, and are not exactly photo-oriented, even they could use this SEO tip.

For example, a medical clinic can take photos of their facility and medical equipment, then upload these photos without infringing on the rights of patients. There would be many people downloading your photos and using them in medical blogs.

We hope you enjoyed learning about this trick and are looking forward to trying it. Our SEO trick week will happen again on Monday next week.

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Warm regards,
The Growth Grind team.