Do Stock Photos Hurt Your SEO or Do They Not Matter?

There are two schools of thought regarding images for blog posts.

1. Any image is fine; they exist for thematic reasons and to break up text.
2. Good, unique images are an important element of ranking.

I'm generally in the second camp, though some of my clients are in the first, and I haven't tried too hard to convince them otherwise. Today, though, I wanted to dig into the topic and explore the SEO implications of different kinds of images.

What Are Stock Photos?

The primary point of contention here is, specifically, stock photos. Stock photos are photos you get from a stock photo website, either on a free-to-use license like Creative Commons, or on a paid license like what you would get from Getty.

There are dozens of websites that offer portfolios of stock photos, some for free and some for paid licenses. Some photographers also maintain their own stock photo website, and if you're more into graphic design than photography, there are a lot of stock element libraries you can use, including the ones worked directly into tools like Canva and its competitors.

The concept of the stock photo comes from the early days of newspapers, all the way back in the 20s and 30s. Photography was still relatively difficult and inaccessible, and reporters weren't going to be carrying around ultra-high-resolution cameras in their pockets the way we are with our smartphones today.

Newspapers and magazines wanted to stand out with photography, but might not have had the resources to capture the relevant photos themselves. Companies sprang up that would go around and take photos of relevant subjects. If people were involved, they had those people sign releases granting permission to use the image.

Magazines and newspapers could contact a stock photo agency and say, "We're doing a story on chocolate, please send us five images of different kinds of chocolate," and the agency would send some photos over that the publisher could use.

Every business expands over time, and the stock photo industry has benefited greatly from the expansion of photography itself. Sure, any reporter could be carrying around a camera, but they might not have been able to take the relevant photographs, especially for time-sensitive issues or issues far enough away that the travel would be unsustainable.

Internet-based stock photo agencies sprang up as early as the 80s and 90s, but the big players like iStockPhoto weren't until the 00s. Shutterstock was 2003, fotoLibra was 2005, and in the mid to late 00s, Getty was buying up archives from smaller agencies and becoming a mega-agency with millions or billions of images.

What makes stock photos different from regular images?

When we're discussing blog posts specifically, what makes stock photos different than regular images you might take with your smartphone or put together in Photoshop?

Basically, it comes down to three attributes.

1: They generally require some kind of attribution. If you're ever browsing a website and you see a caption beneath the images with something like "image provided by Getty Images" or "image courtesy of AP", it's a stock image. While this attribution is not a negative towards SEO itself, users see it, and that can affect their perception of your site.

2: They generally require you to pay for a license. Most stock photo agencies do not provide images for free, and those that do will have other ways to make their money. You typically need to pay for a license to use the photo. The license itself can limit the ways you can use the photo, and some agencies are very aggressive in enforcing their licenses.

3: They can be used by multiple other websites. Images have an inherent copyright when they're captured. The photographer or graphic designer owns the rights to the image when they create it. You can't just go to Google Images, find relevant-looking photos, and use them on your site. With stock photos, multiple people can pay for the license for the same photo and use it across multiple websites. It reduces the uniqueness of the image.

These three attributes can be important, if not for SEO directly, for the user experience and the reputation associated with your brand. I'll dig more into that in a bit.

How Images Matter for SEO

There's a lot of confusion around SEO for images and how images matter for SEO. Before I can discuss how stock photos work with SEO, we need to be on the same page about image SEO in general.

First of all, here's a question for you: Is the presence of images, at all, a search ranking factor?

I don't think so. There are plenty of websites that rank highly with few or no images at all.

However, images help with one significant element of modern SEO, which is the user experience. Users want a compelling and easily digestible experience on your site, and images help do that by providing interesting breaks and added value to your content.

A bad user experience, like a wall-of-text page with nothing of visual interest on it, can drive users away. The increase in bounce rate alone can be bad for you. That said, breaking up your text and using a lot of formatting can give you those visual benefits without images.

Images have benefits if they're present. Google isn't going to penalize you for not having images, but having images allows you to put keywords in captions and alt text, get your page ranked in the Image Search results, and can add value to the text itself.

Images can hurt your SEO. It's never as simple as "add images and your ranking will go up."

Google has a whole list of image SEO best practices, with guidelines like:

• Make your images responsive to your design.
• Optimize your images for loading speed and reasonable quality.
• Use images properly (i.e., not as a background element instead of an embed.)
• Add metadata like alt text and structured data where relevant.

So, while you aren't technically required to have images in your posts, there are enough ways they can benefit you that it's worth using them, as long as you're able to use them properly.

Is Image Uniqueness Important?

Uniqueness is tossed around a lot as a search ranking factor. Spinning content, copying content, duplicating content; these kinds of strategies are usually called out as gray hat at best, and often wholly negative. Duplicate content penalties nuked a lot of the internet for a while after 2011, after all.

But does uniqueness extend to the images, or just the text?

I did a deeper dive examination into this topic a while back. Google's official guidelines do not say anything about needing unique images, though John Mueller once said that it's "worthwhile" to use your own unique images, but my guess is he's talking about secondary benefits to the user experience.

My overall conclusion is that using unique images on its own isn't a direct search ranking factor, but that it's beneficial in a few ways, including:

• The ability to use them as part of your branding and reputation-building.
• A sign that you're putting more than the minimum effort into your site.
• A vector for added value you can't get with more generic stock images.

The fact is, there are sites that rank well using stock photos and the same handful of images over and over across their pages, there are sites that rank well using entirely unique and engaging images, and there are sites that rank using nearly no images at all. None of these is absolutely killer to your SEO.

How Stock Photos Hurt Your Site

I've spent a lot of time so far saying that using stock images won't hurt you, so why do I have a section about how they'll hurt you?

On a purely technical level, for SEO factors in Google's algorithm, no, stock photos won't hurt your site.

However, there are a bunch of different ways they have the potential to hurt you, or at least not help you, which is the same thing from the other side.

Stock photos don't resonate with your content as well.

The first, and one of the biggest reasons I recommend not using stock photos, is that they just don't resonate.

How many business blogs have you read? How many of those sites can you remember because of a stand-out image? I can generally think of two kinds of images they use, but the sites usually don't stand out. They either use a bunch of dated memes and are kind of cringe, or they use a ton of stock photos of generic business people, and blend into the background.

One of my clients is a food-focused business. If I just used stock photos of food for all of their posts, there wouldn't be a consistent throughline, and it wouldn't feel like a coherent whole. Fortunately, they're more than happy to provide me with access to their assets for photos taken in their locations and of their food, so it all resonates with the content.

Users can feel this when they're reading a site. It might not be something they consciously think about, but when images don't mesh with the content, they get tuned out. When they resonate, they synergize.

Stock photos don't provide you with a branding opportunity.

A big element of value you can get from images is the ability to use them as part of your branding. That might mean a logo in the corner, or a watermark in the background, or even just having a consistent graphic design throughout your site, like I use here.

Stock photos can allow some of this, but it depends on the license you buy. The more restrictive licenses don't allow editing the images. Even adding your logo to it is a violation that can get you in trouble.

Stock photos eat up budget that could go to other marketing efforts.

Licenses for stock photos can be free, but more often, you have to pay. It might be a subscription to a stock photo site, or it might be a per-image license. You could be paying $1 per image, or $30 per image, or $500 per image, depending on the image, the stock agency, and the license.

That adds up over time. Instead, building a library of your own can be cheap or free. All that money could be going towards other marketing efforts.

Stock photos put you at risk of copyright problems.

It's tricky to manage contracts and licenses, especially over time, especially for hundreds or thousands of images across your site. What happens if one of the stock image sites you were using folds or is bought by Getty? What happens if the terms of the license change? What happens if paperwork gets lost?

Some of these stock photo agencies are very restrictive with their terms, and worse, are very litigious. There's a reason I had to write a whole article about it. Even if you do everything right, it's still a massive hassle I never want to deal with if I don't have to.

Stock photos often enforce a brand mention or link.

A key part of most stock images, or at least the better ones, is a requirement to include attribution. That means you have to have mentions and possibly even links on your site that you otherwise might not want. That's link juice going to these agencies. It's a little thing, but still, it needles me.

I don't think the bar is that high for making your own images, and the benefits are worth it, so that's what I do.

They dilute the uniqueness of your content.

I already had a whole section on uniqueness, so I won't harp on it too much, but let's be honest here. If you're researching a topic, you open up five blog posts to read, and two of them are using the same images, are you going to think either one of them is a high-quality post? Or are you going to assume they're both low-effort regurgitation of the same handful of bullet points?

I generally feel the latter, even if the post actually has value in it. The impression is just bad.

Are There Benefits to Using Stock Photos?

What benefits do you get out of using stock photos that outweigh everything I listed above?

You don't have to spend much time making the images. Time savings are really the biggest benefit. You can go to a stock photo site, plug in a few keywords, and find an image that works for your post in a minute or two. It might not be a fantastic image, but it often doesn't need to be.

You can still find more or less unique images. A lot of the drawbacks I mention are less about stock images and more about how people use them. When you type "marketing" into iStockPhoto and pick the first image, you're doing what 50,000 other websites have done.

If you dig a little deeper, you can often find images that haven't really been used elsewhere. They still won't be wholly unique if for no other reason than that they're in the stock photo catalogs, which are indexed, but at least your competitors aren't using them.

It can be cheaper. I find that a lot of the time, stock photo licenses add up a lot faster than you might think. But, paying a photographer for custom photos or paying a graphic designer for unique images can both be costly as well. You have to balance those factors.

What About AI-Generated Images?

Before I wrap up, I need to talk a bit about AI-generated images.

A lot of sites are now using AI-generated images. AI generation is cheaper than stock photo licenses in most cases, and it generates unique enough images, even though the GANs do still work by effectively copying existing work.

I think there are still a few good reasons not to use AI-generated images.

The first is that it's still fairly easy to detect images generated by AI. Even without AI watermarking, AI images are generated using a particular process that creates an identifiable pattern of noise in the image, invisible to the eye but visible to mathematical analysis. Products like SightEngine make this easy.

There are also often a lot of little details the AIs get wrong, even if the generators are getting better. They get the fingers right, sure, but a keyboard might have three spacebars or an extra row of keys, or a calendar has nine days in a week, or a clock has the wrong alignment of numbers. There are a lot of tiny tells that will never fully go away.

Perhaps the biggest problem, though, is that you currently can't copyright AI-generated images. The copyright issue isn't settled yet, but it's not looking good for the AIs right now.

Still, if you're in certain tech and AI-focused markets, AI images aren't going to hurt you and can be a selling point, so it's worth some consideration.

The Bottom Line

Returning to the initial question, do stock images hurt you, or do they not matter?

I think, like many other factors in marketing, the answer is "it depends."

Stock photos aren't inherently going to hurt you, but they have a much lower ceiling on the value they can provide, and are much more likely to give users an impression of low-effort or low-quality content. Google won't penalize you for using them, and you won't see your ranking skyrocket from replacing them, but it's just one of those little details that make the difference between a low-effort blog and a high-effort business.