How Picxy emerged as a successful Indian Stock Image Brand – Case Study

• Client Case Study

In 2018, 3 enthusiastic techies – Jitendra Emmani, Vamsi Mannem, and Satish V Madala left their high-profile IT job and began a venture with a mission to fill-in the huge gap in the visual content space in India. And that’s how Picxy was born. According to the CEO Mr. Jitendra Emmani, stock images websites like Getty Images and Shutterstock do not truly represent our country the way we see it from our point of view. There is more beauty and uniqueness away from the mindset of an underdeveloped country. 

He decided to bring more colour and vivacity to the Indian visual content, and co-founded Picxy with two of his fellow mates. Together they roped in photographers from not only across the country but also from 11 other South Asian countries. They also aimed to eradicate the copyright issues for images in the country by selling photographs for as low as ₹250. This revenue model has also helped many passionate photographers make money with their work.

Picxy first began in Amravati, Andhra Pradesh and gradually moved to Bangalore to attract investors. They have a total funding of $380K and plans to expand its database to over 5 million images and also its offerings to stock videos and vectors. 

COVID-19 was tragic and many businesses especially the SMBs felt the impact. Picxy stepped in to do their bit for the people by collaborating with Give India which is a charity supported by big brands like Omidyar, Xiaomi, Walmart, etc. Picxy became a part of the fundraising campaign by Give India for the frontline workers and impoverished families and raised over $15 million together. 

They have a huge clientele presently to prove their success including Oglivy, Schbang, Pocket Aces, and many more. With an ambitious 12 member team and a brilliant community of photographers, Picxy has tapped an overlooked potential in the visual content industry and aims to achieve a breakthrough. 

But what was their journey like before becoming a successful indian stock image company? How did their initial performance look like before? And more particularly, how did their initial performance on the search engine look like? 

Let’s look at a detailed case study of this brand from an SEO perspective.

Key Challenges

Picxy approached us with a problem for scaling SEO for dynamically rendered image websites and internal cannibalization. 

Picxy had issues in scaling SEO and faced problems like internal cannibalization and crawling. 

They had approached us with the same motive their startup was based on ie to become a profound stock image brand for providing characteristic Indian stock images for royalty free use. To achieve this, they had to perform well on the search engine, because that’s where folks end up searching for stock images. 

And we took up this challenge and got them the brand visibility they needed on the search engine. 

They aimed to rank for non brand queries like “indian stock images”, “indian stock photos”, etc. It was imperative to have the keyword “indian” in them, because that was the main theme of their website at the initial stage. Also, they have a huge stock of unique content about India compared to other South Asian countries. 

In the preliminary stage, branded queries like “picxy.com” landed poor clicks and impressions to their website. Their total number of impressions in the initial few months for the branded ones ranged from 1.5K-2K whereas for the non-branded ones the number was close to 329K. This was a good opportunity to capitalize on.

They needed relevant content to cater to these potential and relevant queries to improve the click through rate and thereby boosting their position on SERP. Some of the non branded queries include “vijayawada rtc bus stand platforms”, “juhu beach ecr”, “divis bridge”, etc. for which they carried exclusive content. They needed an excellent SEO strategy to rank for relevant queries such as these. 

Their ultimate goal was to emerge as a brand that people would rely on for authentic images of India and other neighbouring countries. And hence, they needed to get their User Experience on point by improving their website’s crawling efficiency and navigation matrix. 

Not only Indian content, but they also provide stock images for other South Asian countries such as Sri Lanka, Maldives, Nepal, Bhutan and many more. Therefore, it was imperative to rank for relevant queries like “bhutan landscape”, or “buddha statue in Sri Lanka”, etc. 

How did our SEO consulting work towards the Solution?

Keyword Research

Of course, the first step is the basic SEO to analyze current performance and the existing keywords. We realized that more work was required to be done. 

We studied a pattern in their website that their inventory had a lot of potential to get categorized according to the theme of each picture eg. “Kumbh Mela” Images  or “kethireddy venkatarami reddy” images, and so on. Therefore, we curated a strategy that would include thematic keywords on the basis of classification. We assigned keyword sets for each category and set a pattern of URL that would focus on those keywords only. 

The concept goes something like this – when your pages are tied together with specific keywords, it establishes a theme throughout the site that would make your site appear more relevant to those keywords as a whole. And accordingly, the copy was modified with the relevant keywords accordingly.

Automated meta tags

Sometimes it’s better to let search engines populate a meta description themselves, especially if they are targeting long tail keywords. We did the same. The reason is quite simple: when search engines gather a meta description, they always display the keyword and phrases that the user has searched for. 

Detailed competition Audit

Competition Audit was essential. We gathered competition data with the help of various tools like SEMrush, Spyfu, Google Keyword Planner, etc. In this part of the process, it is essential to realistically identify who your competitors are. We identified and decided to go for websites with maximum keyword similarity. We got hands on their backlink profile and identified high quality links that we could target. 

Also, we analyzed their content deeply for improving the website’s UX. We closely understood their social media, engagement and content strategy. And took down pointers that we could implement on Picxy’s website.

Also, while filtering keywords of our competitors, we used the keyword level difficulty metric of SEMrush and targeted keywords which had lesser keyword difficulty to rank on – in other words – with low competition keyword rankings(the low hanging fruit).

Moreover, we studied their pattern of keywords against URLs and then adapted an automated way to generate URLs. The URLs had similarity with the keywords targeted. This was very helpful in generating the URLs appropriately.

Internal Linking Strategy

The internal linking we performed for Picxy was in depth. We identified pages with the highest authority with the help of tools and began linking these pages to other pages so that the link equity was passed appropriately. Internal linking was done on the old as well as new blog posts as well with anchor text that are keyword focused to improve its relevance. Broken links were fixed after analyzing it on Google Analytics. Also we made sure it appeared natural and not over-stuffed. 

What did we Achieve?

A growth of 209% in overall clicks in the period of 6 months

A growth of 702% in overall clicks in a year

A growth of 340% in non brand clicks and 290% in non brand impressions

An average growth of 750% in traffic for the keywords “indian stock photos” and “indian stock images”. 

Pixcy’s position shot up to Top 5 positions on the Google SERP for the desired keyword “indian stock images websites” “indian stock photo website”, etc.

On URL level, their position increased to Top 10 for non brand queries like “government bus images download” “tirupati gopuram hd images”, etc.

Conclusion

Picxy’s booming potential in SEO was scaled by making changes on site to create a highly personalized user experience – benefiting not just customers but also content producers. 

Similarly, you can scale your visibility and reach on the SERP by availing Customized SEO Solutions for your needs. 

IndianMarketer’s Motto is to connect client’s goal to reality by providing effective SEO solutions. 

Hope you found this piece helpful. Let us know your thoughts in the comments.