Adjusting the styling of my images

I spent some time last week inspecting the top search terms for each of the niches for my accounts. I wanted to get a better idea of what the images really looked like. For example in hairstyles- are the images of people in staged photoshoots or are they less formal UGC? For iPhone wallpapers, are they photographs or digital sketches or illustrations?

For wallpapers, I noticed that a large percent of the images are illustrations, the below pin is an example.

Up until last week, I wasn’t explicitly paying attention to this anywhere in my in my pin creation process. This resulted in most of my wallpaper pins being photograph looking images like the below:

The thesis of my whole process is that if I make pins similar to the top ranked ones in search then they will also rank. So I updated my process to match the common pin styles that I observe in the top ranked pins. Now, if most of the pins are illustrations instead of photographs amongst the top pins in a search term, then the pins I make to target that search term will also be illustrations. This resulted in many of my wallpaper pins changing style to look something like this:

The improvement in wallpapers carried through to my other accounts. For hairstyle for example I was posting all images that looked to be from a staged professional shoot (see below).

Now I pick up on if the ranking pins are actually more casual photos or traditional UGC content. This resulted in more images like this where the subject appears in a bedroom or other regular household setting:

Too early to see what kind of impact this is having but will update in a few weeks.