For your business to have an effective website, quality content is a must have with optimised imagery SEO. Of course you need to fill your site with articles, product descriptions, blog posts, and more, but it’s important that your website doesn’t look plain in comparison to your competitors. Imagery will make your site more visibly appealing to your user base, and there are so many important factors how images can help your site.
Why Images are Important
Images are important for so many reasons other than visual appeal. To build brand character you need imagery with consistency. For a more memorable experience, images can help visualise that, making it an easier and naturally flowing website. Images play a huge role on social media posts as well, Instagram is a good example of fine image marketing, read more here on Instagram and how it’s changed.
To boost your site’s organic search rankings, content marketing can be used just as written content is. Embedded information in images, also known as alt-tag or alt-text, is a vital form of metadata.
Imagery metadata is a common use for SEO purposes and can be displayed when a user hovers their mouse over a picture showing information on the image. Include common keywords that are where possible. This will most certainly boost your organic rankings. See how optimising images in-depth is important for SEO here.
Optimize Your Images
There is still plenty to consider although it does seem simple to just upload a few images onto a site. Using the right image formats, correct resolution, and cropping the size are just a few factors to keep in mind.
Make sure they are cropped correctly in the right resolution, using a supported format such as .png files. This will keep consumer confidence and will boost the conversion rate on your website. See how you can make web friendly images here.
Here is the order and factors you should be ticking off on your imagery optimisation:
- File size for increased page load times
- Supportive image format, .jpg, or .png, etc.
- Appropriate image resolution for crisp images
- Keyword and appropriate alt-tags for SEO
- Short and descriptive captions if necessary
- Keep images original to your content
Optimizing images is crucial and using this formula will help improve search performance and even more crucial if you want to stay competitive in search rankings. But you shouldn’t just be using stock photos. Stock photos will not have the same SEO effect that original photos do.
Your images need to be relevant to you and your brand, pictures of your facilities or stores can have just as more significant impact than a stock image could. This will increase value on blogs, landing pages, and articles. See our other methods of producing content here.
Benefits of Imagery SEO
Imagery can be used as a better way to tell a story or your goals quickly and more visually appealing than words. Some ways to produce vibrant storytelling are:
Imagery Search Ranking Increases
Those that use search engines like Google or Mozilla Firefox often browse through images first, this makes it more likely for a viewer to visit a website. This is a great way to increase traffic.
Spread the Word
Great imagery and appealing content are more likely to go viral, it’s pretty self explanatory that, ‘the word will spread’.
Improved User Experience
User friendly SEO images attract more viewers even better than text does. They’re simply more engaging and will help reduce the bounce rate on a site.
Conclusion
The message is simple, that imagery can have just as much affect as anything else on a website can. It can be very time-consuming running a business, especially keeping a website flowing. Here at Fifteen, we produce compelling, simple and user friendly designs for all types of industries. Be sure to check us out and our services.