3 Ways Your Website’s Images Can Increase Your Website Traffic
Are you planning a new website build or simply updating each season with more relevant photos? Using the right imagery can help you get the sale and is worth putting in the time and attention. Our brains process imagery 60,000x faster than text. We make a memorable impression with our images and colors. Our potential clients remember 80% of what they see as opposed to 20% of what they obtain by reading.
I am all about knowledge, strategy, and giving you the information you need to know so you are empowered as a business owner to know what works best so you don’t have to question it.
When you are looking to gather or select imagery, having a strategy is critical.
1. Selection
It’s important that your visitors resonate with your website within seconds of seeing it. Their first impression will determine right away if you are a good fit for them. Imagery is memorable and having a folder of 5-10 brand images that you use on rotation across your marketing can be so helpful. Likely, they will remember what they saw before being able to recall your business name in the process of selecting their vendor. More on why consistency matters here.
Be sure your images:
Share the work you want to continue to sell (people want what they see).
Show what you offer (if you do florals, make sure the imagery you use includes florals).
Show your team and their faces. When we make decisions in a time of high stress, or deeply personal purchases, seeing the faces of those we will be entrusting our business to is key.
Use metrics from your social media to see what your ideal audience resonates with.
Keep in mind that most images on your website will be horizontal for headers and sprinkled throughout in square or vertical. You will want to pull heavy on images that will crop horizontally.
2. Size
Having a healthy website photo size is key in order for your website to be shared with the online gods and load properly. You have to consider bounce rate, loading time, and quality of the images you upload to share your work. If a website loads slowly, there’s a 90% chance that your potential client will leave your site. In print, there are 300 dots per image, per inch. On the web, only 72 dots per inch are needed to see a crystal clear image. This allows us to down the size of the photos and still have clarity.
Confirm these three things on your end before uploading your images:
Your photo size is below 250KB.
Your photo’s pixel width is no more than 2700px.
Your images are saved in one of the following formats: .JPG, .GIF, or .PNG. .JPG will be the smallest in size and is the most commonly used for photos. .PNG is the most popular format for logos or other graphic files.
If you need to downres some of your photos, try using JPEGmini or Tinyjpg.
Want to see if your current website has photos that need to be optimized? Try web tools such as GTMetrix or Pingdom, or use the browser console. Then you know what to edit to optimize!
3. SEO
Why is image SEO important? Optimizing your image names for the web allows you to get the biggest organic reach. You’re telling the blind website robots what is in the image you are posting to best connect those looking for someone in your industry. Your images should be easily found in image search engines like Google. Web browsers crawl your website and index the images you have on your website. Then, potential clients can search for images with certain keywords in the image search, click on your images, and land on your website. Voila!
When prepping for SEO, consider:
A descriptive name—example: “wedding-Portland-Oregon-red-floral.jpg”, or “weddingdj-Austin-Texas-1.jpeg”.
When possible, use alternate (“alt”) tags to define the alternate text for an image. This will display if the image cannot load. Example of alt text: “Wedding Photo in Portland Oregon with Red Flowers”.
Avoid too many images to bog down the perceived experience. Limit yourself to 10-15 images per page (unless it’s a gallery page).
For additional SEO help, I highly recommend Sara Does SEO and her SEO in an hour offerings. She makes it so easy!
If you have specific questions or want feedback on your unique needs or industry category — reach out! You can email me anytime at hello@kaleighwiese.com