Adding beautiful images to your website has several benefits apart from looking good. This blog post looks at what they are and how to get your images working hard for your business.

Visually appealing

Images help to break up large chunks of text making your content more readable. Research shows that most people skim-read content, skipping to the parts they want to read. Images help to keep their attention and read through to the end.

Make sure your images are low-resolution and as small as possible in terms of size and the data they use. Pictures that are large in terms of the data can affect how quickly it takes for your website to load.

Images can add so much more to your website than making it look good. But only if you make sure they aren’t affecting how quickly it loads. A website that’s slow to load won’t help to improve its authority and is likely to turn readers away as they’re likely to lose patience and move on.

If you have a product-based business, the quality of the images is key as that can affect whether people buy from you or not. Research shows that 75% of people make their purchasing decisions based on product images. So, it’s worth investing in getting some professional ones done as they really can be the difference between getting a sale and not.

Relevant to the text

If you’re a product-based business, adding relevant images is easier than if you’re service-based as you’ve got lots of lovely items to showcase. It’s really important to add images that complement what the words say, or are generic and so don’t detract from the content.

For example, if your blog post is about the best toddler carriers, images of newborn babies in a sling will be confusing for your readers and might make them leave your site because they think the post is about baby slings.

Make your images searchable and accessible

Adding alt text (alternative text) to your website images helps the right people find them.

• it describes what the image shows if it fails to load
• it tells search engines what the image is about so it can decide who to show your website to.
• it makes your website accessible to visually impaired users. Their screen reading tool describes the image to them using the alt text, helping them decide whether it’s what they want to read about.

Adding keywords helps your images and therefore website show up in search results. But make sure they’re relevant and added naturally. Don’t keyword stuff or just add them for the sake of it as that will damage your authority.

Have fun with images on your website

Images help you add a splash of your personality to your website. You can have fun with them as long as they’re not too over the top or bizarre! Having images of you on your home and about pages helps your audience connect to you which is key for the know, like, trust factor.

People like to be able to put a face to a brand and see who it is they are buying from. Think about how you purchase online. If you come across two pages with the same services that you want to buy for the same price, but one has photos of the faces behind the brand, which would you go with?

I’d probably go with the one that has an image of the person I’m buying from as I like to know a bit about who I’m buying from and I get that from a photo.

If you’d like regular SEO tips and inspiration, have a look at The SEO Club on Substack. For about the cost of a weekly coffee shop pit stop, you’ll get easy-to-follow SEO strategies, tips, and videos to show you how to make the most of your website so that it helps your business and sales grow. Head over to the services page to see how I can help get your website shining brightly and standing out above the noise.