Guidelines For Using Images On Your Website
The appropriate use of imagery on your website can present your brand personality, capture the attention of users, and convey what you stand for. Also, when you use imagery right, particularly in SEO can boost your ranking and attract new organic traffic to your site. As with all things in the digital world, there are best practices to follow when using graphics on your website design if you want to reap their effectiveness.
The following are useful tips when placing visual images on your website to help drive traffic and clicks and better reach your target market:
Use High-Quality Images
When a user lands on your site, they should be able to know what your business is about and how it can help them. By adding meaningful and powerful images to your home page and landing pages, this makes the purpose of your site more apparent. This prompts visitors to learn more.
It typically means using proprietary imagery on your website design to present a realistic representation of what your business is all about. Stock imagery can be too generic to convey your unique selling proposition. But, if you find that your own images lack the quality necessary for your home page, you may hire a professional photographer to capture your offerings to do them justice.
Offer Better Usability with Graphics Icons
Icons have a major role in software applications to visually prompt users to perform a task. They are also more useful for web visitors, particularly when there are many choices. This helps address higher bounce rates when users face too much text and need to make drill-down choices.
With that, use graphic icons to break up text on your homepage, service page, or solution page, especially when there are many options to choose from. Make sure the icons on your website design are visually pleasing and simple so visitors can quickly decide and make selections.
Utilize Smart Imagery for Greater Scanning
Studies have shown that site visitors tend to gaze on images more than text, and only read about 20% of the text on a web page. For this, use more graphical elements in website design Brisbane to promote quick comprehension and scanning. You may incorporate graphical bullets and statistics on your About Us page to break up the text as well as to attract users. Graphical bullets can also work as an infographic on your services page.
Add Stock Images Cautiously
If you have no time, resources, or budget to gather unique, professional imagery for your website design, you may find yourself using stock imagery to tell people who you are. Pick stock photos carefully and use those that relate to your industry and products as much as possible. Use very specific keywords when searching for stock image sites to help you find images that can meet your needs.
Avoid using generic stock images that do not say much about who you are and those that would turn visitors off, for example, people in a meeting room. You may ask a graphic designer regarding the right stock images for your specific site layout.
Keep Images in Each Web Page to a Minimum
You usually add graphics on a web page to break up the text, but it should be done sparingly. It is recommended to use three images on each of your web pages. You may add demos or screenshots of products on your website design whenever applicable. When talking about a specific product or service, you may include certifications badges or logos.
You can make a blog banner template for every blog post with each one unique to its parent blog post. You can feature these blog banners on your homepage and repurpose them on your social media posts.
Make Your CTAs Clickable
When perusing a page, graphical CTA buttons are an excellent way to direct the users toward the next step, or the desired action. Call to action buttons that are bold and with action-oriented writing are more likely to convert visitors. You will experience about a 35% increase in conversion when the CTA button of your website design stands out from the text.
Also, avoiding using a button text label such as the basic “Submit,” and instead of using actionable verbiage like “Download Whitepaper” gives a visual cue regarding what the user will receive after clicking through. This helps encourage visitors to continue and click on your CTA.
Optimize Images for SEO
Websites that optimize their images for SEO experience an improvement in visits, sometimes up to 60% of new visitors via Google image search. Therefore, when updating your website design or refreshing its content, do not forget to optimize your imagery for search engine optimization. This process is a must-do and not something to postpone especially when you are rushing to publish new content. This is because optimized images will display high in Google image search results, bringing in new visitors to your website.
But how do you go about it? Here are a few tips:
- Images that reside in various directories tend to be difficult for search engines to locate, so put all your images in the same sub-directory on your server.
- Tag each of your images with alt text in your CMS, as well as incorporate keywords in the alt text. Limit your Alt text to five words and use commas to separate them.
- Use relevant keywords when labeling your image files, and limit to five words. Use a hyphen between words of the file name without spaces.
- Avoid using meaningless and senseless file names. For stock photos, make sure to rename them logically.
- Consider labeling the image according to where you use it on your website design. By doing this, the file name aligns the image to the body text and keywords on your web page.
- You can test your website to find out how your tagged images work. There are free SEO tools you can use for this task.
Smart usage of graphics is definitely a skill, requiring time and careful consideration to pull off successfully. If you lack the expertise or have no in-house graphics department to help you in making your website design a masterpiece, it is best to use the services of professional web designers to work on your site, particularly your imagery.