Great photography brings you more sales
Up to date photography on your website can make your businesses seem much more professional and approachable than stock photography, or no photography at all, but did you know that it can even land you more sales? Most people know at least a little about Search Engine Optimisation, making sure your website appeals to the algorithms that control where you appear on search engine results, but it’s not just about your written content. Let’s look at a few ways that great photography can also make it easier for customers to land on your web page.
Original images perform better
Most website builders have you covered when it comes to stock images, but there are only so many stock images to go around, and so choosing from a handful of pre-sets means you’ll be just like thousands of other sites around the world. That’s not good from Google’s point of view, and their bots will trawl an online bank of photos to see if your pictures have been used before. Google rewards originality above all else, so if you use unique images you’ve had taken to represent your business, it will automatically put you ahead of other sites that make do with stock images.
High-quality images are best
While originality is important, size also matters to Google, and small or low-quality images naturally perform less well than the same image if it’s bigger and higher resolution. Images should be 1200 pixels wide to be considered ‘large’ by Google, and to look good at that size then they have to be high resolution, so they can’t be copied and pasted from elsewhere on the web. To guarantee that your images will be large and high quality enough to impress the bots, getting a professional photographer to take them is your best bet.
Context is king
Google’s bots used to be less intelligent and easier to fool, but thanks to advanced AI and machine learning they’re getting much smarter. Not only can they tell how well written and original your site is, but they can also even tell how well it flows and how much sense it makes, right down to the images you use. By using your own, professional images you can specify exactly how you want each image to look so it matches the content of your page. That way, rather than getting by with a stock image that sort of fits with what you’re writing about, you’ll have images that are actually of you and your business doing what you’re advertising. That’s exactly what the bots want to see, and it will do wonders for your search rankings.
Don’t forget the details
Search engines like Google are really just massive information hubs, and the more information you can give them, the more they trust you and the higher up the rankings you’ll go. Meanwhile, disorganized or mysterious sites go right to the bottom of the pile. This goes all the way down to the smallest slivers of metadata, your photo captions, alternate text and many other things. For example, giving your photo a caption helps Google know what the picture is of, so it can easily match it with what your company does, and it can give you the thumbs up. Similarly, naming the file after what’s in the photo gives Google more info about it, further helping the bots recognise your site as a high-quality one.
Get professional help
If you’re concerned that your website isn’t showing your business to its best advantage, or that you might be missing a trick on image SEO, then give Charles Waller Photography a call. We specialise in bespoke business photography that looks fantastic online, showing off all the best things about your business in action, while also ticking all those elusive SEO boxes. We’re helping businesses to break free from dull stock photos every single day, and you could be the next one to say goodbye to the generic, and hello to originality