As the old saying goes, “Eye appeal is buy appeal,” and nothing appeals to the eye more than high-quality, professional photography.
Whatever industry you are in, your small business can benefit from having great photography on your website, social media, and in your advertising.
Just changing the setting of your photograph makes a product more appealing, as seen in these examples.
Professional photography is engaging and instills trustworthiness and professionalism in all prospective customers. Imagine comparing two businesses — one whose website is full of stock images or low-quality photos, and one whose website has great-quality images of the employees, business owners, and products they are offering. Which company will you trust more with your money? The answer is clear.
Your photos represent your brand, so investing in professional photography to advertise your business is key. Your brand is a reflection of your service. Presenting your service through interesting, creative photography will tell your potential customers everything they need to know about you.
Having professional photography tells your clients that you are operating with a certain level of professionalism and you are dedicated to quality.
When implementing an SEO marketing strategy, there is one golden rule — “Content is King!” While your website should always have engaging written content, photography is also content, and having more is always better.
Professional photos can be used beyond your website — they can also be used to brand your business on social media, as well as in blog posts and articles. Adding photos to your Google My Business page can also drive a ton of traffic to your website.
Offline, professional photos can be used in advertising materials, like flyers or brochures. The possibilities are endless.
One third of all Google searches are performed in Google Image Search. That means if you have great images on your website, they will show up with a high ranking in Google Image Search. If you rank well there, your rank in regular Google searches will improve, too.
Case Study
How do we know that quality photography is good for your business? Because we’ve seen the proof! The following is an example of how our clients gained vital keyword rankings just by adding professional photos to their website.
One of our clients recently approached us about adding some refreshed professional photography to their website.
Once those photos were uploaded to our client’s site, they began ranking for a new keyword. Even better, their SERP position was #3 in Google’s “Map Pack” — within the results underneath the map at the top of a Google search results page.
That’s on top of improving the clients’ position for another targeted keyword, bringing them from page 8 of Google SERP to page 3. A huge improvement in one day, just by adding optimized photos to the website!
What You Can Take Away
If you are focused on improving your website’s SERP rankings, optimizing your images for SEO will greatly increase your chances of a higher rank. Google takes into account how well your photos rank on Google Images to rank your website on Google Search, so having great photos and optimizing them is key.
Optimizing your images is simple once you know what to do. Let’s take this image we took for one of our clients as an example:
Here are a few tricks for optimizing your photos for SEO:
- Use a descriptive filename: Your filename should be short (2-4 words) and hyphenated. Include descriptive words but not too many. Keep them relevant.
- Bad filename example: MARS_1234.jpg
- Good filename example: fresh-vegetables-avocados.jpg
- Use image alt tags: Alt text is now used by Google to understand the content in the image. Google can’t see your image, so it reads this text to know what the image contains. Alt tags should give short, detailed descriptions of the image. Alt tags were originally used for the visually impared, so imagine describing your photo to someone who has visual impairments. These tags are only visible to the search engine, so don’t worry about grammar.
- “Fresh avocados and limes in a grocery store”
- Detailed image caption: Unlike alt tags, these captions are visible to people using Google, so they should be interesting and add context to the image.
With these tips, as well as ensuring that the content on the same page as your photo or any anchor text linking to your photo is relevant, you’re well on your way to improving your Google rankings!
That’s what we’re all about at PGN Agency. Real clients, real results, for real impact.