It’s important to use images on your website to improve the quality of your content. They help engage your audience resulting in them spending longer on your site. Images also improve user experience, as well as decrease bounce rate which can positively impact SEO.
Let’s take a look at other reasons why are images important on a website.
5 reasons why images are important for your website
- They create more engaging content
- Improve user experience
- Improve website bounce rate
- Positively impact SEO
- Encourage Social Media Interest and Sharing
Why do we add images to our web pages?
We add images to our web pages to create interesting and engaging content for our readers. Images create a visual connection with the viewer and trigger emotions in a way text can’t.
With the exception of our favourite novel, reading pages and pages of text can be a monotonous task and a real challenge.
If we think about why we choose to read, it’s usually for pleasure, because we have to (examinations) or to acquire new information.
With the exception of the first two, we read because we want to learn something new – and in order to learn, we need to be engaged and understand the content clearly.
Images help us with both of these factors and are the reason it is so important to include them in the content of our web pages.
Another reason is to encourage social media sharing. Depending on how your website is set up, it’s likely that your web page will have a key image or ‘featured image’ at the top of your page.
This featured image is also used as the thumbnail to introduce your page (when on a blog), or if shared on social media, will appear as the image a user will see first before the title.
When you scan your Facebook feed, it’s likely you will see and engage with the image before you actually read the title of the post. It’s the image that initially grabs your attention before you even read what the post is actually about!
This is the power of an image, it speaks a thousand words. Including them on our web pages not only affects on-page interactions but can engage users before they even visit our website.
Why are images important for SEO?
Images are important for SEO because they help to create attractive, engaging content that improves bounce rate and helps target keywords through image search, which can all positively impact SEO.
Bounce rate is the term used when a person clicks through to your website from a search engine such as Google and leaves without making a transaction, such as clicking on a button or link.
A high bounce rate is usually an indicator to Google that the information they were looking for, after clicking a search result was either not found on that page, not relevant to the search result or of poor quality that they just didn’t engage with.
As you can imagine, a website with a high bounce rate isn’t going to persuade Google to position it high within the search results.
Images are a great way to add life to your page. Readers love to view images, whether they’re used for decoration or to help explain the supporting text, they are far more engaging than large areas of text.
Using images on your web page can help engage users and reduce your bounce rate therefore positively impacting SEO.
Another reason images are important for search engine optimisation is linked to targeting keywords within image search.
Optimising your image Alt text allows them to show up in image results when your keywords are searched for. This gives you access to additional traffic from Google Images or platforms such as Pinterest.
As part of my SEO Services, we initially audit your website to find opportunities to improve your existing content, as well as create new content that answers questions your customers are asking.
I am an SEO Consultant from Cumbria and work with businesses of all sizes to improve their online visibility. Contact me today for a friendly chat or email me for more information. Why not take advantage of my FREE Website Audit to see how your website is currently functioning?
