Images generate traffic and can help you to rank better on Google. Not only that, images are another way to help your prospects visualize what your product or service is even if they don’t read any of the words on your page.
How Images Generate Traffic for A Website
Any website owner or marketer knows that getting traffic to a website takes a lot of hard work. You can follow every single step, including optimizing your content and promoting it across multiple channels organically. Yet, even then, you still won’t get the kind of results you want in terms of traffic.
What if there was a method for generating high-quality, highly-relevant traffic to your site? What if this method does not require you to pay for media ads or spend hours finding guest bloggers?
Let’s find out.
Images Generate Traffic – How To Use Them
An image is worth a thousand words.
This old adage is especially true when it comes to online marketing.
Did you know that 1 in 4 social media posts include an image? And that the average click-through rate for an email increases by 14% with images? Or that 40% of people will respond better to visual information than text?
It’s clear that when it comes to getting clicks, there’s no denying the power of images. However, if your business or website is just starting out, how can you make sure your images are effective in driving traffic and boosting sales? We asked our top marketers for their advice on incorporating images into a digital marketing strategy:
The Value of Original Images
Original images are unique, so they help your content stand out. Every time you create a new blog post, you’re entering a crowded field of competitors. However, if you include an original image with your article, it will immediately stand out from the competition. You can use that image as the primary image on social media posts or when sharing to other sites like Pinterest or Reddit.
Also, original images generate traffic and can be used in a variety of ways. Sure, you could include them within your blog post for extra visual appeal – but why stop there? Original images are perfect for sharing on Twitter and Facebook. Plus, they’re ideal for sites where visual content is king – like Instagram and Pinterest!
Optimizing Images For Search Engines
For starters, you should label images with relevant keywords. Just like the text on your website, using the right words can help your site’s SEO by having search engines such as Google understand what an image is about. Use descriptive file names for all of your image files. For example, a picture of a “red bicycle” can be named redbicycle.jpg instead of an unhelpful dsc0398027542395.jpg which only tells you when it was taken and not what it is about.
You should also use the alt and title attributes for each one of your web images. The alt attribute gives the visitor or search engine spiders that are unable to see the image text that describes what they are missing out on if they can’t see it (i.e., descriptive text). The title attribute is used to give some more information if you hover over an image with your mouse (i.e., more descriptive text). Both the alt and title attributes can be filled with relevant keywords in order to help increase traffic from image searches via these key phrases.
Finally, you should include an image sitemap in order to help search engines find images on your website that are not linked directly from any text content or other sites linking back to yours.
Using ALT Attributes
You can use the alt text attribute to describe an image to search engines. Google and other search engines use the alt text to understand what content is on a webpage, even if they can’t see the image itself. This is especially important for people who are visually impaired, as it helps them better understand what’s on a page by describing images in detail.
When you upload an image to your website, make sure that you add descriptive alt text that contains your targeted keyword phrase.
The alt text is also displayed when an image cannot be found or displayed for some reason (for example: because of slow internet connection or software problems).
Tracking Performance of Images
With the right images, you can drive lots of traffic to your site. But how do you know how well each image is performing? By tracking your data with Google Analytics, that’s how!
Using Google Analytics‘ “Real Time” feature, you can watch as visitors arrive at your website and find out what content brought them there. Using this feature along with the platform’s other monitoring tools will allow you to track which images are working best for your business. Over time, you’ll be able to see which images on a certain page are bringing in the most traffic—and tweak them accordingly to maximize their impact.
The Search Engine Benefits – Images Generate Traffic
Images generate traffic and can be a valuable source of traffic to your website, and when used in conjunction with the recommendations for copy optimization, they can do wonders for increasing conversion rates. In fact, image optimization is an important part of any complete SEO strategy. Images are indexed by search engines much like text is, but because only the filename is considered relevant text by search engine spiders (aka crawlers), it’s important to ensure that your image files are named appropriately.
For example, if you have an image on your site called “IMG_234” it will likely not be found in any searches for any relevant terms. If you change that file name to something more descriptive and relevant—such as “black-labrador-sitting-in-grass”—you not only increase the chances of it being found in an image search within a search engine but also increase its chances of being found when someone searches using words contained within the file name itself (e.g., black labrador).
The key to using images to drive traffic is to make sure that the images you use are relevant to the article you are writing. The image should be a visual representation of what the article is about. It is also important to optimize the image for search engines. When you upload an image, make sure that it has a keyword-rich file name and fill in the alt text description with a keyword phrase that includes your main keyword. This will help tell search engines like Google what your image is about and help it show up in search results where people can find it and hopefully click through to your website/blog post.
It does take time and effort, but if you put in place all of these steps for each one of your blog posts, over time you will see images generate traffic from Google Images search – both from these posts as well as from new content. If you do not have the time or experience with images, give us a call. We have over 25 years of experience helping business websites get more traffic through search engines. We are real people based and working right here in Florida. Our team is ready to help you.
