The Impact of Original Image Content for Website SEO
January 27, 2021 | Category: SEO, Web Design
A variety of factors contribute to a website’s overall ranking with search engines like Google and Bing.
Unfortunately, search engines don’t make these website rankings public. Therefore, it’s on us to put all the puzzle pieces together for improving ranking with SEO.
One piece of this big puzzle is using original image content. This content is merely original and unique pictures that your business has taken.
This article will explain how having this content across your website can be impactful for SEO.
Understanding Search Engines – User Experience
First, we need to understand how search engines have been thinking lately. Search engines like Google and Bing are growing exponentially smarter over time.
Over the past few years, they’ve been shifting importance away from SEO specifics like keyword density. Search engines now care most about user experience. User experience refers to how people are reacting to and using your website.
As a result, everything from a website’s layout and blogs to its speed and back-end coding should impact the user experience.
Every small piece of your company’s website should provide value to visitors. The value your website offers impacts how visitors react to it.
When users generally have a great experience, search engines reward your site with a higher search result ranking for your content.
Consequently, this leads to more organic website visitors. You can use Google Analytics to gain a more robust understanding of organic traffic for your website.
Understanding Original Image Content on Your Website
The importance of user experience leads us to original image content. As we mentioned above, it’s authentic and unique pictures your company has taken.
Some great examples of original pictures to have are products, employees, and your company’s physical location.
From a user perspective, they’re far superior to typical stock photos, which are already overused and don’t provide much value. Here is a perfect example of a stock photo:
Stock photos lack a certain level of authenticity and trust, which can impact a website visitor. This especially holds if it’s a website visitor’s first impression of your business.
In other words, unique pictures give you more control over the impression your company delivers.
A website full of stock photos compared to a similar website with original content is quite the contrast.
In 2019, Reboot Online launched an experiment with two identical websites. The only difference was one had original photos, and the other had stock photos. After three months, the site with original images had a higher rank receiving more organic traffic.
What about Blogs?
Using original image content applies to any part of your website, including blogs. Yoast, a popular SEO plugin, recommends always using original images for blogs. The longer the blog, the more value images add for spicing up the content.
Although images are only one piece of the puzzle, they impact a user’s experience on your website. We imagine user experience will only become more important for how search engines rank websites over the long term.
For more advice on SEO for website content, we recommend our thorough SEO blog writing guide.