How High Quality Images Affect Your Site’s Search Engine Optimization

Your SEO can have pretty sizable influence on your business’s success. We all know this. So let’s break down a few reasons that it’s important to have high quality images on your website.

4 Ways High Quality Images Affect Your Site’s SEO

High quality images are more likely to attract attention. Of course. You knew that already. In fact, HubSpot has found that articles with high quality images are 94% more likely to be viewed than those without. One reason is that high quality images help to establish the credibility of the source. Viewers feel like a higher quality image indicates a more trustworthy brand than a low quality image. Not surprising, right? Presentation matters. (Read my post on what makes a high quality image here.) But what that means in analytics-speak is an increased click through rate. If your site is repeatedly clicked in response to relevant queries, that tells Google that your site is useful and it’s more likely to rank your site higher in search results.

Engaging images also have an impact on how long a user will stay on your website, which is another indicator for Google to understand how useful a website is.

Relatedly, you want images to load quickly. Don’t upload print quality files to your website. They can be GIANTS and will take seemingly forever to show up if they do at all. Users today have zero patience, meaning if the image takes too long to load (generally more than 3 seconds), they bounce. So make sure your file size is reasonable. Your photographer will usually export web sized files for you as well as print files.

Squarespace has a file size limit of 20MB per file, which is quite large, although their recommendation is a tiny 500KB or less with a 2500px width. That’s a quite a range, 500KB to 20MB but I generally make web sized images 2500px on the longest side and whatever size that ends up being works well.

Furthermore, part of improving the quality of your images is actually in your metadata and file names. HTML is not the same coding as an image file, so you need to tell the crawlers what your picture is about by using keywords in the filename as well as in the file’s metadata. Your photographer can and should do this for you before exporting your images. Additionally, you should enter this information on your site’s pages as well.

So, a high quality image is generally more engaging and otherwise beneficial for your SEO ranking. Google likes sites that make people happy and as a general rule, business owners want to make Google like them, so if you make the information on your site useful and support it with high quality optimized images, you’re on the right track. 🖤