Quality photography can unlock some serious SEO benefits for any site.
Plus, the right photographs can bring even the most stilted pages to life.
In this article, I’ll explore six ways photography can improve your website and SEO – and how you can execute these strategies yourself.
1. Improve UX (and boost SEO)
User experience, or UX, encompasses all aspects of the end-users interaction with your website.
And quality photographs can dramatically enhance the end-user experience.
Here’s a perfect example – Venngage’s homepage with and without a background photograph:
Studies have shown that first impressions are formed after just 100 milliseconds.
And as you can see, the simple addition of a quality photograph transforms the crucial first impression visitors to your site have of your brand.
Contrast above the fold of Venngage’s homepage with the same section of inVPN’s site, which doesn’t include any photographs:
If you don’t include photographs across the key areas of your site, you’re running the risk of having your visitors be more likely to bounce off your site than delve deeper into your key pages.
If you run an eCommerce website, photography is even more crucial to your site’s success.
For example, research from CXL showed that simply changing the size of a product’s image on an online store can increase its perceived value by up to $13.50.
Photos bring contrast to text-heavy pages as well, and can drive engagement across your blog posts and conversions across your service pages.
Pepper every page of your site with quality photographs to create the best possible user experience – and receive a boost in the UX metrics that Google measures as a ranking factor.
2. Make any page more engaging
Quality photography can make any page of your website more engaging.
And the more engaging your site, the higher up the Google search results you’ll climb.
In fact:
- Articles with images get 94% more total views than articles without images (Jeff Bullas).
- There is at least one image for every 350 words in 100 of the highest ranking blogs on the internet (Blog Pros).
Properly using images can make any page on your site more engaging and should be used throughout your blog posts and other content – something to keep in mind when you’re writing great content for your portfolio website.
It’s a good idea to start a piece of content with a high-quality image, as this will grab the reader and encourage them to read on. Take Venveo’s guide to marketing to architects, for example.
When a reader lands on this page, the first thing they see is an engaging image that does a great job of illustrating the article they’re about to browse. And the fact that the image clearly features a large group of architects is especially effective, as it shows that the company truly understands its audience and their goals
The Pixpa blog avoids this by simply following each subheading with a photographs, as you can see in this article on iPhone photography tips.
Blog posts aren’t the only pages that can benefit from the boost in engagement that comes from quality photography, either.
Images can be used to help draw visitors’ eyes to key CTAs and drive conversions as well, as Best Nursing Programs has done here:
One of the most powerful things photographs can do for your site is to humanise a brand, product, or service.
For example, Wave humanises its invoicing software by leading its landing page with a photograph of a real customer:
A picture is worth a thousand words, and humanising a product or service through photographs like this is significantly more effective than even the most captivating copy.
So, be sure to include a quality photograph across every section of your site you want to draw visitor’s attention to and increase engagement with.
3. Reap the rewards of image SEO
Image SEO is a secret weapon for getting found online.
By ranking in Google Images and other search engines, you can drive significant traffic to your site, boosting your overall organic rankings.
Useful, relevant, and aesthetic pictures paired with equally relevant and keyword-rich text do extraordinary amounts for a site’s visibility.
So how can you benefit from image SEO?
Use images that add value
This seems obvious, but it’s often overlooked. If an image doesn’t add value, get rid of it.
Give it a relevant file name.
No more IMG_1440.jpg or picture01-final-edit.jpg. The filename should tell people (and Google) something about the file.
Use JPEG for larger photos or illustrations and PNG for text-heavy or transparent backgrounds.
Of course, there’s more to it than that. But this rule of thumb will steer you right almost every time.
JPEG isn’t always right.
Upload it at the right size
This is just half the battle, yet it has an enormous impact on site speed. 
Compress where you can
The other half of the battle is reducing the file size through image compression – ideally minimizing file size while maintaining high quality. (JPEG tends to be much lighter than PNG)
Add alt and title text
Add alt text (alternative text) to every image you use. Make sure it describes what’s in the image.
Use OpenGraph and Twitter Cards
Using OpenGraph and Twitter Cards ensures that when you and others share links to your website on social media they stand out. 
4. Refresh content with new images for an SEO boost
Content freshness is another Google ranking factor.
Which means that refreshing content and images can boost your content up the SERPs.
In fact, this simple strategy can drive serious results, with 99 Firms finding that updating old posts with new content can boost traffic by over 100%.
There are five approaches you can take to refreshing content:
- Expand
- Update
- Optimize
- Refocus
- Merge
Expanding content is the most common way of refreshing it. You might look back and find you have more to say about – or more images to add to – a topic you’ve covered in the past.
Updating evergreen content works exceptionally well for annual guides and ever-changing topics. By actively going back and updating your content, you can keep it from becoming irrelevant.
For the best results, be sure to update the year in your content’s title and heading to get the biggest SEO boost when you update your content. This is especially important when the information is time-sensitive, like Best Value Schools’ guide to the best value universities – something that changes every year:
Optimizing content includes going through and making sure title tags and headings include the target keywords, a detailed meta description, and making sure you’ve optimized your images with relevant alt text and size.
Improving a page’s UX by adding images is also an effective way of optimizing existing content.
Refocusing content tends to happen when you’ve realized that the keywords you were expecting to rank for differed from what happened in reality. Refocusing means embracing the data and changing titles and headers to target the new keyword.
Merging content is a powerful tactic when you realize you have duplicate or overlapping pages that aren’t going anywhere. Merging content makes for fewer but higher quality articles on your site, which will give you an SEO boost.
5. Build backlinks using images
Images can be a powerful tool to garner backlinks. Because images can be embedded and give credit to the source with a link.
Infographics and product photos tend to earn the most backlinks, as they’re the kinds of images other sites are most likely to use in their own content.
Quality photographs can generate backlinks in their own right too, with nature images having been shown to bring in hundreds of referring domains in some cases.
You can often find quick wins where people have embedded your photo, but they link to the actual image itself instead of the post that it came from. So reach out and request proper attribution!
6. Keep an eye on your site speed
Images often deal the heaviest blow to site speed.
Just ask A Gift Personalised, an eCommerce site whose homepage loads so slowly because its been filled with uncompressed images: 
Why does site speed matter?
It’s not only a direct Google ranking factor, but has a huge impact on your UX too.
In fact, a study by Akamai found that two seconds is the “new threshold of acceptability for eCommerce web page response times,” and according to their data, 47% of viewers want a two-second load time.
To achieve this with your own site, it’s crucial that your images are no larger than they need to be and that they’re in the right file format.
So make sure to:
- Properly size images for where they’ll be displayed
- Compress images as much as you can
- Use a CDN to deliver your images
- Use a good photography website builder
Images can deal a massive blow to site speed if you don’t actively take these steps to maintain your photos’ quality. But by keeping these in mind, you can reap all the benefits images bring.
Summary
Photography has the power to transform a website, boost a site’s SEO and improve your brand’s perception.
High-quality photos not only sell but also drive engagement and build backlinks for your web presence. Proper implementation of image SEO, image refreshes, and taking care of images bearing down on your loading times will drive significant traffic to your site.
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Author bio & headshot:
Adam Steele is the Founder and COO at Loganix, an SEO fulfillment partner for agencies and marketers. We build easy to use SEO services that help businesses scale. If you liked this article, please check out our SEO guides and templates on the blog.
