Website Review Evaluation: Your Stock Photos are Betraying You

Website Review Evaluation and Stock Photos

One quick Google search for images leads you to a first page full of stock photo vendors. The truth is, many people find them useful, given the importance of images to break up the text on a Web page, as well as supplement the actual words. After all, a picture is worth a thousand words, and there are both obvious and subtle techniques to make your stock photos truly enhance your pages.

Stock Photos ? To Use or Not to Use

With that said, there are simply too many bad stock photos on too many sites. It isn?t good enough to realize the huge advantage pages with images have over pages without (the former receive far more traffic in terms of total views); the kind of images matters just as much.

In fact, there have?been essential website review evaluation studies done that show the relative importance of generic stock images. Your visitors mostly ignore these and focus on engaging people-oriented photos that accurately portray whatever you wrote about in the text. And since engagement ultimately means more time-on-page, this increases interaction across the board ? your posts will get more social media shares, improvement in Alexa scores, bounce rates, click-through rates and more.

How to Best Use Photographs in Your Blog Posts

The number one thing to keep in mind is relevance. Avoid placing images just to make the page look better; these will serve as ?filler? more than useful engagement tools. Put these images together with the on-page text, so that a website review evaluation will show how the time-on-page shoots up when everything is done correctly.

Pay attention to image sizes, because they are some of the biggest reasons pages take too long to load. There are plenty of image-optimization methods?to choose from. ?Whichever ones you use, keep in mind a goal of two seconds for page load-time. Basically, if you want your traffic to actually look at the images, they need to load quickly ? especially if there?s important information contained in them. For example, if there?s a call-to-action in the header, then a website review evaluation should ensure it loads within a couple of seconds, before the viewer loses interest and moves on to the more quickly-loading text.

The following is a very general guideline ? but that doesn?t mean it isn?t important. When looking for high-quality photos, always put the viewer first. It is fundamental to human nature that your traffic wants to know what you can do for her, and not the other way around. If you want increasing conversion rates, choose images that you think they will gravitate towards, and eschew the ones that you think puts your brand in the best light. Products or services should make the viewer empathize with the onscreen actors or situation, so that they can bond with them and ultimately buy from them.

In today?s competitive online marketplace, your business must be continuously-evolving to keep pace with your competitors, as well as with Google?s shifting Search paradigm. To help you with this, a website review evaluation serves as a proactive method of locating targeted traffic. The following free Inbound Marketing Assessment identifies your website?s strengths and weaknesses, and allows you to better capitalize on the former and shore up the latter. Since it?s free, you can start the process right away ? and see just how beneficial it is for your digital marketing platform.