Images contribute to the aesthetics of your website, grab the attention of audience, and convey the message of your site, products or services in the best possible manner. They complement your SEO (Google Rankings) endeavor as search engines value high-quality, relevant and unique images.
But images that look great on the website, may not be great for your audience, and SEO ranking. They might not be visible to the audience on social media. They might be ruining the performance of your site.
Digital Sprout, website design and SEO company in Annapolis, Maryland, lists 5 ways to evaluate the contribution of images to your online presence.
Site or Webpages Load Slowly
Images, when not optimized, consume a considerable amount of server space and Internet bandwidth, and may slow down the website Customers are impatient, so the speed of your site has a big impact on conversion and other metrics. Monitor the time required by your site or internal webpages to get loaded on a device fully.
How much time should be marked as a threshold? Google classifies performance in three categories. The thresholds for each category are as follows.
Good: 0-2.5 seconds
Needs Improvement: 2.5 seconds-4 seconds
Poor: 4 seconds and up
However, we do not rule out other factors that can kill the performance of a website.
There are two proprietary tools from Google to help you check the speed or performance of your site. They also provide you recommendations to improve the speed.
- Test My Site: The tool evaluates the performance of your site on mobile devices.
- PageSpeed Insights: The tool evaluates the performance on mobile and desktop both.
1. Images Do Not Appear in Google Image Search Results
Google Image Search tool can help you know how well your website images are contributing to the performance of the Site. You can know it easily. Just perform a search with your brand’s name or products or services, and click the “Images” button. If you have a site with good on-page SEO, images are most likely to come on the top or at least on the first page.
Image Credit: Google Search
2. Missing Image Details
Hover the image with your mouse or finger. It should reveal the title, caption, and description of the image. If you don’t find specific details about the image, it means that the images are not optimized. Image optimization is an inseparable part of SEO (Search Engine Optimization). It also makes your site accessible to visually impaired people. It means more traffic, and more conversion.
3. Images Not Fetched by Social Platforms
Post image-driven content on social media platforms where your audience spend most of the time like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, etc. Images should appear in the full-dimension. When the image format is not compatible with the social platforms, it will not get fetched properly. In today’s digital age when people spend a considerable amount of their time on social platforms, it’s essential to fix this issue.
4. Pixelated or Blurred Images
When images are stretched, the resolution decreases because of the reduction of pixels per inch (ppi). Take a look at the pictures below. If your website images turn this way on the device screen, it will make a bad impression on the audience, and increase the bounce rate. If you run an eCommerce site, chances are high that you witness immediate loss due to shoppers rejecting your products.
Image Credit: Google Search
It’s important to fix the image optimization issues at your earliest hiring Digital Sprout, a trusted Maryland SEO company.