Given the nature of its services, a moving company needs to provide customers with a proper visual presentation of what they offer. After all, people need to connect with your moving business on a personal basis in order to put their trust in its expertise and hire you. And one of the ways to accomplish such an effect comes through the use of optimized images on your website. Not only does it help you establish a stronger initial bond with site visitors and attract more high-quality to your website, but it also boosts your SEO efforts in the process. In this article, we explore the importance of image optimization and how to optimize your website images.
Running a good website can genuinely benefit your business. As a mover, you probably have a lot of images on your website as well as a blog. Perhaps, you’ve noticed that sometimes, you can’t see images or they appear to load too slow. Images are an essential part of website optimization and can significantly improve but also worsen the user’s experience. Therefore, you need to learn how to optimize your website images and make your website an attractive place for your customers.
Why is it important to optimize your website images?
Despite popular belief, images provide more value than merely a decorative element on your website. Instead, they are the visual portrayal of your brand to online users. They are the link between the services your offer and how customers see those services and your entire business in comparison to your competitors. More so than that, your moving company SEO development relies on the quality of your website images as well.
Images that are not blurry and trigger emotional reactions in others can engage them in the same ways in which content can. When you combine the two with the use of captions, readers can connect with the visual appeal of the image much like social media posts. Additionally, including alt tags for each of your images provides positive points in the eyes of search engines, giving a description for each of the images to crawlers and bots. Let’s take a closer look at the top benefits optimizing your moving company website images:
You can reduce page loading speed
Page loading speed is one of the crucial factors for online consumers today. The amount of time someone needs to spend to get the products/services/answers they need will have a significant influence on their next decision. That is why websites need to ensure that their page loading speed is always shorter than 3 seconds, as per Google parameters.
The fact is that the longer it takes your web pages to load and respond to changes, the higher the chances of users leaving your website will be. Now, there are many ways to boost your page loading speed, optimizing your image being among the most efficient ways among them. The size of the images can influence the overall load of the page, making it more difficult for devices to load the page itself. By reducing the size of the image, you can reduce the size of the page – making it easier to load on different devices.
Google rewards websites with optimized images
Websites with irrelevant content and poor quality images have less chance of ranking high on search results pages in comparison to optimized ones. That is why it is so important to ensure that your business implements all the tools that digital marketing for moving companies offers. Page loading speed, image optimization, font styles – these are all important elements that search engines use when ranking websites for SEO efforts.
It improves User Experience (UX)
Whether we are talking about inner pages or blog posts, your PPC landing pages, social media posts, or email marketing campaigns – images make a big difference in how your target audience reacts to it all. High-quality images that convey your message can create a lasting impression on users. Therefore, it is all the more important for you to make sure to optimize your website images in the process. So, if movers want to boost user experience for their websites and promotional campaigns, optimizing images plays a key role in this task.
Attract more visitors to your website
People respond positively to visual elements today. Social media platforms portray much of this truth in the likes and shares when it comes to images and videos. When you choose to make the added effort to optimize your website images, you create a strong chance that people will feel inspired to share it with others, earning your potential leads and links in the process. Most of all, this can expand your overall reach, helping your moving company develop as it attracts new audiences and leads in the process.
A simple guide on how to optimize your website images
To optimize your website images means to make their size appropriate, but still, preserve the satisfying quality. Furthermore, it includes optimizing your images’ SEO – improving the page’s ranking on Google search. Before we start on ways how to do it, be sure to do one more thing. You need to determine your website value and see what the problems it may have are. It’s not only about the images – there are maybe some other things you should optimize, too. Then we can proceed to the image optimization. Here’s how to do it.
Check the file format
Images come in different formats, but only some of them are suitable for website pages and faster load. Decide what you want to achieve by posting an image and decide on one of these image formats:
- PNG – one of the most common formats across the web. The advantage of using a PNG image is that you can compress its size without losing the quality. However, PNGs are usually ‘heaviest’ in size.
- JPG – another standard image format. The great thing about JPG images is that they carry small size and minimal change in quality. However, loss of quality does happen every time you resize them – especially in small details of the image.
- GIF – gif format has become very popular in recent years. These are small size images with a limited number of colors. However, they are not used for large, beautiful images, but for animation. You can use them for icons and exciting graphics.
- TIF – this format shows the highest quality, but also huge file size. Therefore, it’s not commonly used on the web, but for commercial print works.
Reduce image size …
Large image files are harder to load and therefore, take more time. That’s why when you want to optimize your website images, you need to first think of their size. You should remember that a large pixel size doesn’t always mean the highest quality. If you have a lot of images, you can reduce their size online easily at once, or do it in some other software like Adobe Photoshop.
…while thinking about its quality
Yes, it’s true that images shouldn’t be too large so the website can load faster. However, you shouldn’t overdo it. Reducing a size too much usually means low-quality images. It’s okay to reduce the image quality by 10-20%, because it doesn’t show, but anything more than that can be harmful.
Learn about the compression
Images can be compressed in two ways – lossy or lossless compression. In lossy compression, the images, usually JPEG formats, lose some of its data – which is not a big deal but helps to reduce the file size. When an image is compressed in a lossless way, it doesn’t lose any of the information or the quality.
Use relevant images
Putting pictures on your page shouldn’t just be a random task you do. Dedicate your time to find quality images that are relevant to the content you create. They should describe the text you are writing and complete it the topic. This way, they will leave an impression on your readers and inspire them to read more.
Include captions
Captions should be included in almost all images on your website. That is an interesting way to describe an image but also include it in search results on Google.
Write alt tags to optimize your website images
Alt tags are very often forgotten, even though they are a very important piece of image optimization. To maximize your website images correctly, be sure to include alternative text to raise the relevance of an image and help users who can reach the image and caption to understand what’s on it. Alt tags and captions are easily important when using WordPress, so don’t forget to add them with your images.
Extra tip: If you use WordPress for writing your content, you need to think about its safety. Even though it is the most commonly used CMS, there is a level of risk you should always consider. Therefore, learn about how to secure your WordPress website and don’t think about the possible dangers.
Start boosting your brand through the images you use
Despite how times are changing and how digitalization is sweeping the world, a picture is still worth a thousand words. Today, this old proverb is even more true than before, given how many images there are online, and how fast users go through each of them. That is why you need to make the effort to ensure that each of the images connected to your brand can help it grow. By making the images on your website better, you also develop your brand as a moving company in the process.
- For additional assistance on how best to optimize your website images or take your website to the next level, make sure to reach out to our movers’ website design team today!
