7 Ways to Optimize Your Images For Clicks & Leads

An image will make all the difference for your audience because it will get their attention. When you pick an image for content that image will often show up when people share the content which helps get more eyes on it. Images also build trust and help boost your authority.

Eryn Newman at Australian National University, for instance, has shown that the simple presence of an image alongside a statement increases our trust in its accuracy – even if it is only tangentially related to the claim.

Source: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200406-why-smart-people-believe-coronavirus-myths

Like this post? Pin it to your blogging board on Pinterest to save for later.

Imagine what a great image that's totally relevant to your content will do for your authority! Use the following 7 image methods to move your visual marketing up a gear.

It’s important that the images you choose add to your content or story and not detract from it. Think about who your audience are when you're choosing the images, especially if they show people. Speaking of that, images with people get more attention than images without people. Magazine covers with people on the front cover outsell magazines without them.  On our Online Sports Academy site, the images are designed to be exactly like magazine covers. I've even used this style of image in this post. Because Content Nitro has a “drive” theme around it, the visual in this post is a woman driving.

Imagine for a moment that you posted an image of yourself on your website. And someone you knew sent you a link and when you clicked it, horror of horrors there's a photo of you on some scuzzy website. some sad person has stolen your image and is using it to promote their work! Ouch. You're going to lose a lot of sleep over that! Now if that's how you feel when it's done to you… You can only imagine how it feels for someone else when you take their images and use them. You want good karma, and image-stealing karma just sucks.  You cannot do a Google search for images and then use them as your own. You must create the image yourself, use your own photo or buy it from a reputable source and then follow the rules about how you can use the image.

Tools like Canva.com make it easy to create branded images that are unique to your business. Their low-cost account also shares excellent images you can use in your content if you choose to upgrade.

When you get an image you need to rename it to match the content you’re putting it with. Use the keywords that you’ve developed for that piece of content in the image title. It’ll help the image show up in searches which will then lead back to your content. It will help you get found on sites like Pinterest and even Instagram.

Alt tags or alt text are where you put the image description. The image description is important. Don’t just put “lady with blue shirt” as the description. Instead, you can add your keywords and get descriptive! For example, if you’re creating content for the virtual assistant community about keeping files organised you can change the lady in a blue shirt to “virtual assistant organizes her files”. Descriptive phrases with your keywords include provides a better user experience for your readers.

You will need to make sure the image is the right size for the web and not for print. Print images are ginormous. They take forever to load and your readers will fall asleep long before they see your image. This means the image can be smaller than you would make it for printing and still look amazing. You can use a CDN like Publitio to not only help speed up your website but compress the images as well. Again, Canva can help you make your own images smaller.

You also want to make sure the images you use are responsive. This means the image can be seen correctly on any device. If your website theme is responsive check to ensure that includes the images as well.

Even if a picture is worth a thousand words, it still needs a caption to draw readers, provide context and tell the story. Vicky Krueger

A great way to increase the findability of an image is to include a caption of some kind that will show up for the reader as well as the search engines. The caption can be a call to action and/or a clickable link. This is a skill that grows with time so don't panic if you don't get it quite right straight away.  As with many things done is better than perfect. You cannot get the caption clicks without the caption

The secret to well-optimised images is to know what information can you add to any image to make it clearer who the information is for, what it’s about, and who should read it, and why and then your images will work for your website rather than keep it stuck in second gear.