Why Image Optimization Matters: Conversions, Speed & SEO

With so many details involved in crafting a business website that achieves your goals of attracting visitors, converting them to leads and then customers, and retaining customers through excellent experiences, it can be easy to overlook one simple step: optimizing images.

You may choose an image based on how it reflects your brand, portrays action or provides visual information and interest, but if that image file isn’t properly optimized, it can prevent your website from achieving your goals in ways that may not always be detected.

First, let’s define “image optimization.” Image optimization is the process of reducing the size of an image as much as you can without ruining its quality.

Why do that? Because smaller image files load more quickly and consistently, and that impacts website visitor experience.

As Website Builder Expert outlines in the infographic here, the impact images have on visitor experience can make or break your website’s success.

Just consider these statistics:

• Content with relevant images gets 94 percent more views than content without relevant images.

• 39 percent of website visitors will stop engaging if images don’t load.

• 46 percent of users don’t revisit poorly performing websites.

So, what do you need to do to include those all-important images, without taking a chance on them slowing your site down? Optimize.

Check out the infographic for specific information about when to use specific formats, tools for compressing images and how to optimize images for SEO as well as speed.

Those SEO image optimization tips, such as optimizing file names with keywords and providing alt text, are also part of the greater task of optimizing all on-page elements for better search results. You’ll find a spreadsheet to walk you through on-page SEO, one webpage and element at time, here. Download it as a tool for your own website planning and maintenance.

There are more resources—ebooks, case studies, templates and more—that touch on all aspects of inbound marketing from campaign planning to website design and analysis of performance results available in our Inbound Marketing Learning Library. You can also subscribe to the Inbound Accelerator blog for weekly updates with the latest informative and inspirational posts.