In the current era, businesses are moving to the internet to compete favorably with others. Consumers are preferring to browse through the internet instead of walking into physical stores to look for goods or services.
When you visit an eCommerce site like Shopify or 3dCart, you will realize that they only use high-quality images. To secure your online presence, you need to optimize your images to achieve stunning images.
The Value of Optimizing Images on Your eCommerce Website.
If you are running an online business, you can’t be successful unless the site is well-optimized. To optimize the various aspects of your sites and web pages, you need to apply the right SEO strategy.
A top-ranked website has both its content and images optimized. Unfortunately, most site owners don’t mind much about the images they use on their websites. However, it’s good to know that image optimization is equally important to content optimization.
Today when consumers are searching for products online, you are likely to find more people opening your images than reading your content. This has been evident especially due to the pandemic that forced people to work online. Covid – 19 regulation in different countries limited people’s movement and therefore ended up shopping online.
If you own an online store, you need to effectively and professionally optimize your pictures/images to rank higher on search engines. In recent years Google has been strategizing to avoid image duplication in the search results.
Image optimization is vital for various types of marketers who want to increase their online presence. Even if you have been using images on your website before, you need to understand the strategies you can apply to achieve positive results. If you haven’t been factoring in the importance of image optimization to your site’s online presence start right away.
For those who undermine the importance of search engine optimized images on an eCommerce website, they are directly harming their business. Optimized images are part of a SEO-friendly website design. If you are cannot see your images on search results, you could be committing mistakes in the optimization process.
How to Optimize Images for Your Online Store Website.
If your customers are complaining of a long load time, you need to consider the factors that affect it. Though many will blame the site host or the bandwidth this is sometimes an excuse. A site’s performance is mainly affected by its internal factors.
As we say this, you must realize that your eCommerce website’s speed is vital than its design. A website with a stunning look but takes 10 seconds to load will end up losing customers to other swift online stores. If you have uploaded many bulky images on your website, expect low loading speeds. Being the site owner, this is a matter to treat with urgency to avoid lagging behind your competitors.
Most internet users are less patient and are less likely to order from a site that takes more than three seconds to load. If you are a new business with such a site, you might end up without a single customer until you correct the mess. For existing businesses, you will lose your customers to competitors who have efficient sites for their online stores.
The reason for losing your customers is that 47% of various products’ consumers expect a page to load in utmost 2 seconds. Again, 40% of consumers will abandon a website that takes over three seconds to load. A site’s conversion rate drops by 4.42% on average with every additional second of its load time for the first five seconds. A low conversion rate will automatically affect your profits negatively. If your business was earning $1,000,000 in profits annually, an increase in load time from two to three seconds can result in a loss of profit worth $44,200 in that year. An additional increase of load time will see this figure doubling or triplicating and could finally see you making losses.
Here are the main ways of optimizing images for your eCommerce or online store:
- Use Different Image File Types Correctly.
Using the wrong file format for any image will cause an increase in load time. Most images on highly ranking pages are in JPG format. It’s the best to use for product images because compressing them to 70 kilobytes doesn’t cause any noticeable change in image quality.
GIF images are perfect for black and white images with a few texts. Combining several GIF format images results in an animated image. You can use them for logos because they support transparency. The PNG images serve as an alternative to GIF and an improvement to it. The format is great for company logos considering its high compression rate. Just like the GIF images, it supports transparency and allows you to control image transparency. Unfortunately, the quality of a PNG image reduces whenever it’s modified and it doesn’t support animation.
- Resizing Images.
Standard product images should not exceed 2048 x 2048 pixels for any website. However, the images you use as thumbnails should be smaller. Though people have used Photoshop for years, we also have online image editing tools such as PIXLR, PicMonkey, and Wondershare PixCut.
- Name Your Images Minding about SEO.
Every picture you use on your eCommerce should have a descriptive title. If well crafted, these titles can help boost you boost eStore’s ranking on search engines. To optimize search results for any image, consider adding relevant keywords to its title or description. However, you must avoid using lengthy titles and keyword stuffing.
- Other Methods of Image Optimization.
In addition to the above ways of optimizing images for your eStores, you also need to use relevant alt-text. This helps Google and other search engines to understand what’s contained in a particular image. For example, if your title is ‘small-sized black leather jackets.jpg’, you can edit the alt-text to ‘alt = small-sized black leather jackets’. This greatly improves your store’s SERP positioning. Finally, you need to have a good site map to make your images easily available during a search. You can include your picture’s title, image description, and other relevant information in the image site map.
Conclusion.
Online business is as real as any other type of business. However, some eCommerce store owners are yet to fully optimize their online presence. With the above information, you now understand some tips to help you rank higher on Google. Though you might be having some search engine optimized content on your website, we cannot ignore the role played by optimized images in ranking your site higher.
