Published on 11/07/24 & Updated on 12/02/26.
Yes! Pictures enhance every blog post visually and are brilliant for SEO.
Research has shown that blogs with pictures get 94% more views than those without visuals. Ultimately, blogs without images will receive less interaction than those with them.
You can find non-copyrighted images easily online at no cost through platforms such as Canva, Pexels or Unsplash. Using public images and infographics will provide a professional feel to your website. However, if you would like to add a personal touch, consider creating your own infographics or having a photoshoot in the office resulting in a bank of images you can use!
The Benefits of Using Pictures in Blogs
The benefits truly are endless but here are our top 3 reasons you should ensure you include pictures in your blogs:
- Amplified User Experience: Images are a powerful tool for enhancing user experience as they provide a visual appeal by breaking up large amounts of text. This can help grab the reader’s attention and keep them engaged with your content. Including infographics as part of your images, will increase your reader’s understanding of your content by helping to explain complex concepts more clearly. It has been found that infographics increase visitors’ drive to read by an immense 80%.
- Boosting SEO Performance: Incorporating images can significantly raise your search rankings by increasing dwell time. High-quality images tend to result in visitors staying longer on your website, which signals to search engines that your content is valuable and engaging. Blogs with pictures are also more likely to be shared on social media platforms which will drive more organic traffic to your website.
- Improving Mobile Optimisation: The increasing number of users accessing material through mobile devices has made mobile optimisation crucial. Pictures improve the mobile experience by increasing the readability and engagement of material on smaller screens. Well-placed images can break up text and make it more readable on mobile devices. As well as this, page load times can be accelerated with optimised images, which is important for mobile users. This is because pages that load quickly offer a better user experience and can positively impact your SEO.
Using Pictures in Blogs: Best Practices
To fully reap the benefits of using pictures in your blog posts, here are 5 best practices for incorporating images into your blog content:
1. What’s The Best Blog Image Size?
It’s important to consider website speed when including pictures in your blog as they can hinder your page loading time. As images tend to be the largest files on a site page and must be downloaded by the user’s browser before they can be presented, they often take the longest to load. So keep your images below 100KB!
To prevent this, ensure that any images you are using are under 100KB in size and in JPEG format. Using JPEGs allows you to display high-quality images that are also efficiently compressed into smaller files, making them easier to share.
In order to compress images over 100KB, you can use an image compressor such as Image Resizer.
2. Use Captions to Explain Images
Adding captions is a brilliant way to enhance readers’ comprehension of your images. They draw readers’ attention as they provide fast, digestible information. Make sure that your captions act as a short summary of the section your image is linked to. This ensures that readers will be satisfied with being able to find a simple and summarised version of your point.
Furthermore, captions provide an opportunity to include keywords in a natural and relevant way, which helps increase visibility.
When writing captions, it is helpful to be descriptive, clear and concise with the relevance to your content in mind. For example, if your image is a chart, your caption may explain the key takeaways. Keep your captions brief meaning around 1 or 2 sentences. The primary goal of a caption is to provide succinct and useful information.
3. Optimise Alt Text
If you are using infographics, including alt text is incredibly important. Alt text has many uses such as helping visually impaired people understand what an image shows. It allows those using screen readers to be able to comprehend the nature of the images you have chosen. This makes your content more accessible and increases the likelihood of conversion.
As well as this, alt text helps search engine bots understand image content. Google and other search engines use alt text to determine what a picture is portraying. This can improve topical relevance which is the relevance that a site has to a particular keyword. In particular, adding alt text increases the chances of your images ranking highly in Google Images, acting as another way for people to find your website. Ensure that you are optimising your alt text by keeping it concise and accurate.
Alt text will also appear on a page when an image fails to load. This means that users will still be able to gain some information about the image despite the visual not being able to appear. This can significantly reduce the chance of bounce rates, which refers to the percentage of visitors leaving your site without interacting with it.
It isn’t necessary to include alt text for purely decorative images that do not convey any meaning or information. This is because it will not provide any value for visually impaired readers and does not link to the content you have written. Alt text is most valuable for infographics and data images. Moreover, if the text surrounding your image describes its contents, there is no need to repeat this within the alt text.
4. Choose High-Quality Images
High-quality images enhance the professionalism and credibility of your blog. Blurry and pixelated images can negatively impact user perception. Especially when you are compressing images to under 100KB, check that the resolution hasn’t become poor as this can take away from the sophistication of your blog.
To maintain this level of professionalism, try to avoid stock images. Select unique and relevant images that enhance your content rather than generic stock photos.
Additionally, maintaining a consistent style for your images can help create a cohesive look for your blog. For instance, use pictures of uniform size and format to create a clean and consistent appearance. If you’d like to go that extra mile, pick images with colours that complement each other to bring an all-round coordination to your blog.
5. Choose Image Positions
One of the key benefits of using pictures in blogs is that they help to break up your text and keep readers engaged. In order to gain the most from this, ensure that you space out the positioning of your images. Our top tip is to include around 3-5 centred images within each blog, depending on its length, and distribute these throughout the start, middle and end.
In addition, setting a featured image, which is the one that appears at the top of your blog post, is incredibly helpful. A featured image represents the contents, mood, or theme of a post and often shows up as a thumbnail. It acts as an initial way to capture the curiosity of visitors, making them eager to click and read your blog. Make sure that the image you choose here is eye-catching and representative of the blog’s contents.
How Lumen SEO Can Help
We at Lumen SEO can take care of your whole SEO strategy, including keyword research, link building, content writing and technical SEO. You can learn more about what an SEO agency does, here.
If you like the sound of working with us, we offer free, no-obligation SEO audits on business websites. To claim yours, simply enter your details here and we’ll get a free SEO audit to you within 7 days. It will include the strengths and weaknesses of your website along with the top three aspects you should focus on improving, in order to enhance your business’ ranking.
For a friendly chat about the SEO services we provide here at Lumen SEO, contact our SEO consultants today. Alternatively, you can message us on either our LinkedIn or Instagram pages.
Written by Viktoria, for Lumen SEO.
