The Importance of Excellent Photography On Your Website

You may have heard the advice, “content is king” when strengthening a website’s marketing success. That is true for many reasons. To create a user-friendly online listing that is inviting and appealing to look at, pictures play a vital role. Let’s take a look at how images can help both grab a viewer’s attention and strengthen your message towards search engine spiders.

First, the larger the image size, the better the quality of the image. We size the images on our website to be a minimum of 1400x1150 pixels. When you take photos for your listing, be sure to use the largest .jpg size possible. If taking them from an iPhone, for example, always choose the Actual or Large size, ideally over 1 MB. A small .jpg cannot be enlarged without greatly distorting the image and creating a grainy picture. An image can be successfully resized large to small, but not vice versa.

Size matters, but they still need to be great images. While you don’t NEED to hire a professional photographer, you should be paying attention to the quality of the image, i.e., composition, perspective, lighting, and color. We regularly feature vacation rental homes in our marketing pieces. Often, listers will submit images that are dark and hard to see. Lighting is really important. When photographing vacation rental homes, we almost always turn on the lights in the room to brighten the picture and balance the lighting with the outdoors. Occasionally, there is a lamp that casts a very yellow light, and this can affect the color of the walls and thus the outcome of the image. In cases like these, a little Photoshop magic comes in handy.

Images are also incredibly valuable when it comes to Search Engine Optimization. By optimizing your image’s metadata, you will be strengthening the exposure of your listing. When naming your image files, be sure to be as informative as possible and use keywords that describe your picture. For example, we automatically label images cape-cod-vacation-rental-kitchen.jpg when they are uploaded to us. This information is part of the metadata of the picture, and it’s best to include keywords. Taking the time to rename images is really worthwhile because, when Google or other search engines are “crawling” your site, it values these keywords. This helps the SEO of your listing – it increases its exposure as well as enabling your images to be found when people search on Google and look for images specifically.

We have all seen the difference between a beautiful picture on a website, Instagram, Facebook or Pinterest and just an OK one. A “wow” shot gains a lot of engagement and positive feedback. This is how a website needs to appear – full of wow shots that explain your business in a visual way. People are moving fast and making decisions online quicker than ever. First impressions matter. We are constantly coaching our rental homeowners that, if the house pictures aren’t gorgeous, the rest of the text information may not even matter.