Adding Images to Blog Posts to Drive Site Traffic

As we talked about here last week, blogging is a great way to multiple your SEO efforts and bring in more customers for your business. There are a few things you can do to make sure that your blog posts are reaching the right audience and giving them the information they really want (we will address one genius tip for how to do this in our next post). But one very simple fix you can do right now to drive traffic to your site is adding images to blog posts.

Adding images to blog posts gives you a simple additional way to enhance your SEO. Without getting too technical about it, let’s just say that Google likes pictures, and your blog post will be more searchable if you have  a photo in your post. (It is essential, though, to make sure you are labeling each photo’s alt text appropriately–this is what the search engines “read.”)

Because people also do specific image searches in Google, adding images to blog posts gives those posts an extra avenue for discovery.  For instance, if you are an HVAC company discussing the merits of various furnaces, providing a picture of different brands of furnaces (with the appropriate alt text describing exactly what the picture shows!), will help your name pop up if someone does either a traditional search or an image search for those brands.

It is obviously great if you have your own images to use (if you are a contractor, for instance, this is a great way to show off your work!), but you can also purchase affordable stock images that can be added to your posts. We recommend iStock and Shutterstock as good sources of royalty-free images that are reasonably priced. You can also use Getty directly, but they are pricier and more suited to companies with larger budgets or very specific image needs.

Be in touch if you have any questions!  You can reach Niki at [email protected].