Ever since people began creating content for the internet, it has been obvious that articles and other material that are illustrated with images tend to be preferred by web users. Nobody wants to read a huge chunk of text on their PC, tablet or mobile – they want it to be broken up for better visual stimulation and to avoid it looking too off-putting. As time has gone on, it has also become apparent that material with images actually performs better than that without, which is something hotel marketers cannot afford to ignore.
According to the CMO Council, people are likely to remember only ten per cent of the information they hear after three days has passed. However, if they read that information teamed with a relevant image, they retain 65 per cent of the information. This could mean the difference between someone forgetting your hotel brand and remembering it well enough to make a booking. Xerox has also found that coloured visuals increase people’s willingness to read a piece of content by 80 per cent.
Again, this increases the likelihood of your message getting across, be it through a blog post or some other means of communication.However, only 27 per cent of marketers reported having a plan in place to organise and manage their visual assets, suggesting they aren’t reaping the rewards of this incredibly influential medium and could be losing out on bookings as a result. One way in which you could make website images work for you is by using them to boost your organic SEO traffic. Here are a few tips on how to do this. Ensure images are relevant Every time you think about posting an image to your hotel website design or hotel social media posts, ask yourself carefully if it really is relevant to your topic. A picture of the butterflies on your barbeque terrace might be pretty, for example, but it doesn’t really add value to what you’ve written. Stick to images of your restaurant’s food, or your chef actually cooking on the terrace.
Also, while stock photo libraries can be a good resource, the images they offer can sometimes be a little cheesy and over-posed; people are likely to know they’re bought. Can you take your own instead? This has the added benefit of allowing your would-be guests to get to know you and your hotel staff, which in turn boosts engagement. Add Alt text Many people don’t understand Alt text, but it just refers to the text that appears when an image cannot be displayed to a visitor for whatever reason. A good way to write it is by thinking how you would describe your picture to a blind person – so, Hotel name with Greek sun setting over horizon, for instance. Title text doesn’t affect your SEO rankings, but Alt text will because Google’s spiders crawl it and use it to decide if the content is relevant to someone performing a search.Change file namesIf you have followed our advice and taken some pictures of your own for your hotel’s website, then they will probably appear as a series of numbers or dates on your computer when you come to upload them and search for them.To improve your organic SEO, always rename them to something that describes what they are a picture of. Get a location in here if you can, as this will help when people are looking for hotels based on a resort or country name. Try for sizeIt’s worth being very careful with file sizes, because large ones can impact upon the time it takes for pages to load – and if it ends up being as slow as 1990s dial-up, then people might go straight off your website.
Also, the faster your site loads, the higher Google ranks it for SEO because it achieves a better usability rating and so will appear higher on a page of search results.It’s easy to make errors with image size, as even iPhone pictures can be more than 3,000 pixels wide – and cutting a photo down in size doesn’t always lower the file size. If in doubt, use a technological tool like JPEG Mini to help you. Consider a caption aren’t compulsory when it comes to SEO, but they can effectively support a page’s content by linking up to the terms people are searching for.
According to KissMetric, captions under images are read 300 per cent more than body copy, so there is an opportunity to engage with readers here in exchange for just a little more effort at the time of uploading. So there we have it: images not only make your website and other copy more aesthetically appealing, but they could help you to rise organically up the search engine rankings too. By increasing the time people spend on your site and boosting usability, you’re showing the likes of Google that you’re worth a look – and that increases the chances of a traveller seeing your property and liking it enough to make a booking.
