E-Commerce Image Optimization Hacks You Need to Know
Business without e-commerce is unimaginable for organizations, irrespective of their size and nature. E-commerce
generated around $2.3 trillion in sales in 2017 and is expected to reach $4.5 trillion of sales in 2021. What’s more, experts predict that the growth will continue at 15% every year.
However, as the e-commerce boom explodes, so will be the competition. There is a dire need to ensure that your e-commerce store stands out from the rest not only in terms of products, services and visual appeal but also searchability on the search engines. Apart from keyword-driven content, image optimization is another useful way to increase the traffic to your e-commerce site.
As a digital marketer, you must have wondered many a time how to optimise your product’s images so that they show consistently when searched online. Image optimisation plays a huge role in driving online traffic and sales. Digital marketing professionals should know the basics of this technology so that they can create maximally optimised images for their website.
Looking at it simply, images occupy a significant part of e-commerce websites. That is why their size and simplicity can be important factors that affect your web-based performance to a great extent. If you want to enhance your online search ratings and conversion rates, these image optimisation hacks will prove to be quite helpful.
Know About Different File Types
Not a design developer or expert? You still need to know all about PNG, GIF and JPEG in digital marketing. Go for digital marketing certification for more expertise. You must know which file type has a higher visual attraction but occupies lesser space so that they have a lesser load time. In JPEGs, millions of colours are displayed and size and quality are adjustable. So, naturally, they can be used for almost all product images where you need more colour variation. GIF is the best choice for animation, small images or limited colour images like a logo. But do remember that they are heavier in size. When image quality matters more, you could go for PNG files which are larger in file size but better in quality.
Get Image and File Size Right
Image size or dimension should be large enough for the product details to be clearly visible. Regarding file size, keep it in mind that larger the file size, longer it takes for the image to load. It is the more important aspect as you want each of your images to download every time a visitor is browsing your site. Aim to keep file size between 1 to 2 MB. That way, you will have more happy customers and lesser bounce rates. You can even resize your images using easy online tools or software. Try several sizes and choose the smallest size that still has a good image quality. You can now use this size quality ratio for other images too.
Image Naming
File names matter a lot when search engines are choosing a file. So, spend some time in naming your image files carefully. Let the name be briefly descriptive about what the image is showing. Rather than random number codes, images can be better caught by search bots when they have names with keywords. For instance, if you are selling a red leather bag, the image name should contain these words for best SEO results.
Use of Sitemaps
Sitemaps tell Google and similar search engines about your website’s pages. So, it is a good practice to create image/video entries in your sitemap which are optimised for search engine algorithms. In fact, sitemaps are a great way to get your media content noticed by search engine crawlers.
Use of Thumbnails
Thumbnail images are a great way to up sell other products once your customer has made an initial purchase. Just like Amazon does, you should display similar products or add-ons at the bottom of the page through thumbnail images. So, never forget to optimise these thumbnails to gain a greater profit from the same customer. Keep their file size super small, around 70 kb and name them just like your product images. You can learn more about image optimisation by enrolling in a digital marketing certification course.
Image Tests
Instead of losing sales by loading too many images or getting debugged by higher loading times, test your images for their quantity, i.e. how many for each product, category and page. Also, test for image quality that is being preferred by customers.
Copyright Your Images
Copy-pasting someone else’s images is not only detrimental for SEO of your site but can also land you in a legal soup and ruin your reputation. The owners of original photos can easily check for plagiarism and copyright breach through several tools. So, try to use unique images. You can click on your own, hire a photographer, download free images on the internet or buy images online from paid sites such as Shutterstock, Gettyimages, etc.
Easy to use tools and knowledge about image optimisation can give high sales in e-commerce.
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