What is SEO? Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the act of enhancing your website's visibility through better ranking on search results. The ranking is determined by a search engine's algorithm that matches your website's content to the customer's search query. Most product discovery on the web takes place through search. It's no surprise that almost half of product searches start on Google, making your search rank crucial. A higher-ranking lead to increased organic search traffic to your site and attracts potential customers. Unlike paid advertising, SEO doesn't require payment per click for better ranking, and provides cost-effective, long-term results. Google holds 92% of the search engine market share, making it valuable to optimize your site for better ranking on Google. Other popular search engines include Bing, Yahoo, and DuckDuckGo. How to increase visibility of your online store with SEO Keyword research Keyword research involves identifying the spec...
The convenience that eCommerce stores provide to customers is hard to match. The broad selection, lower prices and avoiding the hassle of traffic to visit a brick and mortar store have proven to be significant advantages. However, a common concern that many customers share, especially when purchasing from a new store, is “What if the product that gets delivered is not the one that I had on my mind?”
Product images are a great way to alleviate this concern. Customers generally get a good idea about the product by looking at the product images, and this is particularly helpful when the images are of good quality and shot from multiple angles. Giving the customer all the information that they need before making their purchase is an excellent way to establish trust.
However, high-quality images come at a cost. They tend to be heavy, and heavy images increase the time to load the page. A slow-loading page is not a great customer experience, and in this era of short attention spans can result in customers leaving your site. Sites that take a long time to load also tend to erode the trust of your customers. Therefore, it is imperative to get your images to load quickly.
One way to achieve this is to resize your images and use the right size in the right place. When you shoot a picture with your camera, the outputs tend to be of high quality and are enormous. Using a larger image to represent products in your cart may not be suitable, and thumbnails would suffice in such cases. Similarly, using multiple sizes like 'medium' (say 300x400) in product listings, such as catalogue pages and search results, and 'large' (say 600 x 800) in product detail pages can help. We should also consider loading 'huge', zoom-quality images only when required. This idea of using different sizes and lazy loading images will provide a significant boost in your page load speed. A consistent size for all your product images helps your website get a uniform look and feel.
Additionally, it has to be noted that image formats affect the size of the image. For example, PNG images are heavier than JPEG images. Of course, the “heaviness” is also related to the quality of the picture. Images that are smaller in size also tend to have a loss of quality. However, tools that enable format conversion (say from PNG to JPEG) often provide the ability to control the quality, and quite often, the loss in quality is barely perceptible. Therefore, a recommendation is to use the correct image format with the right quality. This is easy to experiment with, and with a couple of trial and error attempts, you should be able to arrive at the numbers.
There are several online tools like Pixlr and PicMonkey to resize your images and convert formats. If you are using Omnibus, you are already covered and don’t need any additional tools - Omnibus comes with a built-in image resizing capability and converts images into Google’s WebP format. WebP offers approximately 25% additional compression over JPEG and results in much faster loads.
To summarise, product images play a vital role in earning your customers’ trust, as do faster page loads. We can earn customer trust by providing a good number of images of the right quality to help them gauge the product and assist them in completing their purchase. We hope this post helped you understand how to optimise your images and make it easy for your customers to discover your products. Do share your thoughts in the comment section.
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