New research from Skyword found that business-oriented web pages with images performed 91% better than those pages without images.
Skyword examined the performance of tens of thousands of posts in performing the study, and was able to segment the value of images for business purposes (excluding entertainment, news and sports posts, among others).
So, images don’t just make a little difference…they make a ton of difference.
Adding a little commentary and common sense to the study, it seems reasonable that posts with images both perform better in search results and are also shared at a higher rate than those posts without images.
This puts an ever increasing importance on both the managing editors and content producers (the people that make your content look pretty) within the organization (full content marketing team information here).
Of course, this should come as no surprise. In the magazine business, we had a saying that the cover of a magazine serves just one purpose…to be opened. Design has the majority to do with that happening, just like the importance of the headline of this post.
Next steps?
Define the role of your content producer, and the mix between original art and stock photography.
Include images in all your blog posts.
Review all your content to make sure that it is visually appealing.
Tag all your online images with meta-tags and captions when possible (millions of searches per day are image searches).
And last but not least…
Build time into your content process so that design doesn’t become a last-minute operation.
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