5 Reasons Why Your Business Needs Updated Website Photos
It happens to the best of us (even us in the photography industry)–we build a website with a ton of great and professional quality photos, and then months, possibly even years go by before we even think of updating them. In some cases, businesses may never put their own original professional photographs on their website and use stock photos instead. Failing to realize the importance of updated website photos,
Unfortunately, this lack of updating visual imagery is all-too common, and before you know it, you’ve paid little attention to your site and as a consequence, your online image begins to suffer. As a corporate photography business, we have the opportunity to transform an individual or a business’ online image through photography and video; that is in-part because they choose to update the photos on their website by contacting us.
Whether it is to generate pictures of your office space, professional headshots of your team, architectural shots of your building, or photos of events, for marketing and advertising materials, here are 5 reasons why your business website needs updated photos:
1. Improving your Search Engine Optimization and Online Rankings
New content drives organic rankings and the way search engine bots are perceiving your website when compared to others in similar industries. Adding new content of any kind will mean that bots are landing on your site more often and the frequency of how often you are indexed by search engines will increase.
You may be wondering how this works if you are not familiar with SEO and indexing. Simply put, search engines like Google use “bots” to scan the internet and use a number of algorithms to determine how relevant pages should rank on any given search. One of the (many) factors that goes into this is actually fresh content.
Why New Photography? New photos are recognized as “fresh” content. When your website looks professional and features new content like photography, you are likely to have this factor into your SEO and online business rankings.
2. Impress Returning Clients
One of the easily-recognizable things when you return to a website is new photography. This is certainly one of the easiest ways to impress returning clients. If people are used to logging on to your site once a day/week/month and you have had the same photos up for a while, seeing new visual imagery is going to look impressive. Having the ability to display updated photos for business also signals success on some level.
If you are able to put new photos on your site that means that you can afford the time and effort to freshen your image (it is exactly why having out-dated photos looks dull and a little negligent).
3. There is a lot you can do with updated website photos
One reason people don’t think to get new photographs as often as they should is because they don’t realize all of the different places they can use photos in web design. Here are just some of the things you can use professional photography for:
- Photo or Media Gallery: Showcase products, office space, events, or other aspects important to your brand.
- Email Marketing, Blog Posts, and Content Development: Once you have your own professional photos, your reliance on stock photos for things like email marketing or blog posts are going to be fewer and further between. Having your own original photos when developing content will make the things you create even more personalized and unique, which majorly contributes to your professional appearance.
- Ecommerce Stores: When is the last time you updated your product pages? Professional shots of your products make a huge difference, and it is good to update these every-so-often as well.
- Social Media: Profile pictures, banners, post content–you name it! Professional photography can really help you step up your social game.
4. It Matters Most to the Online Client
If the majority of your clients do not have in-person interactions with your company, and do a majority of their interactions online (which is nearly every brand these days) — updated website photos really do matter most on a website. According to Market Leader, Michael Seiler, who is the founder and director of the Institute for Behavioral and Experimental Real Estate at Old Dominion University at Norfolk, Va claimed: “We find that the photo is overwhelmingly viewed first,” speaking about an online study of Real Estate clients. Without question, professional looking photos matter to a potential client and iPhone photos just do not cut-it when it comes to web content.
5. Adaptable and Current Image
Although it is fifth on this list, I think one of the most important reasons for updated website photos for business is because it makes your brand look adaptable and the change reflects your current image on your website. Most businesses are characterized by continuity and change, which means that website content you posted five years ago is likely not relevant any more. This applies to something as simple as headshots as well. There is nothing worse than having a five-year-old photo of an executive or prominent company figure. These are things that should just be updated as time goes on.
