Why Images Are Essential for Online Content

You want to capture your audience. You want to get them to click on your links and engage with your topics and offers. In order to do this, the post or page must be accompanied by an  image. Because of the sheer amount of words out there, images are a very important addition to your online content.

We live in visual culture. This is difficult to overstate. Consider a statistic taken from a recent Jeff Bullas blog post: “Ten percent of photos taken in human history took place in the last 12 months.” Many popular social sites have made changes to their interfaces that increase the visual display. Facebook  and Twitter reorganized their platforms to include the banner at the top. Sites like Pinterest and Instagram are pure images. We live in a culture where images are extremely important—where they capture the attention and the imagination of nearly everyone. This seemingly small tactic can make a huge difference for your content and your brand.

Take a Close Look at Your Visual Content

Think of images as part of the hook. And they are essential. “Articles with images get 94% more total views, and including a photo or video in a press release increases views by over 45%,” writes Jeff Bullas. It’s difficult to overstate the importance of supplying photos on your blog and website pages.

Not surprisingly, the better the photo, the more it drives up engagement. It’s not hard to grab a picture for your blog or snap one yourself (since we all have cameras in our pockets), but it is important that the photo be good quality and relevant.

Consider the possibility that just providing valuable content isn’t enough to gain traffic. Content marketers can use bulleted lists, sub-headers, and quotes to outline a post and make it easier to read, but images are highly effective for increasing a piece of content’s marketability and engagement. It’s not likely that people will arrive at your site because of interesting images, but it’s possible that some of those readers will return because they remembered one of your engaging images. If you’re posting your content on social media sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter (which you should be), images attached to those posts will stand out far more on a newsfeed than words will.

If you’re having trouble driving traffic to your blog or website, perhaps well-placed and well-designed images are the incentive you need to offer your target audience. So take this cue to adapt your business to today’s visual culture, because an image is worth a thousand words.