Having images on your private practice’s websites helps improve the overall appearance of your website, giving readers an attractive place to pause while reading your Specialty Pages. Images also improve SEO: Google loves sites with images—and tends to rank those sites more highly.
However, it isn’t enough to add a few images and call it a day. Optimizing images ensures your website loads quickly and runs smoothly, while descriptions aid SEO and help clients navigate the page.
Below we detail why images are important, and how you can make sure your images are optimized for both search engines and potential clients.
Why Optimizing Images Is Important For Your Private Practice Website?
Optimizing images for your private practice has two major benefits.
- It speeds up the loadtime on your site, thereby rankings on search engines (Google loves a fast site!), so potential clients are more likely to find your practice.
- It improves user experience, ensuring potential clients stay on your website.
Image optimization might seem like a relatively unnecessary process for a private practice, but if you overlook your imagery it may become the reason potential clients can’t find you.
Website Load Speed
We all have experience with a sluggish webpage: when we’re waiting on a slow website, the temptation is always to click away and find our answer elsewhere.
It’s already hard enough to stand out on the internet. The last thing you want to do is send potential clients to your competition because they’re frustrated with your slow site.
And it isn’t just the user that’s put off by slow load speeds. When ranking a website, Google considers how fast a page loads. Large, unoptimized images can push you down the rankings, making your practice harder to find.
Ranking Higher On Google Searches
Google crawls websites to determine how to rank pages for keywords. During this crawl process, the algorithm indexes images as well as text.
However, Google won’t automatically know what an image is. Optimizing the images with descriptive names and alt texts can help search engines define what they’re seeing.
This can add authority and trust to your webpage, helping it move up the rankings. This also helps your images rank in Google Images.
Improving User Experience
Optimized images help clients navigate a webpage, breaking up the text for easier reading.
It’s important to include (relevant) images on your website to ensure clients are given natural spaces to pause while reading. (Headers also help break up the text.)
Image optimization also improves accessibility. Using alt text and descriptive title tags ensures potential clients using screen readers know what’s happening on the page.
They’ll get the full experience, instead of half the story.
How To Optimize Images
Optimizing images doesn’t have to be complex. Once you’ve done it a few times it will become a natural part of building your webpage. So, you’ll be able to concentrate on the important things.
Compress File Size
Compressing the file size can help with the load time. This is particularly important on mobile devices, which is where most potential clients do their searching!
Compression reduces the overall file size without losing the quality of the image. There are several ways to compress a file, but the most popular is TinyPNG. This website automatically compresses your file to an optimum size while maintaining quality.
You can also compress images manually using programs such as Photoshop and Windows (which is preferred since they provide more control for reducing file size).
Resize Your Images
Resizing your image alters the actual length and width in pixels. This improves loading speed while also boosting user experience.
A big image that dominates the webpage will drag the overall load speed down and make it impossible for prospective clients to scroll.
Resizing images is relatively easy with an image editing tool. You can use Adobe Photoshop or Canva to resize your images, and many web hosting sites allow you to resize images directly in the page builder.
Rename The File
When you upload an image, the file will often have a fairly basic name. While this might not seem like an issue, it can affect your search engine ranking. A file name such as “image001.jpg” means nothing to Google’s algorithm.
A descriptive file name will immediately inform Google just what the image is depicting. The best method is to just describe the image in the file name. So if it’s a picture of a person on a laptop, call the file name person-on-a-laptop!
Use Descriptive Alt Image Tags
Alt image tags are the text alternative to an image. When the browser can’t load an image properly, alt text is what is shown instead. It’s also what’s picked up by any screen readers that clients with visual impairments might use.
Alt text should describe exactly what the image is of—think of it like playing charades. But, whatever you do, don’t stuff your alt text with SEO keywords (regardless of what some SEOs might say). This doesn’t work. And it’s frowned upon by Google’s ranking algorithm.
Final Thoughts
It’s easy to overlook image optimization, but a few small changes can ensure a better experience for your potential clients while boosting your rankings on search engines like Google.