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3 Google Best Practices for Including Images on Your Pages

Images help draw people into your content and retain the information you share. On average, people only retain 10 percent of what they hear after three days, but they retain 65 percent of the information conveyed to them with visual cues.

But slapping random images on your deathcare website pages isn’t the right move. Google provides some best practices for using images to increase SEO and the overall performance of your pages, and we’ve summarized three of them below.

1. Start with high-quality, relevant images.

This one might seem obvious, but many small businesses adorn their website with low-quality or irrelevant free stock images, mostly because it’s convenient and easy to do so. Some problems with this tactic include:

  • Images don’t support the content, so they don’t help with user engagement, information retention, and conversion.
  • Anyone can use those free stock images, and they do. Which means your site won’t stand out from the crowd.
  • Low-quality or boring stock images don’t capture user interest when they’re used as thumbnails in search or on social, which can reduce how many people click through on your link.

When possible, use original images. Hire a photographer to capture your funeral home facilities in well-lit, professional images, take pictures yourself with a decent smartphone, or use tools like Canva to easily make graphics with the right brand colors.

2. Include meta data for every image.

Every image on your page should have:

  • A descriptive title. “Woman standing near casket,” “Family grieving at gravesite,” “White flowers next to urn” are all examples of short titles that might describe images.
  • A caption. The caption can include keywords and be a bit more creative. “Family works with funeral director to plan memorial” or “Preplanning is easy, and you can do it remotely” are examples for images that show a family touring a funeral home or someone sitting at a computer.
  • A unique filename. Don’t leave “IMG00001.jpg” as the filename. Tell Google something about the image here, such as oak-casket.jpg.
  • Alt text. Make sure to complete the alt text description of the image to support accessibility. This is the text that’s read by a screen reader for someone who is visually impaired. It should give a short visual description of the image, such as “White flowers on blue background.”

3. Use the right image formats.

Make sure images are uploaded in formats supported by Google. Those include JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP, WebP, and SVG.

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