Over the past week I have been analyzing our clients website for our in class E-Marketing project. The company is Rod’s Exotic Auto Spa, which is an auto detailing business specializing in luxury vehicles. By navigating through the home page and photo gallery section, I noticed many photos that where either too small to portray what the owner was intending or very pixelated. I recently came across an article (linked below) about the importance and correlation of high quality online images and higher sales. In the retailing sector, a survey concluded that 80% of online shoppers stated that they where “very to somewhat” influenced by content quality when making purchasing decisions.

Improving product images on e-commerce websites

Here are 4 Tips to optimize product images on a website:

1. Use thumbnails to entice the customer, then provide more options- do enough to initiate the first click, once they are on the site they can choose to enlarge the picture or view it from a different angle.

2. Zoom in on the product- especially useful when the product is very detailed.

3. Show your image to Google- when you don’t use the “alternate text” tag in your code for an image, you have effectively made your image invisible to Google and other search engines.

4. “Knock it out”- this term refers to showing pictures in isolation of any background clutter.

These tips can be applied to many different businesses that are trying to improve their search engine optimization.