Will I Have Only Stock Images On My Site?
If so, you’re going to miss New Patient Opportunities. Prospects want to see you and your staff, not staged images from a library. That’s not to say that stock photography has no place on dental websites, but it has to be used with considerable care. Stock photography can harm your SEO because they’re not optimized for the search engines which will hurt your page ranking.
It’s A Question Of Balance
Dental websites serve the functions of informing, engaging, and converting your prospects. Words are great and necessary to inform people, but being able to see happy, smiling patients proudly displaying the results your practice has achieved for them are even better. Working together, the right words and image serve to convince more prospects to pick up the phone or make an appointment online.
For those pages where you don’t have a patient’s or staff person’s photo that works, stock photography serves to engage your prospects and keep them reading. But first, they have to find your website. Optimizing all your original images can help your search engine results page (SERP) ranking.
Yeah, That Takes Some Work
Google’s capability in recognizing image elements is constantly improving. It would be naive to think that its ranking algorithms don’t take those elements into account. For that reason, ensuring that the image you display is consistent with the page content is crucial.
That might seem obvious, but a picture of someone laughing and smiling broadly isn’t overly consistent with a discussion of periodontal disease! It is appropriate when discussing effective gum disease treatment.
Beyond the obvious, here are some other things regarding images to consider:
- Add structured data to your images
- Select a suitable file name for your image
- Provide all the context you can for each image
- Reduce the file size for faster loading on mobile devices
- Add alt image text that will be displayed if the image doesn’t load
There are a number of other things you can do to optimize photos, but if you – or your marketing provider – take care of the five things listed above, you should be in good shape.
Once you’ve had a chance to review what your current provider is doing for you, you may discover that you’re not in good shape. If that’s the case, we invite you to discover dental marketing done the way it should be. Learn more by scheduling a no-obligation Roadmap call with SmartBox. It’s an investment of your time equal to about what you need to place a single dental implant or crown.
In return, you’ll receive your completely customized Roadmap to your practice’s future success. Again, there’s no obligation to discover just how effective and productive your marketing can be.