IN THIS ARTICLE · 7 PARTS
Visitors look at photos before they read a single word. Photos tell them, in a second, whether you are real, what your work looks like and whether you are the kind of business they want. That is why the photos you choose matter so much.
Why stock photos do not work
Stock photos are polished, but they are not you. Visitors recognise the smiling people in suits and the generic handshake from other websites. At best they say nothing; at worst they make a business look fake. They also show nothing about your actual work. Research by Nielsen Norman Group confirms it: people ignore generic stock photos of people but study photos of real people who actually work at the company [1].
What to photograph
- Your work: finished jobs, products, dishes, results. Before and after works well for many trades.
- Your place: the shop, the office, the workshop, the dining room, the treatment room, inside and out.
- Your team: people at work and simple portraits. Customers like to see who they will meet.
- Details: materials, tools, the small things that show quality.
- Your customers, with their permission, using your product or service.
How to take good photos with a phone
- Use daylight. Shoot near a window or outside; avoid harsh midday sun and the flash.
- Clean up the frame. Remove clutter from the background.
- Hold steady and keep vertical lines straight.
- Take many shots and keep only the best.
- Shoot horizontal for website banners, and some vertical for phones and social media.
For a hotel, a restaurant, a dental practice, an artist or event or a portfolio-heavy business, a professional photographer for half a day is often one of the best investments you can make.
When stock images are fine
For abstract topics, backgrounds or illustrations in blog articles, a carefully chosen stock image or illustration is fine. Just never use it to represent your team, your premises or your work.
Prepare photos for the web
Google's guide to images on the web [2] explains sizes and formats, Google's image SEO guide recommends descriptive file names and alt text [3], and the W3C explains how to write alt text for people using screen readers [4].
- resize them to the size they are shown at
- compress them, so pages stay fast: why is my website slow
- give files descriptive names, such as
bathroom-renovation-sofia.jpg - add alt text describing the image, for accessibility and for Google
One honest photo of your real work does more than ten perfect stock images.
Where photos matter most
The top of your homepage, every service page, your About page and your Google Business Profile: how to set it up. See how real photos are used on the sites we built in our projects.
References
- Nielsen Norman Group. "Photos as Web Content." nngroup.com
- web.dev (Google). "Learn Images." web.dev
- Google Search Central. "Google image SEO best practices." developers.google.com
- W3C Web Accessibility Initiative. "Images Tutorial." w3.org
