Why you should use high quality photos on your website

Pictures are one of the most important factors influencing a traveler during the booking process. High quality pictures are fundamental to highlighting your property’s unique characteristics; they can enhance your image and give a professional look to your website. Thanks to the immediate, and predominantly emotional, impact of pictures, the visual message often overtakes the written message.

Compared to a written message, the human brain perceives images 60,000 times faster. Almost 90% of the information transmitted to brain is visual. On social networks, images and videos often go viral and have a 50% higher rate of being shared compared to a piece of text alone.

Nevertheless, many property owners are too distracted with other aspects to properly value this important marketing vehicle.

Making your property more visible and attractive for travelers means increasing conversion rates of bookings—even in the competitive environment of the OTA (Online Travel Agencies, eg. Booking.com).

Here some tips:

1. Use large, high resolution images, especially on your home page
   Research from Visual Web Optimizer shows that large images (2000px) contribute to a 10% increase in sales.

1. Insert as many images as possible into your gallery
   A study by Trivago in 2014 estimated that a listing with more than 20 pictures has up to a 29% higher chance of being booked, while a listing with fewer than 10 pictures has only a 10% chance.
   Don’t forget to optimize visual content

2. The image optimization of a website and the HTML tags attached to them, is critical for a good ranking on search engines. Being able to optimally utilize the ALT (alternative) attribute of images has many advantages. A text alternative to images becomes crucial when a browser can't properly render them. Even when the image is rendered, if you hover over it with your mouse pointer, you can see the ALT tag text created for that image. The ALT attribute also adds SEO (Search Engine Optimization) value to your website. Adding appropriate ALT tags to the images on your website can help your website achieve better rankings in the search engines by associating keywords with images. As a matter of fact, using ALT tags is probably the best way for your ecommerce products to show up in the Google image and web searches.