You might not think images add much to legal blogs, but their importance for SEO is undeniable. While reliable statistics are hard to come by, Jeff Bullas estimates that blogs with images drive 94% more engagement than those with none.
Visuals break up walls of text for readers, keeping them on-site longer and lowering your bounce rate. They also provide important clues about your content to search engines. While text is the vehicle with which you convey your message, the accompanying images have a huge role to play in optimizing the ROI from your blogs.
Of course, that doesn't mean you should just haphazardly install images into your pages as an afterthought. A lazy approach to law firm blog image selection will take from your content, rather than improving it. There are also certain legal restrictions you need to be aware of.
How Many Images Should You Use?
Unfortunately, it's difficult to come up with a broadly applicable answer to this question. It depends on a few different factors.
The first is the length of the blog post in question. Neil Patel suggests using one image for every 150 words of text. However, he adds that no image should be there for "decoration"; every visual you use should have a purpose. If your blogs run to 1000 words, chances are you'll struggle to find six highly relevant images for all of your posts.
With that in mind, there's no need to go overboard when adding images to your blog posts. As long as you have a minimum of one featured and one inline image, you'll usually be fine. Of course, if you spot an opportunity to add a relevant graphic or photo, you should always take it.
SEO Considerations
There are a few technical factors to keep in mind when it comes to blog images and search engine performance. Getting these right will maximize the reach of your blogs.
Quality
You might think that the higher your image quality is, the better your blog will be. However, the opposite is usually true. High-quality images slow down your website, and search engines don't like to rank slow websites.
If your platform doesn't automatically optimize images, you should invest in an optimization tool.
Descriptions
Getting your image descriptions, captions, and alt texts right is the best way to improve their performance on search engines. Accurate, detailed descriptions that contain your keywords create more avenues through which your content can be discovered.
Photos
Photographs are the best images for professional services marketing content. They're also the most expensive, labor-intensive, and time-consuming. You need to use them, but wisely.
Unless you have a high-end camera and photography experience, you should hire a professional photographer to take website pictures, especially for the homepage and attorney profiles. A well-taken photograph makes itself obvious to even the untrained eye, and one set of pictures could remain on your website for several years. While it might seem like a big investment in the immediate term, it will add huge value to your brand.
If possible, it's a good idea to have a photo with a local landmark on your homepage. The majority of your clients will reside within a short distance of your office, so this is an easy way to remind leads where you're based.
Stock Images/Creative Commons
Stock images come from subscription services like Shutterstock. You pay a certain amount per month and get a set number of downloads in return.
There are also free versions of these services, known as creative commons sites, that allow you to download and share images without charge. Image creators often want exposure as payment, so they'll ask you to give them credit when you share their work. While these sites have decent offerings, the selection will never be as good as that of a paid provider.
Whether you pay for them or not, stock images will never be a substitute for original visual content. However, they are convenient and relatively inexpensive, and you can usually find an image to go with just about any topic.
Custom Graphics
A custom graphic is a computer-generated image that's designed specifically for your website. Like a photograph, it will add more value than a stock photo; also like a photograph, however, it represents a greater outlay in terms of money, time, or both.
One thing you'll always need a signature graphic for is your logo. This doesn't need to be flashy (in fact, for a law firm, it probably shouldn't be), but it does need to look professional.
Legality
If you're paying for a stock photo service, you needn't worry about copyright; you've paid for the images, so you own them. The same is obviously true if you take them yourself or pay a photographer to do so. Copyright issues are most relevant to images you find online for free.
Creative commons sites provide a way around this issue. Their licenses allow the public to use images while leaving certain rights with the creator. The nature of these rights varies; you might just have to give credit to the producer, or you might have to agree not to use the image in question for certain business purposes.
As a rule, you should never use images you find on Google. The owner of the content could take a lawsuit against you if you use their work in breach of the Fair Use policy.
State Bar Rules
If you're designing a law firm website, you should also be aware of your state bar's rules on marketing with images. In Texas, for example, you cannot use stock images of people's faces if visitors might mistake the photo models for attorneys that work at your firm.
The Icing on the Cake
As a lawyer, you might find the science of image selection frustrating. Legal matters are best explained with words, so visuals can sometimes seem like frivolous decorations in law firm marketing content.
However, the benefits are too great to ignore. Simply put, if you want to make the most of your website, you can't afford not to have images on it.
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