Boost Your Brand: How to Choose the Perfect Stock Photos for Your Website
The Power of Imagery in Website Design
In today's digital age, your website's imagery can make or break its appeal. High-quality images add a visual dimension to your brand, making your site more engaging and memorable. A well-chosen stock photo can speak volumes about your product or service, helping you connect with your audience on a deeper level.
If you can’t invest in a full brand photoshoot yet, stock images are a great way to round out your visuals and supplement those you have. Of course, you should still have a professional, branded headshot to use on your website and across social media so people know who you are.
The trick isn't finding stock photography (it's all over the internet), but finding the right stock images and making them work for your website.
Curating the Perfect Stock Photos for Your Brand
With countless free and paid stock photo websites available, finding the perfect images can be overwhelming. Not all photos will fit your brand’s unique style and tone. Here’s how to ensure your choices align perfectly with your brand:
Align with Your Brand’s Tone: Choose images that reflect your brand’s personality and messaging.
Target Your Audience: Select photos that resonate with your target demographic.
Quality Matters: While free stock photo websites offer great options, paid sites often provide a wider range of high-quality, unique images.
The collection of stock images below demonstrates how different feelings and styles can vary significantly. Notice that they don’t all fit together seamlessly. When choosing stock photos for your site, aim to create a cohesive collection of images that appear to belong together. Start with a broad selection and then narrow it down. The final set should look as if they could have all been taken on the same day by the same photographer.
Customize Your Images
Even stock photos can be made unique with a few creative touches like overlays, added text, and cropping (as long as you’re following the rules).
Here are some fun ways to add interest to your images and make them stand out:
Add an Overlay in a Brand Color: This can tie the photo to your brand’s visual identity.
Incorporate Text: Create fun graphics or pinnable images by adding text.
Creative Cropping: Crop your image in different ways to get multiple uses out of it.
Showcase Your Products: Add your own products to the image to highlight your work.
Using these techniques with your stock photographs can help create images that people will recognize as uniquely yours without having to take the photos yourself. This is a great way to maximize the value of the images you invest in, allowing you to purchase fewer but use them more flexibly.
Don’t Forget to Infuse Some SEO
Prep your images for optimal SEO to help people find you online. Making these simple tweaks are an easy, but impact-heavy way to boost your SEO.
Use descriptive file names: Name your image files using descriptive keywords to help search engines understand the content of the image.
Add alt text: Include descriptive alt text for each image, as this improves accessibility for visually impaired users and provides additional context for search engines to improve on-site SEO.
Compress images: Use image compression tools, such as TinyPNG or ImageOptim, to reduce file sizes without losing quality, thus improving website loading times.
Use proper image formats: Choose the appropriate image format for your website (e.g., JPEG for photographs, PNG for illustrations, or logos) to maintain image quality and optimize file sizes.
Do’s and Don’ts of Using Stock Photos
When incorporating stock photos into your website, keep these tips in mind:
Do: Ensure relevance. Choose images that complement your content and serve a purpose.
Don’t: Overuse stock photos. Too many can make your website look inauthentic.
Do: Credit the photographer or source, especially when using free stock images. You can easily do this by adding it to your footer, or creating a “site credit” page listing your designer, photographer, copywriting etc.
Don’t: Choose images solely for their visual appeal; they must align with your brand’s narrative.
Looking for the best sites to source your stock photos? Check out this blog post!
