Is Your Online Presence Visually Engaging?

Your website must be visually engaging if you want to prevent clients from navigating away from your site.

In their post 3 Reasons Your Blog Needs to Get More Visual, the experts at Social Media Today have examined the importance of visual engagement online and the growing popularity of image-sharing websites. Pinterest and Instagram are welcoming new members by the millions; more users are preferring Tumblr to Twitter. It’s the age of visual marketing, and it’s time for every serious professional to take advantage of shifting trends to maximize hit counts and client retention.

Examining your website

How do you know if your website is visual enough? You should start by examining your layout. While there’s no perfect image-to-text ratio, the right layout will be clean, balanced and easy to read. It will emphasize your most important content without overwhelming the eye.

Some questions to ask yourself: How’s my color scheme? How long does it take the average visitor to scroll? When visiting my site, what’s the first thing a potential client will notice?

The first few seconds are critical. If, for example, you’re a West Virginia bankruptcy attorney, you’ll want your location (WV) and your specialty (bankruptcy) clearly displayed to hook anyone who came through from a search engine.

How to restructure your content

Again, balance is essential. Words will be the foundation of your website, but images are what punctuate and highlight them. You should aim for at least two or three graphics on every page of your website, even if the graphics are only photos or your website’s header and footer.

Resist the temptation to make your site foreboding or overly academic. This is a world accustomed to social networking and easy interface, so user-friendliness is key. Could your mother navigate your website?

Avoid clutter or walls of text. Punctuate your content with images, video or even blown-up quotes from your text. Infographics are another solution; a survey by IDG puts the infographic as one of the fastest-growing marketing strategies on the web, with more than 21 percent of web hosts using them for their blogs and businesses.

Playing the game

Visual engagement has become a necessary weapon in the word of online marketing. The average Internet user is assaulted by hundreds of graphics every time they surf the web. They’re accustomed to ads, images and streaming video as a matter of course. How are you going to make your website different from the rest?