Welcome back! This is John Locke, and today, I'm analyzing an article that I came across
called "Does the Hero Image Matter?" This is on the 3.7designs.co blog. I just found this
very interesting. Now, if you watched the video that we did yesterday, where we were talking
about analyzing what's on the page, elements in the page, there are going to be some cases
where it is important to have a hero image. But this article talks specifically about how
certain hero images perform, and let's go over it really quick, what this article says. So,
it talks about how a lot of websites incorporate the hero image, and this is more like a banner,
but usually, the hero image is like a big, full-width, full-height image that appears
at the top of the page. Usually, it's on the home page or another landing page. Usually,
it's got some sort of call-to-action headlines, and usually, what they're talking about in this
article is selecting the right imagery to elicit the right type of emotional response.
So, in this case, “We’ll help your website and digital marketing efforts soar.” has a picture
of a balloon. The text over here to the left, call-to-action buttons to the left, and again,
most people read in this F shape where they read the top corner and then over to the right and then
down. So, this F shape is how people read. The headline here, call-to-action buttons,
image over here, so it's a metaphor for making the efforts or the balloon goes up. Okay, so it's
usually the first thing you're going to see on the homepage. And what they're talking about is often,
this is a cause of a lot of attention, a lot of debate, a lot of consideration during the
web design process, and especially if you're dealing with clients that are
really particular about what image you're going to show and how it affects people.
So, what they were talking about in 2017, it was a study where they were looking at a client's
website and there was a lot of talk about what are we going to put in here? Oh, an image! So,
they decided to go with three different ones. They were looking at these three images:
it was either going to be this one here with these kind of blocks, I guess, or a blue, red,
and yellowish screen, or this image of the hand holding the crystal ball and the city reflected
upside down. Interestingly enough, you see that over here, the text is in the center,
over here, the text is on the right, which is kind of opposite of that F shape that
we're talking about, or this one with the cityscape. We see these a lot in stock
photography with the text on the left and the square emotive that we saw here. Obviously,
this is part of the design. I don't know anything about this company; I'm just noticing that these
squares appear here and they appear there. But to me, this one is not really compelling.
I mean, to me, this one's okay. To me, this is like the most visually interesting. Okay,
so I guess there's an explanation here. This is talking about the brand elements, and the colors
are different service groups. I would have never known that. This one is talking about a metaphor
of seeing the world through a different lens and different perspective. Well, I guess there are
little squares here. I guess I didn't notice them before, but they're there. And then this one was
the baseline concept focusing on innovative and growing city. But what they did to say,
tested it using metrics like average page view per session, average time on site per session,
and bounce rate. So, they ran it for 53 days and the 1,382 sessions (that's how many times people
saw that page). This was the winner as far as engagement. That would have been my first choice
too as far as an image that elicits an emotional response and is just visually interesting. You've
heard us talk about this before where design is a part of SEO. This used science to back it up. They
used the split test with three different ones, and this was the most interesting.
This had the most engagement, led to the lowest bounce rate, or the best engagement metrics. So,
those who saw this as the first image on the site consumed 26% more pages compared to the
baseline of the cityscape, and the one with the red, green, and blue screen was only nine
percent more. That's interesting. And then people stayed on the site 43 percent longer with this,
the crystal ball in the lens upside-down city. People stayed on the site 43 percent longer,
and again, the idea with the squares of the red, the blue, and the yellow screen was
a nine percent improvement. Bounce rate, no change. So, this means that imagery can make
a difference in how people behave on your site. I just thought it was very interesting what they
used. I think it was they said tools like Google Optimize make it extremely easy to run tests such
as these. So, there are a couple of comments here I wanted to look at - one person said,
"did you also test against no image? I would be curious to find out how this test, no image versus
image, would perform nowadays where mobile traffic share is so high." And I think what they're saying
is you'd save a little bit of speed or bandwidth by not loading that image. That would be like one
asset that you would not load. And granted, like photography images are usually the heaviest part
of the page, but I would probably shy away from that if that was me because as we talked about in
the last video, you don't want to go against the pattern of things that Google is already ranking.
So, if the majority of sites have a hero area like this, they have a full-width,
almost full-height image with some headline and maybe like a little tagline here, maybe a
call-to-action button. You don't really want to go against that grain and have nothing because Google
might be looking for those, because it's a pattern of data looking at all the different sites that
it's looked at in that specific category for that query. Sites with the hero image might do better,
and so they might be looking for that as something to give, just one data point,
give it like a little extra push. So, I would, you could test that, but that would probably be
something that I would shy away from doing at all if all the other sites in my category had a hero
image. I hope you find this interesting. I will link this up in show notes. I would love to hear
your thoughts. Web Design does make a difference, and again, pattern matching is something that we
preach a lot here. Anyway, my name is John Locke, my business is "Lockedown SEO". I'm here every
single day making videos on SEO. Thank you to all the new subscribers that have come on recently,
I really appreciate it. We'll be here tomorrow. That's all I have for now. Until next time, peace.