Image SEO
A Beginner’s Guide to Optimising Your Images for Search Engines
Image SEO is an important part of any optimisation strategy and can be largely overlooked.
A well-placed image can capture attention, convey complex information, and drive engagement in ways that text alone cannot. But are your images working as hard as they could be? In fact, images can impact organic rankings. This is where image SEO comes in – the art and science of optimising your visuals to ensure they’re not just beautiful but also discoverable by search engines and appealing to users.
This guide delves into the world of image SEO, providing you with the knowledge and practical steps to unlock the full potential of your visual content. From understanding the fundamentals to mastering advanced techniques, you’ll learn how to boost your website’s visibility, improve user experience, and ultimately, drive more traffic and conversions.
What is Image SEO?
Image SEO is the process of optimising images to improve their visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs). It involves a range of techniques designed to help search engines like Google understand, index, and rank your images effectively.
By implementing image SEO best practices, you increase the likelihood of your images appearing for relevant search queries, driving targeted traffic to your website.
Key tactics include:
1. Resizing and compressing images
2. Giving images descriptive file names
3. Adding alternative text (alt text) to images
Why is Image SEO Important?
Image SEO offers a multitude of benefits, making it a crucial component of any comprehensive SEO strategy.
Improved Accessibility
Descriptive alt text makes your website more accessible to users with visual impairments who rely on screen readers. By providing context for your images, you ensure that everyone can understand and appreciate your content.
Traffic Generation: Images have the potential to drive significant traffic, especially with the rise of SERP features like Featured Snippets that display images prominently. Many users start their search on Google Images, so optimising your images can lead to increased visibility and clicks.
Enhanced User Experience
High-quality images break up large blocks of text, making your content more engaging and visually appealing. Images can also provide context, illustrate complex concepts, and enhance the overall user experience.
Impact on Organic Rankings
Search engines like Google use various factors to rank websites, including image optimisation. By optimising your images, you provide valuable signals to search engines, improving your chances of ranking higher in both image and web-based search results. A Google survey found that 90% of people are more likely to purchase from businesses that have photos included in their organic or local results.
Where Can Images Appear in Search?
Images can appear in various places across Google’s search results and platforms, offering multiple opportunities to reach your target audience.
Google Images
This is the dedicated image search engine where users can specifically search for images. Optimising your images for Google Images can drive significant traffic to your website.
Google Lens
This visual search tool allows users to search using images instead of text. By optimising your images, you can increase your chances of appearing in Google Lens results when users search for visually similar content.
Standard Search Results
Images are often displayed within standard search results pages (SERPs), either as thumbnails alongside text results or as image packs. These visual elements can draw user attention and increase click-through rates.
Knowledge Panels
Well-known brands, entities, and places of interest may have a knowledge panel result, which is a rectangular result at the right of the screen containing information including a logo.
Google Business Profiles
Eligible businesses that serve customers face to face can create a Google Business Profile, which contains multiple areas of imagery.
Image carousels
Side-scrolling results are still common when they stem from paid advertising.
Social Media
Visual SEO benefits connections on social media sites.
“Top Stories”
Eligible journalistic enterprises may see their latest news and images included in a “Top Stories” feature.
Finding or Creating Useful Images
The foundation of any successful image SEO strategy lies in using high-quality, relevant images that provide value to your audience.
Original Images
Whenever possible, use original images rather than stock photos. Original images offer unique value, helping your website stand out and giving Google more reason to rank you higher.
Types of Images:
Photos: Showcase products, break up text, and add visual interest.
Graphic Designs: Convey abstract ideas and concepts.
Charts and Graphs: Display complex data in an easily digestible format.
Icons: Improve website navigation and usability.
Logos: Strengthen your brand identity.
Screenshots: Provide clear instructions and examples.
Copyright
If you use images created by others, ensure you have the necessary permissions and licenses. Violating copyright laws can lead to legal trouble and damage your reputation.
Choosing the Right Image Format
Selecting the appropriate image format is crucial for balancing image quality with file size. Different formats offer varying levels of compression, transparency support, and animation capabilities.
PNG: Uses lossless compression, preserving image quality and supporting transparency. Ideal for logos, images with text, and images requiring high detail.
JPEG: Uses lossy compression, reducing file size but potentially sacrificing some image quality. Suitable for photographs and images where file size is a priority.
WebP: Developed by Google, WebP offers both lossy and lossless compression with superior efficiency compared to JPEG and PNG. Provides smaller file sizes at comparable quality levels.
GIF: Uses lossless compression but is limited to 256 colours. Best suited for simple animations and graphics.
BMP: Produces large, uncompressed image files with very high quality. Not typically used for websites due to their large size, which can slow down page loading times.
Optimising Image File Names
Image file names provide valuable context to search engines, helping them understand the subject matter of the image.
Descriptive File Names: Use descriptive, keyword-rich file names that accurately reflect the image’s content.
Best Practices:
1. Include relevant keywords.
2. Keep file names concise.
3. Use hyphens to separate words.
4. Localise file names for multilingual content.
Writing SEO-Friendly Alt Text
Alt text (alternative text) is an HTML attribute that provides a text alternative for images when they cannot be displayed. It serves several important purposes:
Accessibility
Alt text ensures that visually impaired users can understand the content of images using screen readers.
SEO
Alt text helps search engines understand the context of the image and its relevance to the surrounding content.
User Experience
Alt text is displayed when an image fails to load, providing users with a description of what the image was intended to show.
Best Practices:
1. Write alt text for functional (not decorative) images.
2. Keep it concise (under 125 characters).
3. Include relevant keywords naturally.
4. Avoid keyword stuffing.
5. Describe aspects of the image that are important in context.
Optimising Page Title and Description
The page title and description play a significant role in image SEO, as Google uses them to understand the context of the image and its relevance to the search query.
Importance
Google uses the page title and description as part of its image search algorithm.
Best Practices: Follow Google’s guidelines for creating quality title links and snippets:
1. Write descriptive and relevant title tags.
2. Craft compelling meta descriptions that summarise the page content.
3. Keep titles and descriptions concise to avoid truncation in search results.
Defining Image Dimensions
Specifying image dimensions using the width and height attributes in the <img> tag is crucial for preventing Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) issues. CLS refers to unexpected shifts in page content as it loads, which can negatively impact user experience and Core Web Vitals.
Importance
Image dimension attributes prevent Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) issues, improving Core Web Vitals.
Technical Details
Use the width and height attributes in the <img> tag.
Creating an Image Sitemap
An image sitemap is an XML file that lists all the images on your website, providing search engines with a clear roadmap to discover and index your visual content.
Purpose: Image sitemaps help search engines crawl and index images, increasing their visibility in search results.
Implementation
Create a separate image sitemap or add image sitemap tags to your existing sitemap.
Include the <image:loc> tag to specify the URL of each image.
Submit your sitemap to search engines via Google Search Console.
If you’re using WordPress, Yoast and RankMath offer a sitemap solution in their plugin.
Adding Structured Data
Structured data, also known as schema markup, is a standardised format for providing information about a page and its content to search engines.
By adding structured data to your images, you can enhance their visibility and provide search engines with valuable context.
Benefits
Structured data enhances webpages by helping search engines deliver better visual results.
Examples
Include images with details like price, availability, and ratings in product schema.
Add image schema in Article schema with multiple sizes to enhance the visibility of your articles in Google Discover and different devices in Google Search.
Leveraging Content Delivery Networks (CDNs)
A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a network of servers distributed across the globe that stores and delivers your website’s content, including images, to users based on their geographic location.
Functionality: CDNs host images on multiple servers globally, improving delivery speed.
Benefits:
1. Faster loading times.
2. Improved user experience.
3. Reduced server load.
4. Improved search engine crawling.
Ensuring Responsiveness
In today’s mobile-first world, it’s essential to ensure that your images look good across a wide range of devices, from smartphones to desktops.
Importance
Images should look good across various devices.
Techniques
Use responsive image scaling.
Utilise the srcset attribute to provide different image versions for different screen sizes.
Employ the <picture> element to specify different image sources based on device capabilities.
Utilising OpenGraph and X(Twitter) Cards
OpenGraph and X(Twitter) Cards are meta tags that control how your pages are previewed when shared on social media platforms like Facebook, X, and LinkedIn.
Purpose
OpenGraph meta tags ensure optimal previews when pages are shared on social media.
Required Properties:
1. og:title: Specifies the title that should appear in the preview.
2. og:type: Specifies the type of object (e.g., “article”).
3. og:image: Specifies the URL of the image for the preview.
4. og:url: Specifies the URL of the page.
Optimising for Speed and Quality
Balancing image quality with file size is crucial for delivering a positive user experience. High-quality images are visually appealing, but large file sizes can slow down page loading times, leading to frustration and abandonment.
Balancing Act: High-quality images appeal to users, but large file sizes can slow down pages.
Techniques:
1. Compress images to reduce file size without sacrificing too much quality.
2. Use the latest image optimisation techniques.
3. Implement responsive images to serve appropriately sized images to different devices.
Being Mindful of Copyright
Respecting copyright laws is essential when using images on your website. Using copyrighted images without permission can lead to legal repercussions and damage your brand’s reputation.
Legal Risks: Highlight the importance of avoiding copyright conflicts.
DMCA: Explain the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and the consequences of violating copyright laws.
Tools for Image SEO
Several tools are available to simplify and streamline the image SEO process.
Image Compression Tools: These tools help reduce image file sizes without sacrificing too much quality.
Site Speed Analysis Tools: These tools help you identify slow-loading pages and images, allowing you to optimise them for better performance.
Structured Data Testing Tools: These tools allow you to test and validate your structured data markup, ensuring that it’s implemented correctly.
Key Takeaways
Before you upload your images, remember these key image optimisation rituals:
Choose the right file format: Select the format that best suits the image type and purpose.
Serve the right file size: Optimise images for faster page load speed.
Pair on-page SEO elements with the image: Ensure that your metadata, header tags, and structured data align with the image content.
Ensure crawlability with an image sitemap: Help search engines discover and index your images.
Image SEO is an indispensable element of a successful online marketing strategy. By implementing the techniques outlined in this guide, you can ensure that your images are not only visually appealing but also discoverable by search engines and engaging for users. As Google continues to prioritise visual content in search results, investing in image SEO will become increasingly crucial for driving traffic, improving user experience, and achieving your online marketing goals.
Now you have the tools to smash your image seo – it’s time to look at the url structure of your site: