How often do you think of optimizing your content for image search? While it’s common to hear people talk about optimization to rank on SERP, it’s also important for photo centric brands to focus on image optimization, Image SEO.
What if a single image in your blog post can bring a lot more visitors to your website? Sounds good right! But why is it necessary to show the images in your blog/website in Google Search? What is the advantage that you will get out of that?
Basically, if a user searches for a certain search term or as we call it, Keyword, the right optimization of your website images can lead up to the relevant image matching the search term showing up on Google’s top search results. Often, the enquirer will switch to clicking on ‘Images’ for a refined result. Users tend to click lesser on images and use image search option for mainly browsing. This is an opportunity for an image heavy site or an image related business to capitalize on other platforms that allow image uploads. Like Pinterest, Flickr, Instagram.
Our client is from a Photography industry and is based out in Delhi. This picture above shows you a comparison of web search and image search over the last 3 months for their website and as you can clearly see the monumental difference in impressions between both.
Don’t get stuck up with thoughts like only web search will end up in clicks and that only clicks matters, impressions don’t. These are grandma’s tales.
We have shared with you tips on Image Optimisation that you can apply to your website straight away.
First and foremost, use the relevant, good traffic keywords that you have shortlisted or chosen for your brand in every of the below optimization steps.
Image File Names: Use a descriptive file name which represents your images. Avoid the image file name with random numbers and letters. The file names can give Google clues about the subject matter of images.
Alt Text: Give an Alt text that describes your image clearly. And if you own a product website, it is a good idea to add the product or model number in the alt text. Google knows what product you’re looking for based on a search for the product number alone.
– Use a short text
– Use the Main keyword but never do keyword stuffing
– Don’t Use ‘image of’ or ‘picture of’ in your alt text
Description: Give a brief description for your image which serves the relevance of your content. If your images are descriptive enough with proper keyword, it will lead to a click
Title: Give accurate title for the image with your main keyword.
Image Caption: A caption is a small text that is used to define the image attached and is often placed at the bottom of the picture. Don’t miss out to give a caption.
Image Type: JPEG images are more SEO friendly than PNG images
Image Size and Optimization: Image optimization is the way toward making and conveying top-notch pictures in the perfect size and resolution to improve the user experience. It additionally includes Boosting of SEO Rankings. Resize the images and optimize with Maximum width you need. The size depends on your site dimensions. There are some online tools like Imageoptim, Short pixel, TinyPNG which are best for image compression.
Create Image Sitemap: Is there any way search engine discover your images easily? Yes, creating your image sitemap and submitting it to search engines which increase the likelihood of images appearing in search results.
Utilize Schema Markup: Did you know that schema markup is also relevant for Image SEO? Google says ‘If you have images on your site, you can help users with recognizing the sort of content related to the picture by utilizing properly structured data on your pages. This helps users with finding significant content quickly, and sends better-focused traffic to your site.’
Here is the link of what google says about Schema Markup: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2017/08/badges-on-image-search-help-users-find.html