Quality content coupled with effective image SEO is crucial for website success for any business. Of course you’ll need to regularly post articles and blogs, as well as regularly refresh your general website content, but it’s important your website doesn’t look boring in comparison to your competitors.
Imagery will make your website more visibly appealing to your user base, but it’s the image SEO that will help thrust your website to the top of organic search engine results. Keep reading to learn more about why image SEO is beneficial for your website along with our checklist for successfully uploading images to your site.
Why are images important on a website?
Images on a website are important for so many reasons other than visual appeal. To build brand character, you need imagery with consistency. For a more memorable experience, images can help visualise that, making it an easier and naturally flowing website. Images play a huge role in social media marketing too with Instagram being a great example of fine image marketing.
The rise of visual search has also highlighted the importance of adding images (and videos too) to your website content. Platforms like Google Lens are enabling users to search for content using images, meaning the need for adding multimedia to your website and optimising it is crucial for search engines and people to find you online.
Not only is optimising your images crucial, but adding embedded information to them (also known as alt-tag or alt-text) is also key as this is a vital form of metadata. Imagery metadata is a common SEO tactic and is displayed when a user hovers their cursor over an image. This is where users are shown more information on the image and it’s also where you’ll want to include your target keywords where possible as this will most certainly help to boost your organic rankings.
What are the benefits of image SEO?
As we’ve already mentioned, imagery can be used as a better way to tell a story quickly and is far more visually appealing and engaging than words. Here are some of the other benefits of conducting SEO for images.
Higher search engine rankings
Search engines like Google crawl and index your website to determine your ranking based on how relevant your content is for users. By adding relevant images to your web pages and optimising them for SEO, it adds more contextual information to your content, meaning you’re more likely to be shown in search engine result pages (SERPs).
Increased website traffic
When you improve the relevance of your content via image SEO, it will affect the success of your images being discovered, crawled and indexed by search engines. This will ultimately mean you’ll rank higher in SERPs, meaning more people will visit your site.
Improved user experience
User friendly SEO images attract more visitors even more than text does, and when they’re optimised correctly – this includes file type, size and resolution – it provides a better user experience for your customers. This is because it helps towards the load speed of your web page which attracts and engages your audience.
Our checklist for successfully uploading images
When it comes to optimising your images for SEO, there are plenty of factors to consider. It might seem as simple as just uploading a few images onto your website, but there’s more to it. It’s about using the right image formats, ensuring the correct resolution, and resizing the image appropriately that are vital factors.
Images can significantly impact load speed times and by resizing in the right resolution, using a supported image format can make all the difference to that along with user experience and SEO overall. This in turn will help boost consumer confidence and help to increase your conversion rate on your site.
Here’s our checklist for you to keep in mind when your uploading your images and conducting image SEO:
- Ensure the file size of your image is kept to a minimum to help increase page load speed
- Use supportive image formats for your content management system (CMS), such as .jpg, or .png
- Keep your image resolution appropriate for clear and crisp images
- Add your target keywords and optimise your alt-tags as part of your image SEO efforts
- If it’s necessary to add captions to your images, keep them short and descriptive
- Make sure your images are original and relevant to your content as this is key to ranking well in SERPs
Optimising your images is crucial and using the above checklist will help improve your organic search performance. This is even more vital if you want to stay competitive in search rankings.
As mentioned above, you should also try to stick to using your own original imagery if possible. This is because using stock images for SEO will not have the same effect that original images will. Your images also need to be relevant to you and your brand. For example, images of your facilities or stores can have a significant impact and will also increase the value of your blogs, landing pages, and articles.
Want to learn more about image SEO?
The message is clear and simple – images can have just as much affect as anything else on a website can! If you want a successful and effective website, conducting regular image SEO is crucial as it will help you reach the top of SERPs.
If you’d like to learn more about image SEO, be sure to contact us today. We know keeping a website flowing can be time-consuming, so why not see how our digital marketing experts can help your business.