You may recognize keywords, SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) headings, white-hat, and black-hat as part of SEO jargon. You should place image SEO squarely in your vocabulary as well.
Image SEO can enhance or detract from your online visibility, traffic, and conversions. It would be best if you familiarized yourself with how to optimize your images. Remember that having images on your site can help you as much as good content does.
Romain Berg is a comprehensive digital marketing agency dedicated to delivering results, not hype. Our expert content and design teams can help you convert browsers into loyal customers. You can expect the team to maximize your image quality, consistency, loading speed, and more as part of a superior SEO strategy.
Contact us today, and we’ll be in touch to create a customized digital marketing plan for your business or organization.
Images are non-negotiable
When you scroll online, what catches your eye more: A wall of words describing a product or a detailed, quality picture of the product? Of course, it’s the picture.
Indeed, Google and other search engines utilize user experience metrics to help rank your site. Displaying quality, relevant images among your web (and social media) content improves the user’s experience.
How does that happen? When your site visitors encounter detailed product imagery, brilliant photography, or pictures of happy people using your products and services, they stick around longer. (This metric is called the “bounce rate.”)
Google notices when users stay glued to your pages. The longer people stay on your page, the more Google assumes that your site is trustworthy and authoritative.
When it appears that more people trust you online, your rank improves. You can see how quality images could make or break that authority.
What type of imagery will help my SEO the most?
Choosing your images depends on several factors:
- Page purpose: Your photos will differ between your product pages, Home Page, or About section.
- Target audience: Images on social media may lean more towards the creative and curated side. Think Canva tiles, product images, or “candid” shots to boost audience engagement. However, website photos should showcase your professional side.
- Desired Results: Do you want your images to convert more customers, grow your audience, or build awareness around your company mission?
Getting clear on these criteria will help you curate and publish images that draw your audience to your brand and help them stay engaged.
On your website, think about using images to break up massive word blocks in your content. This aesthetic applies to every page on your site, including all of your blog posts.
Each heading could include a relevant photo, preferably at or near the top of the page. As a rule of thumb, add three or four images for every one thousand words you type in a blog article. Make sure to space them equally throughout the text and not clump them together.
What all images should have in common
Whether you have a custom photoshoot or use stock images, your pictures should check all of the following boxes:
- Authenticity: DO invest in a professional photoshoot for you and your team. Using stock photos when you could use the real thing does not build trust with your audience. Your potential customers and clients want to know who’s behind the website in real life.
- Formatting: Using JPG files for larger photos is a smart quality choice. PNG-type images help preserve background clarity. WebP could be useful if you want to decrease file size without losing quality.
- Relevance and File name: When you’ve selected an image for your blog post, place it near a relevant section, and name the photo aptly. (I.e., do not leave your file name as a random-number-dot-PNG.) Rename your photo to reflect what it shows. For example, an image of a horse running in a field could have a file name of horse-running-field-sunset.png. This practice will improve your SEO and boost your rank over time.
- Device responsiveness: Images can appear differently depending on the viewing screen. As you’re building or updating your site, be sure that the images you select work well on mobile and desktop screens. Platforms like Wix and WordPress include this feature in their service.
- Image loading speed: Waiting around for images to load only invites your users to leave faster. Shrinking your image file size can optimize page loading speeds and help your audience remain engaged. Googling “photo resizer” will give you various paid and free tools for image file shrinking. Some of these tools offer formatting conversion without compromising the image quality, too.
Captions, alt titles, and alt text
The information behind the images you use can help or hinder your SEO. Here’s what to remember:
Photo captions can be optional.
Most blog post images do not use captions because images should capture the context of the content. A caption is usually redundant and does not impact your SEO here.
Always use Alt text.
For vision-impaired users, alt text is critical to the user experience. Describing your images in detail for these users is the right thing to do.
Plus, Google and other search engines do not “see” your photos, but they respond to your description of them. Be sure to include a keyword or phrase in your alt attributes, and use as much descriptive detail as possible.
Alt-text is also helpful for users who’ve disabled web browser images. Alt-text is available on many website-hosting platforms. After uploading an image to your site, you should discover how to edit your pictures to include alt text easily. Click the photo and get to work.
Hire a professional team for the best Image SEO
Image SEO presents a rabbit hole of technical options for business owners. This article includes most of the actions you can take to make your images and website more visible without a lot of effort or time.
Contact Romain Berg for a deeper, more comprehensive dive into image SEO that increases your traffic and conversions reliably. You could spend more time on image SEO, but why not leave it to the pros at Romain Berg?
When you fill out our contact form, we’ll reach out with unbeatable SEO and content strategy. We drive our success on search metrics you can use to target your marketing dollars to get the highest possible ROI. Start enjoying the results you deserve with Romain Berg.
