How to make images SEO friendly for your website

Explore the impact of image SEO and best practices for image optimization

There are many facets to successful search engine optimization (SEO) efforts, and while seemingly small, optimizing your images is an important piece of the puzzle when adding it up among your combined SEO efforts. 

Image SEO is often overlooked, but with the recent Google Page Experience update that ranks your pages higher if it provides a good user experience, it’s essential to consider the impact that large file sizes and weak alt attributes can have on your site’s page speed and user experience. 

Join us in learning below as we define image SEO, discuss its importance and detail how to make images SEO friendly for your website. 

What is image SEO? 

Image SEO or image optimization works to improve the images on your business’s website to rank higher on Google Image Search results and boost the visibility and optimization of your web pages.

Conducting image SEO involves a variety of different tasks including choosing accurate file names, adding and optimizing alt or alternative text, reducing file size and more.

Why is image SEO important?

If you want to follow best SEO practices, it’s important to make image optimization a regular part of your ongoing SEO strategy, especially since images are heavily used on websites and often show up above organic search results on the pages you see when you type a search query into a search engine, commonly referred to as Search Engine Results Pages or SERPs for short.

In addition to ranking higher on Google Image Search and boosting the visibility and optimization of your web page, image SEO also: 

• Provides faster loading times to improve the user experience of your website.
• Improves the organic visibility of your page by giving contextual relevance to the images.
• Potentially improves your website’s traffic from Google Image Search.

Related resource:
SEO Glossary: A Beginner’s Guide

How to make images SEO friendly

If you’re familiar with image SEO, you may think all you need to do to complete this SEO task is to add alt text, but image optimization should go far beyond one simple exercise.
Although not complicated once you’ve established a process, there are multiple steps you need to complete to improve your website’s organic performance with image SEO. 

To help you get started, we’ve compiled a simple image SEO process for you to follow to optimize existing images on your website as well as ones that you’ll add in the future:
Step 1: Conduct an image audit and optimization of your website.

Take account of and organize all the images on your website in one place. Accurately conduct an audit of your images and be sure to optimize the following as needed: 

• Rename images with descriptive names.
• Add specific, relevant and unique alt text.
• Resize and reduce image file size. [1]

Once the audit is complete, remove the old images and add the optimized ones to your website.

Step 2: Implement an ongoing image SEO process.

Once you’ve completed your audit and optimized existing images for SEO, remember to implement an ongoing image SEO process for blogs and other images that are added to your website from now on.

As part of this process for consistently optimized images, be sure to:

• Name your images properly.
• Create alt text.
• Resize images to display dimensions.
• Reduce image file sizes.

Mini Case Study: How image SEO improved site speed for Orlando’s leading hyperbaric center

Client:
Hyperbaric Healing Treatment Center

Results: 
By auditing and optimizing the images and performing other technical SEO adjustments on Hyperbaric Healing Treatment Center’s website, we were able to drastically improve the load time speed on all pages on the website, in turn improving the user experience. 

The results of Google PageSpeed Insights showed that the website’s desktop overall performance score—measured on a scale of 0 to 100—increased by 26 points after image optimization:

The results of Google PageSpeed Insights showed that the website’s mobile overall performance score increased by 57 points after image optimization:

“Image SEO should be a key component of any business’s overall SEO efforts. We have seen great success in improving the performance of our clients’ websites by optimizing the existing images. Oftentimes when you make these adjustments, you’ll find that the image files were uploaded at extremely high resolutions that were drastically harming the success of the site, and optimizing them makes a substantial impact,” explains Hugo Azzolini, President of Different Perspective. 

Need to define your SEO strategy?

If you need help understanding how search engine optimization can help your business, a digital marketing agency can help. They’ll guide you through creating the right SEO strategy to correctly structure your website, expand and optimize your content and improve your overall search engine ranking.

At Different Perspective, we help businesses in a variety of industries reach target audiences, gain online visibility, attract new leads and track results with comprehensive SEO services as part of a coordinated digital marketing plan.

Contact us today to learn more.

Source:
1: Semrush | Image SEO and Alt Tags: 7 Advanced Image Optimization Tips To Increase Traffic with Images