By Christian Alvizuris, SEO Account Coordinator
Google Image Search is now the 2nd-largest search property, making up 26.7% (Jumpshot data) of the online search landscape. Additionally, 18.6% (MozCast) of SERPs show Image Pack results. This could prove to be an opportunity loss for businesses who are currently not leveraging image optimization, or are not optimizing their current images properly.
[caption id="attachment_32209" align="aligncenter" width="640"]
This lovely dove will get plenty of clicks if this post becomes popular.[/caption]
Below is a list of some tips and recommendations for optimizing your images for Google Image Search:
Focus on quality and relevance to enhance a user’s experience
- Images that are good quality and appealing can enhance CTR.
- If an image is unappealing, it is less likely to get clicked on. An image that receives more clicks is more likely to rank higher.
- If you are reducing file size, be sure to maintain an image’s quality.
- Most users enjoy zooming in to see image details. Think about your user base when reducing image file sizes.
- Be considerate of the size of an image’s subject, especially when reducing the size to a thumbnail.
- Standard image ratios are 4:3 and 16:9.
- Try to not use stock images.
- Finding an image that is personalized or custom is more likely to get clicked on when comparing to a stock photo.
Optimize your images for Google
- Create a custom, relevant image file name for your photo.
- Google looks at file names when pulling up search results. Use any relevant descriptors, as well as relevant keywords of the visual image content, within your file name.
- Example: A picture of a hummingbird could have the file name of site.com/flying-hummingbird.jpg
- Use image Alt tags.
- Alt tags are HTML attributes used to describe your image and are used in place of the image when it doesn’t render or isn’t displayed.
- Use captions.
- Captions are typically the title or description that get displayed with the image.
- These have proven to help more than alt tags have.
- Fill in descriptions.
- Descriptions are a field that allows for a full explanation of the image, as well as relevant links. Be sure to include any relevant keywords you wish to rank for that match the image (do not keyword stuff).
- Use image sitemaps.
- Using Google image extensions for sitemaps can give Google more information about the images available on your page.
- Provide good context for the image.
- The page the image is on, as well as the content around the image (captions, image titles), provides search engines with important information about the subject matter of your image.
- Leverage org markup.
- Ensure usage of all available markups to increase machine readability.
- Optimize image file size.
- In addition to focusing on UX, images are one of the most common ways page size increases.
- JPG files are typically smaller than PNG files, but PNG files can offer a higher resolution.
- Optimize Page Title.
- Page titles are an additional way Google understands the context and theme of images.
- If you can, it’s recommended to have page titles that are thematically related to your image.
- Optimize Page URL.
- Similar to page titles, if the page URL is also thematically related to the image, this will help the image’s propensity to rank in image search.
- Know the correlation of image popularity/engagement.
- The more engagement an image gets, such as clicks, the more search engines conclude that this is a more popular, relevant image for that query; this coincides with higher ranking.
- Use standard image dimensions.
- As noted above, standard image ratios are 4:3 and 16:9.
- Know the correlation of host page ranking.
- If the page an image lives on is ranking well in web results, the image will generally perform well in image results.
