Image SEO Tips

What Is Image SEO?

Image SEO involves optimizing images to increase traffic from search engines. For instance, optimizing for image SEO can enhance your site’s ranking on Google Images.

As illustrated below, Semrush holds the second position in Google Images for “ecommerce keyword research tool.”

Improving image SEO can also enhance accessibility on your site, which is increasingly mandated by law in various countries.

This article will demonstrate how to add alt text, reduce image file size for faster loading times, leverage structured image data, and more.

Let’s delve into the significance of image SEO optimization. Subsequently, we’ll provide actionable tips for implementation on your own webpages.

Why Are Images So Important?

Google Image searches constitute 22.6% of all searches.

Therefore, it’s vital to focus on your Image SEO; neglecting it means missing out on a substantial portion of potential traffic.

Image SEO can generate significant traffic to your site through two primary avenues:

Firstly, optimized images enhance the likelihood of ranking in Google Images.

Secondly, images play a crucial role in on-page SEO.

Google is increasingly displaying images in regular search results, frequently prioritizing them over traditional organic results.

Consider the results for the keyword “white Toyota Land Cruiser” below—observe the prevalence of images before the initial website link.

Moreover, images aid users in comprehending and interacting with your written content, while also assisting in breaking up extensive blocks of text.

Few things are less engaging than a dense block of several thousand words.

Now, let’s delve into one of the most critical aspects of image SEO: alt text.

What Is Alt Text?

Alt text, also known as alternative text, is a written description of an image.

SEO practitioners often refer to alt text as “alt attributes” or “alt tags.”

Optimized alt text plays a crucial role in enabling Google to rank your images on Google Images. This is because alt text allows you to inform Google about the content of the image.

Moreover, alt text can enhance your site’s accessibility for users and provide an explanation of what an image should depict in case the image fails to load.

Take a look at this example from the University of Dayton. You can see how an image looks when it loads correctly, when it’s broken and has no alt text, and when it’s broken but has alt text:

Alt text can enhance your site’s SEO performance by providing additional relevance signals to a webpage. This assists Google in better comprehending the context of an image, thereby aiding in determining how to rank the page.