Image SEO: 13 Actionable Tips for Optimizing Images in 2023

What is Image SEO?

Image SEO is the practice of optimizing images to be easily discovered and indexed by search engines. It involves choosing the right file format, reducing file size without compromising quality, using descriptive file names, and implementing relevant alt text. Proper image optimization ensures faster website loading times, better user experience, and improved rankings in search engine results.

Businesses that hired a professional SEO company for image optimization got 60% better results as compared to businesses that did not.

Images are an integral part of any website, not just for aesthetics but also for conveying information. As the web becomes increasingly visual, the importance of image SEO has grown proportionally. Just as text on a website can be optimized to appear in search engine results, images can be optimized to appear in image search results.

But, it’s not only about visibility. When images are properly optimized, they load faster, ensuring that users don’t leave your site due to slow-loading visuals. Moreover, descriptive file names and alt text provide context, which can be particularly helpful for visually impaired users relying on screen readers.

Why Is Image SEO Important?

Image SEO is important for several compelling reasons:

• User Experience: Properly optimized images ensure faster website load times and a smoother browsing experience for visitors.
• User Expectations and Shopping Habits: According to Google, individuals who search and shop on their smartphones atleast 1X per week highlight product images as their most-relied-upon feature. This underscores the significance of images in the user’s purchase journey and decision-making process.
• Rising Image Search Trends: Over the past two years, there’s been a remarkable 60% growth in mobile searches for “image search”. This substantial increase indicates that users are actively seeking visual content, and image SEO ensures your visuals are prominently positioned in their search results.
• SEO Rankings: Search engines, like Google, factor in image optimization when determining page rankings. Thus, optimized images can boost a page’s overall SEO.
• Accessibility: Alt texts in images make content more accessible to users with visual impairments, broadening the audience reach and adhering to web accessibility standards.

Given these trends, Image SEO becomes a cornerstone in ensuring that your visual content is both discoverable and relevant, catering to the modern user’s preferences.

13 Tips to Optimize Images for Search Engines

Choose Supported Image Format

Different image formats have unique benefits and weaknesses. WebP is good for compressing images without losing much quality. JPEG is popular for photos because it finds a middle ground between quality and file size, but it can lose some details when compressed too much. PNG is favored for its transparency features, but it can result in bigger file sizes compared to other formats.

WebP images without quality loss are 26% smaller than PNGs. When some quality is sacrificed, WebP images are 25-34% smaller than similar JPEG images with the same quality level.

Picking the right format improves both user experience and search engine performance. Always match the format with the image’s purpose.

Benefits of Choosing the Right Image Format:

• Improved Site Performance: Optimal formats ensure images load quickly and display properly, leading to satisfied visitors.
• Enhanced SEO Performance: Search engines reward sites that use efficient and web-friendly image formats, potentially boosting rankings.
• Reduced Page Load Time: Properly formatted images are often smaller in size, leading to faster page load times.
• Preserved Image Quality: Selecting the right format can maintain high-quality visuals while still benefiting from compression.
• Broad Compatibility: Certain formats are universally supported, ensuring all users can view your images irrespective of their device or browser.

How to Implement the Right Image Format:

1. Research the Basics: Familiarize yourself with common formats like JPEG, PNG, and WebP. Understand the strengths and limitations of each.
2. Assess Your Needs: Determine what’s more important for each image – quality, transparency, or file size.
3. Use Image Editing Tools: Tools like Photoshop or online converters can help you save images in your desired format.
4. Test Across Devices: Before finalizing, check how your images display on various devices and browsers.
5. Stay Updated: Image format best practices can change. Keep an eye on updates or new formats that become popular.

Choosing the right image format can impact both user interaction and search engine rankings. By following the guidance provided, your site can offer clear visuals and is better positioned for higher visibility in search outcomes. Simple decisions in image formatting can lead to improved user engagement and SEO success.

Use Descriptive Filenames

Name your image files descriptively and in plain language. When naming image files for your website, choosing clear and relevant names can improve your website’s SEO.

Bad

Good

Here’s why naming your image files descriptively is important.

• Search Engines Read Filenames: Search engines like Google use image filenames as a clue to understand the content. A well-named file can give search engines more context about the image, which can contribute to better search rankings.
• User Experience: If a user downloads or sees the image filename, a descriptive name offers a clear idea about the image’s content. For instance, “red-apple-on-table.jpg” immediately lets the user know what the image represents, whereas “IMG1234.jpg” offers no context.
• Keyword Opportunity: Naming files descriptively offers an opportunity to incorporate relevant keywords. If you’re writing about apples and your image is appropriately named, it reinforces the content’s theme.
• Organization: For webmasters and content creators, descriptive filenames make it easier to manage and locate specific images in directories.

Steps to Implement:

1. Before uploading, rename your image to describe its content.
2. Use hyphens (-) between words for better readability.
3. Avoid using non-alphanumeric characters or spaces in filenames.

Remember, while filenames play a role in image SEO, they’re just one part of a holistic approach. Combine it with other best practices, like adding alt text and compressing images, for a comprehensive strategy.

Add Alt Text

Alt-text Alt text, short for “alternative text,” is a brief description added to an image’s HTML code. It describes the content and function of an image.

Here’s why alt text matters and how to utilize it:

• Search Engines Value Alt Text: Search engines can’t “see” images like humans. Alt text provides them with a description of the image, aiding in understanding its content. This can help in ranking your images and content more effectively in search results.
• Google uses alt text along with computer vision algorithms and the contents of the page to understand the subject matter of the image.
• Accessibility: For visually impaired users, screen readers use alt text to describe images, enhancing the accessibility and usability of your website.
• Backup for Image Failures: If an image fails to load on a user’s device, the alt text will display in its place, giving users context about what the image represents.
• Keyword Integration: Properly used alt text can be a subtle way to integrate relevant keywords, reinforcing the content’s topic without keyword stuffing.

Steps to Implement:

1. Add alt text to every image on your site. It should briefly describe the image’s content in a natural way.
2. Avoid keyword stuffing. Use relevant keywords but ensure the description remains genuine to the image’s content.
3. Keep it concise. A short, clear description is often more effective than a lengthy one.

Incorporating alt text is not just an SEO best practice; it’s also a step towards making the web more inclusive and user-friendly for everyone.

Compress and Lazy Load Images

Image compression refers to the process of reducing the image file size without significantly affecting their visual quality and when paired with lazy loading, which only loads images as they appear on a user’s screen, it greatly enhances website speed and performance.

Reducing the file size of images, known as compression, is vital for several reasons:

• Improved Load Times: The speed at which a website loads is crucial for user experience and SEO. In fact, the average load time for a webpage ranking on Google’s first page is 1.65 seconds. Combining compressed images with lazy loading ensures you meet or surpass this benchmark.
• Bandwidth Conservation: Smaller image files mean less data consumption. This is especially beneficial for users on restricted data plans or slower connections.
• Better Mobile Experience: Mobile users, who often face varying data speeds, benefit significantly from optimized images, ensuring smooth browsing even in less-than-ideal conditions.
• SEO Boost: Search engines, including Google, factor in website optimization, including image sizes, when determining rankings, especially for mobile search results.

Steps to Implement:

1. Prior to uploading, tools like TinyPNG, Compressor.io, or ImageOptim can be used to reduce image sizes.
2. WordPress users can use plugins like Smush to automate image compression and lazy loading.
3. Decide on the compression type: lossy (reduces size considerably with some quality loss) or lossless (maintains quality but offers less size reduction).
4. Conduct regular checks on your website to identify and compress large images.

Utilizing compressed images is a strategic move, not just for a seamless user experience but also for achieving optimal search engine rankings.

Add Image Properties

Incorporating specific image properties, like keywords and geographical coordinates (longitude and latitude), can be particularly beneficial for local businesses.

• Localized Search Relevance: By embedding geographical data within your images, you signal to search engines the locality of your content. This can help your business appear in localized search results.
• Boost to Local Business Listings: For businesses listed on platforms like Google My Business, image properties can further reinforce the local relevance of the business, potentially improving its ranking in local searches.
• Increased Engagement: Users searching for local services or products might find images with local properties more relevant and engaging, leading to better click-through rates.

Steps to Implement:

1. When adding images to your website or business listing, ensure you embed relevant local keywords in the image properties.
2. Use tools or software that allows you to add longitude and latitude data to your images.
3. Regularly update image properties to ensure they align with your current business location and services.

By refining image properties with a focus on local SEO, businesses can enhance their online visibility in specific regions or communities.

Make Images Responsive

As the number of devices and screen resolutions continues to grow, it’s essential to ensure that your images adapt seamlessly. Responsive images adjust to fit the screen they’re viewed on, providing an optimal viewing experience without slowing down the page. Here’s how:

Benefits of making images responsive:

• Faster Page Loads: By delivering appropriately sized images for each device, you reduce unnecessary data and improve page load times.
• Enhanced Viewing: Images adjust and scale to fit screens, ensuring clarity and detail remain intact.
• Better SEO Performance: Search engines, like Google, prioritize mobile-friendly websites, and responsiveness is a key part of that.

How to Implement:

• Maintain Responsive Sizing with CSS: By setting a maximum inline size (width) and auto-adjusting block size (height), you ensure images resize proportionally to the width of their container while maintaining their original aspect ratio.
  
  img {
max-inline-size: 100%;
block-size: auto;
}
  
• Utilize the <picture> Element: This element allows you to provide multiple sources for an image, letting the browser pick the most suitable one according to the device’s capabilities or the user’s preferences.
  
  <picture>
<source srcset="large.jpg" media="(min-width: 800px)">
<source srcset="medium.jpg" media="(min-width: 500px)">
<img src="small.jpg" alt="Description">
</picture>
  
• Employ the srcset Attribute: Alongside the  tag, the srcset attribute allows for an improved responsive design by presenting different resolutions of an image based on the device’s display capabilities.
  
  <img srcset="small.jpg 500w, medium.jpg 1000w, large.jpg 1500w" src="default.jpg" alt="Description">

Responsive images enhance the experience for every visitor, regardless of their device. By adapting to all screen sizes, you ensure clear visuals and a boost in search engine recognition. Simple changes can lead to significant benefits in both user satisfaction and SEO rankings.

Optimize Your Landing Page Title and Description

Your image might be top-notch, but if the surrounding content, specifically the landing page title and description, isn’t optimized, search engines might overlook it. Both elements serve as the first point of interaction for users on search engine result pages (SERPs). By ensuring they’re relevant and compelling, you increase the likelihood of users clicking through to your page.

Benefits of optimizing your page title and description:

• Higher Click-Through Rates (CTR): Well-optimized titles and descriptions can make your content stand out on SERPs, encouraging more users to click on your page.
• Improved Relevance: Using the right keywords in the title and description ensures search engines understand the context of your page, leading to better content-image alignment.
• Better User Engagement: When users know what to expect from a page (from its title and description), they’re more likely to stay and interact, reducing bounce rates.
• Enhanced Brand Image: Consistent, clear, and concise titles and descriptions project a professional image, boosting trust among potential visitors.

Your on-page SEO elements, including meta data, header tags, page content, and structured data, influence how Google ranks your images.

How to Implement:

1. Keyword Research: Understand what your target audience is searching for. Tools like Google Keyword Planner or Ubersuggest can be helpful in finding relevant keywords.
2. Craft Unique Titles: Ensure every page has a unique title that succinctly describes its content. Aim for a length of 50-60 characters.
3. Write Clear Descriptions: While descriptions don’t directly impact SEO rankings, they influence user behavior. Keep them under 160 characters and make sure they provide a concise summary of the page’s content.
4. Avoid Keyword Stuffing: While it’s important to include relevant keywords, avoid overloading your title or description with them. This can be seen as spammy and lead to penalties.

Optimizing your page title and description is a simple yet effective step in enhancing your content’s visibility and user engagement. Properly structured titles and descriptions not only guide search engines but also offer users a snapshot of what to expect, leading to better interactions and overall site performance.

Define Image Dimensions

Specifying image dimensions ensures that your site’s layout remains consistent while the page is loading. By clearly defining the width and height of images in your HTML or CSS, you provide a placeholder, preventing content shifts during page loads. This not only enhances the user experience but can also play a part in search engine rankings.

Benefits:

• Improved User Experience: Defining image dimensions reduces the chances of layout shifts, offering visitors a smoother browsing experience.
• Faster Page Load: Browsers can allocate the right amount of space for an image if its dimensions are provided upfront, which can contribute to quicker page rendering.
• Avoid CLS Sifts: Specifying image dimensions helps avoid cumulative layout shifts, which can impact your Core Web Vitals performance.
• Enhanced SEO: Search engines value a stable and user-friendly page layout. By minimizing layout shifts, you can potentially improve your site’s ranking.
• Consistency Across Devices: Specifying dimensions ensures that images render correctly on various devices, maintaining a consistent look and feel.

How to Implement:

1. In HTML: When adding an image, specify its dimensions using the ‘width’ and ‘height’ attributes. For example: <img src="image.jpg" width="600" height="400" alt="description">.
2. In CSS: You can define image dimensions within your stylesheet. For instance:

   img.sampleClass {
       width: 600px;
       height: 400px;
   }

3. Responsive Designs: For responsive sites, use relative units like percentages for width and maintain the aspect ratio to ensure the image scales properly across devices.

By simply defining image dimensions, you can significantly elevate the user’s browsing experience and potentially enhance your website’s SEO. It’s a small effort that can lead to substantial rewards in terms of both user engagement and visibility in search results. Always prioritize providing explicit dimensions for every image to maintain a consistent and stable website layout.

Avoid Copyright Violation

Using captivating images can enhance your content, but it’s essential to ensure that these images don’t infringe on any copyrights. In 1998, Congress introduced the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to update copyright laws for the internet era. Unauthorized use can lead to legal issues, penalties, and a damaged brand reputation. Always prioritize using images you have the rights to.

The alarming rate at which images are being stolen online is a pressing concern for many content creators. The Copytrack Global Infringement Report 2019 highlighted that approximately 2.5 billion images are stolen each day. This has led to damages estimated at more than €532.5 billion (around $600 billion) due to lost licensing fees. Interestingly, the United States alone was responsible for nearly 23% of this image theft.

Another significant instance that underscores the importance of copyright adherence is the case where Getty Images sued Stability AI for allegedly copying 12 million images to train its AI model, all without obtaining permission or offering compensation.

Benefits:

• No Legal Complications: Staying clear of copyright issues means you avoid potential lawsuits and fines.
• Preserve Brand Integrity: Using copyrighted images without permission can harm your brand’s trustworthiness and credibility among users.
• Positive SEO Impact: Search engines favor sites that adhere to legal standards and best practices. Infringing on copyrights can negatively impact your site’s rankings.
• Financial Savings: Legal battles can be costly. Avoiding copyright violations can save you from hefty legal fees and potential compensation.

How to Implement:

1. Purchase or License Images: Sites like Shutterstock, Getty Images, and Adobe Stock offer a plethora of images available for licensing.
2. Use Public Domain Images: Websites like Pixabay or Unsplash provide stock photos that are free from copyright restrictions.
3. Always Credit the Source: Even if an image is free to use, it’s good practice to credit the photographer or source, if required by the licensing agreement.
4. Double-check Licenses: Even when purchasing or downloading free images, always review the licensing agreement. Some licenses may have conditions or restrictions on usage.Consider Original Content: If feasible, produce your own images or hire a professional photographer, ensuring you have complete rights to the content.

Steering clear of copyright violations is crucial for both ethical and practical reasons. By taking proactive steps to ensure the legitimacy of your images, you protect your brand, uphold your site’s integrity, and foster trust among your audience. In the digital age, where image sharing is ubiquitous, it’s more important than ever to use images responsibly and legally.

Ensure Image Relevancy and Placement

Picking the right image for your content is a big deal. When you place that image close to related text, it packs a bigger punch. And if you have a main image you want to spotlight? Aim to have it up near the top of the page. But remember that it should feel natural and not forced. The main reason behind all this is simple SEO. When an image and its related text are close together, it ranks better for the keyword it targets.

Benefits:

1. Higher Engagement Rates: Relevant images placed near the associated text can hold the reader’s attention longer, leading to improved engagement.
2. Improved SEO Ranking: Search engines prioritize content where images and text complement each other. This synergy can enhance your page’s visibility in search outcomes.
3. Reduced Bounce Rates: When images match the surrounding content, users are less likely to leave the page prematurely.
4. Enhanced User Understanding: Relevant images support and clarify the surrounding text, making complex ideas easier to grasp.

How to Implement:

1. Strategic Positioning: Aim to position the main or focal image close to the top of the page, but only if it feels natural and not forced.
2. Surround Images with Relevant Text: Whenever you insert an image, ensure it’s surrounded by text that relates to the image. This context can boost the image’s SEO value.
3. Avoid Overcrowding: While it’s important to have relevant images, don’t overcrowd the page. Balance is key. Too many images can make the page look cluttered and detract from the user’s experience.
4. Consistent Styling: Ensure that your images follow a consistent style and size when placed across your site. This consistency improves the site’s aesthetic appeal and user navigation.

The strategic use of images is more than just making a page look good. By ensuring their relevancy and proper placement, you not only improve the user experience but also position your content for better performance in search engine results. It’s a simple step that can have a significant impact on your website’s success.

Add Images to Sitemap

Sitemaps play a fundamental role in ensuring search engines can crawl and index all content on a website, including images.

Including your site’s images in a sitemap helps Google discover them, even if they’re loaded dynamically or located deep within your site’s structure. Moreover, with the rise of image search and the value users place on images, ensuring that your images are discoverable by search engines is paramount.

If you’re leveraging CDNs for faster image delivery, Google even allows you to include URLs from other domains in the image sitemap.

Benefits:

• Faster Indexing: By adding images to your sitemap, search engines can more quickly find and index them. This means they appear in search results sooner, increasing their visibility.
• Enhanced Visibility in Image Search: With billions of searches conducted daily, Google’s image search is a powerful tool. By including images in your sitemap, you improve their chances of appearing in these results.
• Ensures All Images are Discovered: Especially for images loaded dynamically or embedded deep in site structures, adding them to a sitemap ensures they don’t get overlooked.
• Utilizing CDNs Efficiently: Google’s allowance for including URLs from other domains in image sitemaps means you can effectively use CDNs to host your images, ensuring faster load times and better user experience without compromising on discoverability.

How to Implement:

1. Building a Sitemap:
   • Start by listing all the images you want to be indexed on your website.
   • Use an XML sitemap generator tool to create an image sitemap. Many of these tools can automatically detect images from your site.
   • Ensure that the generated sitemap adheres to Google’s sitemap protocol.
2. Submitting a Sitemap to Google:
   • Log in to your Google Search Console account.
   • Select ‘Sitemaps’ from the ‘Index’ menu.
   • Enter the URL of your sitemap and click on ‘Submit’. This informs Google about your sitemap, making it easier for the search engine to discover your images.
3. Utilizing CDNs:
   • If you’re using a CDN to host your images, ensure that you include the URLs from the CDN in the <image:loc> elements of your image sitemap.
   • This allows Google to discover images hosted on your CDN and can lead to better image load times due to the efficient distribution of the CDN.

Ensuring that your images are part of your sitemap strategy is an important step in maximizing your website’s visibility. It not only boosts your chances in image search results but also plays a role in overall site SEO. With the tools and guidelines provided, you can better position your website’s visual content for success in search outcomes.

Add Structured Data

Structured data provides a way to classify content on your site, making it more understandable for search engines. It’s like giving explicit cues to search engines about the meaning of your content.

For images, structured data can offer details about the image, its creator, and other important attributes. By integrating structured data, you enhance the likelihood of your images appearing in rich search results, providing users with a richer browsing experience.

Benefits:

1. Enhanced Search Results: Structured data can make your images eligible for rich results, making them stand out and potentially attracting more clicks.
2. Clearer Content Understanding: Search engines can better understand the context and importance of your images with structured data.
3. Improved CTR: Rich results can lead to higher click-through rates as they offer more information and are visually appealing.
4. Relevance in Voice Search: Structured data can help your content get picked for voice search results, which are becoming increasingly popular.

How to Implement:

1. Choose the Right Schema: Identify the type of content you have and select the appropriate schema. For images, there are specific schema markups like ‘ImageObject’ that can be useful.
2. Mark Up Your Content: Use tools like Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper to add the necessary tags to your content.
3. Test Your Markup: Before publishing, always test your structured data using Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool. This ensures that there are no errors and that search engines can read the data correctly.
4. Monitor in Search Console: After adding structured data, keep an eye on Google Search Console for any structured data errors and to monitor how often your site appears in rich results.

Adding structured data to your website, especially for images, is a smart move in the evolving landscape of SEO. With the increasing importance of rich results and voice search, ensuring your content, including images, is marked up correctly can provide a significant edge. Incorporate structured data to ensure your images and content reach their full potential in search results.

Monitor Your Image Search Performance

Monitoring the search performance of your images is one of the best practices to add to your Image SEO to-do list. It involves tracking how well your images are ranking and performance. It provides insights into the effectiveness of your Image SEO efforts.

1. Google Search Console (GSC):
   • Performance Report: Log into your GSC account and click the “Performance” section on the left sidebar. Here, you can filter results to show only image search data (refer screenshot above). This will give you an idea about the total clicks, impressions, click-through rate (CTR), and average position your images have in Google Image search.
   • Enhancements: Under the “Enhancements” tab in GSC, you can check for issues related to mobile usability and Core Web Vitals which can influence image performance on mobile devices.
2. Google Analytics:
   • By integrating Google Analytics with GSC, you can segment and view the image search traffic. This provides data on user behavior, like bounce rate, pages per session, and average session duration for users who came through image searches.
3. Specific Image Tracking:
   • If there’s a particular image or set of images you want to monitor, consider adding tracking parameters to the image URL. This way, you can see how often that specific image leads to website visits or other conversions.
4. Use SEO Tools: Tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, and Moz offer features to track image rankings for specific keywords. This is useful if you’re optimizing images around particular search terms and want to monitor their performance.
5. Manual Searches: Periodically, do manual searches for your primary image keywords on different search engines, especially Google Images. See where your images rank and identify potential areas for improvement.

By monitoring your website images search performance, you can better understand which SEO strategies work and which areas require more attention. Over time, this will help you refine your approach and potentially improve the visibility and traffic your images generate.

Image Optimization FAQs

Image Optimization Main Highlights

If you’ve made it this far, I genuinely appreciate you sticking around. Let’s take a moment to reflect on what we’ve uncovered about the art (and science!) of image optimization:

1. Format & Size: Think of image formats like languages. You’d want to choose one that most people understand, right? And just like we all appreciate a quick chat, make sure those images load swiftly.
2. Descriptive Clarity: Imagine telling a friend about a picture in your living room. You wouldn’t just say “that picture”, right? Naming your images should feel the same—clear, descriptive, and a tad personal.
3. User Experience: Remember the last time you waited for a slow-loading site? Frustrating, wasn’t it? Let’s ensure our images are always quick on the draw, responsive, and friendly to all devices.
4. Stay Legal: No one likes a surprise lawsuit. Always ensure you have the rights to use an image. It’s like asking for permission before borrowing a friend’s favorite book.
5. Position & Relevancy: Placing an image on a webpage is like arranging furniture in a room. Make sure it’s not just aesthetically pleasing but also makes sense and complements the surroundings.
6. SEO Benefits: This one’s a game-changer. From alt texts to sitemaps, these little tweaks ensure search engines understand our images. It’s like giving them a map to our visual treasures.

Here’s hoping you’ve found these pointers helpful. Happy optimizing, and always remember to let your images shine, both in quality and in SEO!