Did you know that images can rank on search engines just like your blog posts and main pages?
That’s just one of the reasons why image based SEO is so important for a website. Images aren’t just decoration for your website, they do so much more than aesthetics as they contribue to Google’s overall understanding of your website and user experience too.
But images can be a source of SEO woes too, causing accessibility issues, long loading times, detracting from user experience and adding confusion too.
That’s why I wanted to write this blog about image based SEO and the 7 easy steps you can take to improve the images on your website and how they’re used for better user experience, and increased Google search rankings.
Why does page speed matter?
When it comes to SEO, page speed is an important ranking factor.
Did you know that your images take up as much as 50% of the weight of a webpage in terms of loading speed? Many aspects of your web pages can affect how quickly they load such as HTML documents, style sheets, scripts, and other media, but images tend to be the biggest issue for many website owners.
You might have noticed this when visiting a website and noticing that the images are the last thing to load and you’re left looking at a page with a few blank boxes instead! If that happens, you can be certain that there’s no image optimisation going on behind the scenes.
Google uses page speed as a signal of a good website to share with its users because “faster sites create happy users”. If your website visitor is stuck for ages waiting for those blank boxes to turn into images, chances are they’re going to click back to Google search results and visit your competitor instead.
Google takes this to mean that your website isn’t of high value as the user it sent your way had an issue with your website meaning they had to try again. This could mean you drop down those search result rankings as a result.
One of the biggest mistakes I find business owners making with their websites is not optimising their images to improve page speed, but image optimisation can be beneficial for your website’s SEO in many ways, including:
- Adding context around the image and why you’ve used it
- Improving accessibility
- Ranking in Google image search results leading to more visitors
- Improving user experience through design and navigation
The good news is that image optimisation is actually incredibly easy to do, and I’m going to show you the 7 easy steps to take to get it right for your website.
1 – Carefully choose quality images for your website
This might be a personal viewpoint, but one of the aspects I think that affects user experience is when they see the same stock images across the different websites they visit. I know that I’m more inclined to think better of a website with more unique and carefully considered images than one that just seems to follow the herd.
This is all down to relevant content. Something you hear talked about a lot in regards to your blogs and lead magnets, but seldom discussed when it comes to images. If you use an image that isn’t relevant to the point of the page, it’s not adding any value and might even be creating confusion. For example, if your blog is discussing medical care and you use a picture of a dog playing outside – adorable yes, relevant no.
The problem with stock images is that they’re seldom wholly relevant to you and what you do and because they are seen so frequently across the internet, they become rather meangingless. Your audience have seen them before, they add nothing new.
I know that the problem here is down to cost for small business owners with many using free royalty image sites because images can be expensive. The issues with that is so are thousands of other website owners and developers around the world.
I personally recommend Bigstock , for around £70 a month you can download 150 images (300 for £83) which are high quality, used less often and much more appropriate for your website. I think it’s a worthwhile investment as there’s a much bigger image library to choose from so you will able to find something more relevant and appropriate for what you’re trying to say.
One thing you should never do is use google images, i.e. search for images and download what you find from Google image search results (even if you click on the royalty free filter). You need to be 100% certain that the images you use on your website you have full rights to use and using Google to obtain images doesn’t give you assurance of anything.
Getty images have been known to be pretty fierce at prosecuting copyright infringement for many thousands of pounds, so it really isn’t worth the risk. They use reverse image search software to see where images are being used and to establish if rights have been paid for, it takes them seconds to do. So, only use legitimate image libraries.
2 – Use the right image type for the webpage
This one can be confusing and Canva recommends you download PNG files as they are higher quality, which is true but that means they have a larger image file size which is bad news for your page speeds.
I find that JPEG is absolutely fine for most uses. You don’t need top quality images on a website when good works just as well. If you do need a transparent background for a logo, icon, etc then PNG is the way to go.
Also consider if you really need that gif on your website. Moving images are little more than a gimmick in most cases and they do have a larger file size.
3 – Compress your images for a smaller file size
If you’re only going to take one “must do” from this blog post, please make it this one.
Large file sizes means long page loading times and your visitors do not want to for your posts or pages to finish loading, in fact they won’t. They’ll click right on back to the Google search results page and to your competition. It’s for this reason you should use images sparingly, your visitors won’t mind one or two images slowly loading or even failing to load, but a page full of visual content not being there is a completely different story.
Use a free image optimisation app like Riot for Windows (I’m not a Mac user but have been recommended Imageoptim ) to reduce file size and remove any unnecessary metadata that may be in the file. It’s easy to do, just drag your image in (or bulk upload a folder), convert to a different file type if necessary, check the quality after compression and press go.
WP Smush is a handy image compression plugin that will also reduce file size as you upload images to your WordPress website.
Don’t worry about poor visual quality from compressing your images, most software (including my recommendations) can perform lossless compression, meaning that the image looks exactly the same it’s just the filesize that’s reduced.
Reducing image file size will reduce load times and put less strain on the server used to host your website. This ensures your website gives a good user experience and works exactly as it’s designed to to get those leads and sales coming in to your business.
4 – Make sure your images are the right file size
Another task that Riot can help you with is making sure the image size is right for its purpose.
It’s not unusual to download a 600 x 400 image and use it as a 800 x 600 image on your website. The problem here is that you’re using additional resources from your website to achieve this, and this slows down your website even more.
It’s even more common to download a large image and only use it in small size on your website. The larger the image, the larger the file size but also more resources being used to reduce it down to your requirements.
It’s better to know the intended file size as you create or download an image, but apps like Riot can make it easy to resize if necessary and shave a little more time off your page loading speed. Any image editing software will allow you to resize images (only available in Canva pro though).
5 – Save images with an appropriate file name
This is one of the easiest ways to give clues to Google about the context of the image and why it’s on your web page. A blog post about virtual assistants? Put virtual assistant or VA in the file name.
Too many website owners use the original file name from their download source, which is often full of irrelevant keywords or worse, a string of numbers.
By renaming the image for each purpose you use it for, you can use the same image over and over again, but with different alt text and information for Google. Making it easier to add that much needed context to help Google understand the page and how helpful it is to their search users.
6 – Always use image alt text tags
Image alt text is often ignored, yet it’s one of the most critical aspects of using images correctly on your website that I’m still surprised when it happens.
Legally, as a business and website owner you are obliged to make your website as accessible as reasonably possible for disabled users under the Equality Act 2010 . Image alt text is for visually impaired users and folk who may struggle to use a computer screen easily due to sensory processing issues, etc. In these cases, a screen reader is used to read the content on the page and the alt text is read out in place of the images.
As a free adjustment you can make on your website to improve accessibility, why wouldn’t you?
From an SEO point of view, Google is focused on user experienced including the disabled community. So, making your website accessible will be of big help here, but it also helps you give additional clues and context to Google about the image and why it’s being used which can also improve your search result ranking.
To write an effective alt text tag you need to describe the image as if it can’t be seen. “Picture of two businesswomen in a coffee shop having a meeting about marketing” is a good example. It tells the user (and Google) what the image is, and you can gleam from the businesswomen and marketing keywords used in there that the content is around business marketing.
Alt text is one of the easiest and quickest ways to improve the image optimisation on your website.
7 – Add images to your sitemap
I mentioned earlier that images can appear in image search results. That means if you’ve optimised an image correctly and used relevant alt text, there’s a good chance of the image appearing in search rankings even if the webpage itself doesn’t rank so well on the regular results page. With that useful “click to visit web page” link under the picture, it’s a great way of gaining some additional traffic.
However, you need to include images in your sitemap for that to happen, and if you use an SEO plugin you may need to ensure that “image sitemap” is an activated feature.
There you have it. 7 steps to ensure that your images are correctly optimised for your website and working hard for your search engine optimisation. It might seem like adding more tasks to your “to do list” but it really can make a huge difference in where you end up on those search results pages.
If you don’t have the time to optimise your images for SEO, why not outsource instead? I’d be delighted to help, so get in touch with me now for a friendly chat to get started.
