TLDR

Images have a bigger impact on your rankings than you might think...

Are you unsure of the SEO topic you ought to prioritize in 2023? Artificial intelligence, voice search, and augmented reality are all dominating the market to become the new king of search. It will take some time before we move on to the future of SEO, regardless of which horse you back.

We must continue to consider online search in its current incarnation in the interim. The part of the search that you are probably most familiar with is images, which is what we would like to talk about. They are neglected far too often, despite the fact that the majority of websites heavily rely on them.

By addressing image-related SEO issues, your website can quickly gain the competitive SEO advantage it needs in 2023. Of course, SEO is important in every aspect. However, users hardly ever pay attention to your keywords and backlinks, let's face it.

They are only interested in what they can directly experience from your content, and visual information is crucial to that. Visuals can help you whenever you need to learn, find, or purchase something. Images can help you find exactly what you're looking for. Images have a bigger impact on your rankings than you might think because they are so closely related to user search intent and user experience.

Images account for 62.6% of all Google searches, according to research from First Site Guide. And their numbers are growing. See how important they are? Let's explore the technique for converting your images into click-bait user traps.

1. To get more clicks, use original images and images with context.

Consider yourself the user. When you search for something on Google, a number of images appear when you select the Images tab. They all have a similar appearance, if not an exact match.

Which do you choose to click? Well, if there isn't much of a difference, you just pick at random. Out of a group of identical search results, one website is fortunate while the others are not. Returning to the viewpoint of the website owner, you can see how less than ideal this circumstance is.

How To Make Your Pictures Pop

Therefore, the solution is to create and use original images that don't exist anywhere else and leverage intent if you want your site to be the user's first choice. This is especially true if you think about the most important role images play: converting visitors into leads.

The Reasoning: Can the search intent of your target audience be met by a picture you didn't create yourself?

The ideal picture is one with content that is directly relevant to the user's search.

For instance, images with instructions are very helpful for recipe websites. Try searching "how to boil an egg" on Google and check out the image results. What image would you choose to click?

You're going to click on the infographic most likely, right? Hats off to the people who chose not to rely on other people's work as a crutch, or the yolks, um, people. That is your compelling case for producing your own images. Last but not least, original photos and content protect you from copyright violations and hefty fines.

2. Repair broken images.

What could possibly go wrong with an image? displaying the image failed.

Even if there was nothing significant to show, the broken image icon ruins the best user experience.

Obviously, if you really need users to see the image, the damage is even worse. Any online store would suffer greatly from having a product page without a product image.

3. Image optimization to increase the page speed of your website

One of the main issues with images is how they affect your loading time because Google prefers quick-loading websites.

Naturally, you want to limit the size of the images on your site.

How to Speed Up Your Site by Reducing Image Size

To optimize your images, try these steps:

  • Save your images in the best possible way. The best format for large photos is typically JPEG. SVG should only be used for icons and logos. Be cautious when using WEBP because some browsers do not support it despite the fact that it offers high quality and small file size (and is a good replacement for the large GIF).
  • Set the ideal height and width manually. Never make an image too big or too small.
  • Compress your data. Although lossy compression is acceptable if the final image has a good enough appearance, lossless compression is more quality-friendly.
  • Combine pictures in one. However, only when you have two or more images placed side by side. In this instance, combining them into a single image is preferable because doing so will result in fewer page elements, which will reduce server requests and speed up loading.
  • Employ lazy loading. It makes the content currently visible on the screen load more quickly by preventing page elements from loading until the user scrolls down to where they are on the page. The loading="lazy" attribute, which you place inside the img> tag, is supported by Google Chrome.

Your visual quality should always come first. Low-resolution images don't draw visitors or clicks from image searches.

Pay close attention to the Cumulative Layout Shift metric because images also have an impact on this Google ranking factor. Search for the Avoid large layout shifts point in the Optimization opportunities if you want to reduce your CLS.

4. Create responsive images

Let's explore a little deeper into image dimensions. You want your images to be clearly visible on all types of devices, which is ideal (and realistic). However, there are a variety of screen sizes available, with PCs and smartphones being the most common.

How then do you ensure that the same image displays flawlessly everywhere? The secret is to create a responsive image. Make it automatically scale to fit any screen, in other words. Hocalwire CMS uses React Framework to give front-end components for creating responsive web pages and operates on NodeJS in the back end.

5. Use Keywords to Improve Image Names, Alt Text, and More

There are numerous ways that keywords can improve the SEO of your images. Simply know when and where to use them.

How to Improve Images for SEO

If you want to step up your image SEO game, try adding targeted keywords to these five places:

  • Filename: Stay away from names like "image1, pic2," etc. These names offer nothing to search engines.
  • File location: Search engines can understand the additional context from the domain and subdirectory names. If you run an online store selling fishing equipment, for instance, you might structure the URL of a picture.
  • Text surrounding: Users see this, and it works best to accentuate images. Your image's score can be increased by adding even a small amount of pertinent text (such as a caption) nearby.
  • Link text: An anchor text that describes the image will aid search engines in understanding the link that leads directly to it.
  • ALT text: Forgetting to include anything in your image ALTs, much less a description with a few keywords, is one of the most typical SEO errors. Although you might not think it matters much, users who use screen readers have trouble with blank ALTs. And Google is serious about accessibility.

6. Geotag Your Images To Gain From Local SEO

A word of advice for local SEO for all the stores out there. Search engines have more data to work with when you add geographic metadata to your images.

The search engine can pinpoint the location of a location if there are coordinates associated with the image of that location. And if a user is looking for information about that specific location, perhaps that image will be helpful.

Adding a Geotag to Your Photos

Modern cameras and smartphones frequently come equipped with a geotagging feature. If yours doesn't, you might want to complete this task using software or online service.

7. Make A Sitemap With Images

The quickest method for search engines to find your website's pages is through sitemaps. What about an exclusive sitemap for your images? Although it may appear excessive at first, Google actually endorses it. An excerpt from Google's blog follows:

Contrary to regular sitemaps, which impose cross-domain restrictions, image sitemaps allow the inclusion of URLs from other domains. Therefore, hosting an image on your own domain is not even necessary; it will still function for you. Right, it sounds like a dream.

How to Create a Sitemap for Images

The catch is that websites frequently contain a large number of images. Although creating your own sitemap for them is an option (and Google offers an example), manually entering hundreds or thousands of image URLs would take forever. Sadly, there aren't many free automated services available to do it for you.

Hocalwire lets you specify a special URL for each tale and serves the narrative by identifying the device that made the initial request. We can offer different pages and views from the same domain if necessary thanks to robust front-end architecture.

With the help of XML sitemaps, Hocalwire CMS can arrange and make searchable your unorganized, disorganized website.

8. To speed up your website, use image caching

A man who learns to fish will be fed for the rest of his life. When images are cached, a browser will keep them for as long as necessary. It's true that browsers don't need any instruction, but you get the idea.

The browser will retrieve an image from the cache rather than loading it again when you visit a website after it has been saved there. It really does save time.

9. Use Structured Data To Mark Up Images To Aid Google In Understanding Your Content Structured data inform search engines about what is on a page.

All websites can profit from it, but e-commerce websites in particular find it to be a real blessing. Rich snippets can also be added to image search results, in addition to regular search results.

How to Use Schema to Mark Up Your Images

Use Google's Structured Data Markup Helper tool to create structured data code for your pages. Although it is free, a Google Search Console account connected to your domain is necessary.

It operates as follows:

  • Paste the URL of the page you want to mark up after choosing a data type. To begin tagging, click.
  • The page will be shown by the tool. You can mark up an element by highlighting it. Pick the appropriate tag from the menu that appears. For instance, if an image is clicked, choose Image; if a product's price is highlighted, choose Offer->Price.
  • Once all of your desired tags have been added, click Create HTML to generate the code.

Your code can also be tested and validated by Markup Helper. It was simpler than you thought, right? The only drawback is that it might take up to three weeks for the effect to take effect.

10. Encourage sharing of your photos

Utilize social media to boost your publicity efforts. There is never enough of those.

Search engines will consider your pages to be more important and relevant the more shares they receive.

Conclusion

Images won't disappear even though Google is experimenting with artificial intelligence and creating new types of search. In fact, image search is only going to advance further in the near future, which means new image SEO strategies will emerge.

The foundation, however, is not likely to alter significantly. Master it now, and your website will be prepared for the upcoming major image SEO storm thanks to higher rankings.

Hocalwire CMS handles the technical parts of keeping Large Sitemap, Indexing pages for Google, Optimizing page load times, Maintaining assets and file systems, and Warning for broken links and pages while you handle all these non-technical components of SEO for Enterprise sites. If you're searching for an enterprise-grade content management system, these are significant value adds. To learn more, Get a Free Demo of Hocalwire CMS.