Do Images Affect SEO?

Image SEO refers to optimizing images on your site so search engines can find them and “read” them. Do images affect SEO? Absolutely! By improving the visibility and rankings of your content in Google and other search engines.

Image SEO covers elements such as load time, image size, image type, and optimization of keywords or alt texts in image file names.

Although image SEO is often overlooked in on-page SEO, it doesn’t mean that it isn’t important. Poor image optimization can have a negative impact on your pages’ ability to climb in the index, gain valuable backlinks, and drive valuable organic traffic.

SEO is all in the text. Search engines first read the text, and then rank it. Google can’t even read the text in images. Images are problematic, and only the written words are important. That’s the way SEOs saw images for many years. Now, we all know that visuals can be an SEO’s best friend.

Create original images with high-quality and unique content, then add them as search-optimized content.

Examples include:

• Flowcharts that illustrate a process
• Charts created from original research
• Marketing-visuals
• Diagrams that visually describe a concept

11 methods to Make Your Images Rank like a Pro

1. Increase dwell times with quality content and images
2. Track Your Images and ask for Credit
3. Find the best images for your Content
4. Get Featured Snippets and win with Images
5. Optimize Images for Search
6. Add Related Images as Contributor Quotes
7. Use diagrams, charts, and Images
8. Compress and Optimize your Images for Search
9. Improve Mobile Search snippets
10. Improve User Experience with Images
11. The Best Image SEO Strategies

1. Increase Dwell Times 

An image was once a recommendation. Now, adding an image for every scroll depth of each post is crucial. This ensures that the visitor never misses something visually interesting.

It may not always work because some topics aren’t visually rich. Other formatting options such as bullet points and short paragraphs are available in these cases.

An article without diagrams isn’t search-optimized. This is SEO’s most important attribute.

They are so beneficial and so essential in so many aspects. Do it for authority and rankings, click-throughs, and for your visitors.

What happens next after searchers click through to your page? It’s typically one of the following:

• They stay for just a few seconds and then click the back button. (Short click and low dwell time)
• They stay for long hours, taking in the content. (Long click, long dwell time)

In both cases, the visitor bounced. Google sent a different signal on the second visit. Dwell time is a “user interactions signal” that will likely impact your page’s ranking. And what is the secret of high dwell time? Engaging content keeps visitors interested and engaged quickly. This includes no long paragraphs and plenty of visuals.

2. Meet Copyright Violators and Make Friends

“Reclaiming stolen photo credit is one way to do link-building! It also has higher success rates than other forms of cold mail outreach.

Your images might be useful for others. If they’re found, you have the option to reach out to them and threaten them with criminal action. You can either reach out to the person or ask them if they are giving proper attribution.

Use reverse image lookup to search for all locations that have used your images. Look for the Camera button and click it. Google will display matches for you on other websites when you upload any image.

Scroll past your website or social media site. But take a look at any other blog address? Find your images. Did they offer the credit to you as the image source? If they didn’t, contact the editor or writer to politely inform them that your work is duplicated. If they link back from your site to the original, you don’t mind.

3. Find the Best Image for Your Content

Make sure to relate photos to the content. You should also include the photo next to the relevant text. If you have an image you want to rank, place it near the top of your page. The image shouldn’t be out of place.

Your content should contain a photo that is relevant to the subject (you can search Pixabay). You are doing something wrong if you add images to earn brownie points with content analysis plug-ins.

It’s better to use original photos when creating content than stock photos. If you are writing about your company’s employees, then the page should include photos of the actual team and not random stock photos.

4. Get Featured Snippets and Win with Images

Your page might not be in the snippet. However, you could see your image feature there.

The “featured snippet” is now featured in 14% of search results. This megatrend is a key part of SEO. It helps to explain the general decline in click-through rates from searches.

However, it’s part and parcel of the game. To be eligible for the featured snippet, you must rank first. Writing for a dictionary is easier than writing for your own purposes. Simple list formatting works well, as it allows you to include short items.

5. Optimize Images for Search – It’s all in the Photos

Images can bring life to articles and make your site more search-engine-friendly. Google can recognize images and help you rank higher. Consumers are more inclined to read posts with photos.

You might be missing out on higher search rankings by not optimizing your images for search.

You might be asked if your article requires an image, whether you are an author for an online magazine or a blogger full-time. The answer is yes.

You are missing lucrative marketing opportunities if you haven’t optimized your images for size, Alt text, Title, and Description.

6. Add Related Images as Contributor Quotes Including the Image Source Link

If you are a fan of partial match anchor text, then this is the right opportunity.

Sometimes the editor will change the link text to simply state “image source” and that is fine. You can continue this strategy and you will eventually see “image Source” as a popular anchor text in links to the site.

This clearly shows how valuable images are for SEO. Undeniable!

You have built relationships for many years with content creators. Because you are familiar with SEO influencers, you have included editors as well as bloggers in your content. The email comes in one day. Someone might like to include you within their content.

This could be for an interview request, inclusion in a roundup, or contributor quote. You put everything aside and jump into PR mode. You craft a paragraph full of useful insights that will perfectly fit their piece.

However, before you send it out, go through your old content and find related images. You can find one. Add it as a contributor quote. Also, be sure to add the image source URL below the image.

They might be thrilled to include a high-value photo in their piece. It’s likely that they’ll include the link since it’s a good attribute.

7. Use diagrams, charts, and Images

You can create a blog post that explains the importance of content marketing. You may use a fun term: “marketing diagrams”. Because there aren’t many people writing articles about marketing diagrams, you could earn tons of traffic hits over the years.

If you have lots of images, you can add them together to make a new piece. You can combine your visuals to create a post. Find a phrase that includes your industry, plus “diagrams” to see what happens.

8. Compress and Optimize Your Images for Search

Image SEO is a new field. One of the most important questions you will have to answer is “How do I choose the best format for my website?” There are many options, including JPG, PNG, and GIF. Each file format has its pros and cons, in terms of quality, file size, and compression.

GIFs are bitmap images that can display indexed-color graphics and graphics in HTML documents. Transparency is a major benefit of this image format. You can upload GIFs over any color background without the need for image borders.

You can also use GIFs for logos and animations that require minimal file size. GIFs have large file sizes, which can make them unsuitable for photography.

JPGs, the most popular image format, are full-color photos with 24-bits per pixel. This format is ideal for creating larger files and photos. JPG’s loose data compression is a drawback. The settings can affect the quality of your images.

JPG doesn’t support transparency and is not suitable for images with sharp text or images that contain text.

The modern alternative to JPG and GIFs is PNGs, which you can use to download or edit photos in Adobe Photoshop. This image format supports more color than GIFs. Because they are transparent, they are ideal for logos and small images. PNGs are not supported in all web browsers and cannot handle animation.

9. Improve Mobile Search Snippets

Images could be the culprit for lower click-through rates on mobile searches to URLs. You can improve image quality with more relevant and compelling images.

Even though images don’t directly influence rankings, and even if they help with links, they can impact click-through rates for search. Google frequently extracts from your content and presents them within search snippets. This is especially prevalent on mobile.

10. Improve User Experience with Images

This is a simple suggestion: Add photos to your posts to improve the quality of your content. Visual search is also becoming more important. This is the vision Google has for the future. As I have already mentioned, high-quality visual content can bring you some traffic.

You should write your content with user experience in mind. You can use images to help readers understand and appreciate the content. Image can help to spice up 1000 words or highlight your words through a data flow diagram.

11. The Best Image SEO Strategies

These steps will help you add SEO-friendly images to your web content if you’re new to image SEO.

Flesh Out Your Listings through the Image Search.

Google can add badges to photos if you have recipes on your website. This will show crawlers that the photo is part of a particular recipe.

While Google can’t guarantee higher rankings for structured data, it can help flesh out your listings through the Image Search.

To Reduce Image Sizes, You Can Use a Compressor. Befunky for free is one of my favorites to resize my images. For my website I go down to 400 x 250 which is generally around 75 Kbs, this loads very quickly. Experiment to create images that are nice and clear but have the lowest Kbs to load fast.

You will want to compress every image that you choose for your website, be it a photo or diagram. Slow loading on a Mobile can affect your SEO. Poorly-sized images often cause slow-loading pages. Image compression is an important aspect of image SEO, as page speed and SEO are closely linked.

Site speed affects image SEO’s ability for your page to rank high and get traffic. It will affect the user’s ability to move between pages. Google won’t rank pages that load slow. For a detailed assessment of what elements could be slowing down your page’s loading speed, use Google PageSpeed Insights.

Offer Valuable Image Content

Uploading at least one image to a page is the best way to image-optimize. Images tell search engines that your website is interesting and provides valuable content. Photos make it easier to read and scan content, which makes it more likely that users will like and read it.

Google recently updated its interface with new metadata and filters. These filters demonstrate that Google understands the attributes and how images fit into the context.

Keep in mind; image search has been increasingly important over the past years. Google removed the button to “view image” from its search results in 2018, which encouraged more people to visit the website instead of seeing the image. This small change led to a 37% increase in website visitors for most websites.

Speed up Page Load Times by Scaling Images

When you are resizing images, ensure that they are the same size as the displayed size. Otherwise, it can slow down the site.

Page load times are an important aspect of your website’s SEO value. Google will penalize websites that use larger images. The size of an image can affect how fast a page loads and whether users abandon it quickly.

Optimize and Add the Image Alt Tag

Even though they might be unable to see images, search crawlers can still read and understand keywords. Alt tags, also known as “alt attributes”, are used to help search crawlers understand images without actually seeing them.

It informs search engines about the subject matter of an image. Image alt tags can help you reach your audience, as well as aiding with SEO. Some users have disabled their image displays or used screen readers to read the text.

Others may not be able to load images because of a weak Internet connection. Image alt tags inform the reader about the image. If the image is near the top of your post then generally you would put the title of your post in Alt Attributes and then in description detail of the actual picture.

Final Thoughts

If you are looking to improve user experience and rank in the SERPs, optimizing your images for SEO will be your best option. These steps will help you get started. For more help, contact an SEO expert.

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LILY