Image Optimization for SEO & How It Helps Boost SERP Rankings

SEO for images can help you further increase online visibility and rankings, ensuring audiences find you.

In this blog, VP of SEO, Jen Cornwell, will talk more about image SEO and how you can optimize this content.

What You’ll Learn

• What Image Optimization for SEO is
• The Importance of Optimizing Images
• Best Practices: Images for SEO
• Tips: Images for Social Media 
• 4 Tools for Image SEO Success
• Common Mistakes When Optimizing
• FAQs and SEO Images 

Our Expert’s Insights on Image Optimization

In today’s digital landscape, SEO image optimization is an absolute necessity. As search engines become increasingly sophisticated, they prioritize user experience and content quality. Images play a pivotal role in both aspects. When done right, image optimization not only enhances the visual appeal of your website but also contributes significantly to your SEO strategy.

Firstly, properly optimized images improve website load times, a critical factor for user satisfaction and search engine ranking. Slow-loading pages can frustrate visitors and lead to higher bounce rates, negatively impacting your SEO efforts. Optimized images, on the other hand, ensure swift page loading, creating a positive user experience.

Moreover, search engines can’t “see” images in the same way humans do. They rely on alt text and image filenames to understand the content. By providing descriptive alt text, you not only make your content accessible to visually impaired users but also give search engines valuable context, potentially leading to higher rankings.

Additionally, optimized images enhance mobile-friendliness, a vital ranking factor in today’s mobile-first era. Mobile users expect quick access to content, and image optimization ensures they can enjoy a seamless browsing experience on any device.

Lastly, images can be a source of organic traffic through image search results. Proper optimization increases the chances of your images appearing in relevant searches, driving additional traffic to your website.

Action Item: Conduct an audit of your website’s images. Ensure they are compressed for faster loading times, include descriptive alt text, and have meaningful filenames. By taking these steps, you’ll improve user experience and enhance your SEO efforts simultaneously.

What is Image Optimization in SEO?

Image SEO comprises all the activities necessary to ensure your images rank higher in search engine organic listings.

Search engines crawl your images just as they do the content and code. They are looking for identifiers to understand what they are and how they correlate to content.

To ensure your images rank high, consider elements like file name, size, and positioning on the site.

What is Visual Search?

One way SEO for an image may help people find you is visual search, which is a type of search that search engine users can perform.

Users conduct visual searches by uploading an image into a platform like Google Lens, usually in an attempt to either find the image source or learn more about objects within the image. 

Search engines then compare the image to others and use AI and machine learning to understand the image’s contents, enabling them to bring back relevant results.

The Importance of Optimizing Images

So, why is image search engine optimization so important?

Every page of your website has images, and they aren’t just there to make things pretty. They can be images of products, screenshots of our software, or pictures of your employees. They are one more piece in the ranking puzzle that can yield great results. Here are the reasons it matters!

1. Rank Higher on Google Images

When Google indexes your image, it can appear in three different search environments—Google Images search, Google Web search, and Google Discover. Google Image searches now account for 22.6% of all searches. In rankings, Google considers authority, freshness, and context in addition to the image itself.

2. Break Text Up For Better Readability

SEO for images also relates to the readability and scannability of pages. Inserting pictures and other formatting (headers, bulleted lists) delivers better engagement, keeping people on pages longer, which improves organic ranking.

3. Improve On-Page SEO

For every image you use on the page, it needs to correspond to your keyword. If it’s “medical billing software,” then you’d need to include images supporting this keyword and enter alt text relating to it. When Google crawls the page, it will be ranked higher for that specific term since you’ve optimized the image properly.

4. Ensure Images Display Correctly on Social Media

When you insert your content link on a social site, the image should pull automatically. Each website has its own recommended sizes and dimensions, so it can be tricky. Your post looks bare without an image and may not get much engagement. We’ll go into those best practices further down in the article.

5. Provide Better and Compliant User Experiences

Another consideration for SEO for images has to do with the user experience. First, there are ADA requirements for images, which ensures accessibility for those with vision disabilities. They must have text descriptions to comply with the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).

Best Practices: How to Optimize Images for SEO

Next, let’s review some image SEO best practices.

• Use high-quality, relevant images: Always go for high-quality images that match the surrounding content, ideally using unique images instead of stock images that won’t stand out.
• Optimize image placement: Place all images near relevant content, including keyword-inclusive text that gives search engines additional context.
• Determine your keyword: Once you’ve defined the keyword for the web page, you need to integrate it into the image file name, keyword, and title.
• Craft SEO-friendly alt text: Alt text and SEO provide a text alternative to images when browsers cannot correctly render them. Your alt text needs to be keyword-rich and descriptive. A best practice is to keep this under 125 characters.
• Go beyond the standard alt text: Just using the keyword for alt text doesn’t paint a full picture, and crawlers will consider the quality. Instead of just using “medical billing software screenshot,” you could improve it by being more specific, such as “billing workflow features in medical billing software.”
• Use captions that describe the image: For visually heavy pages or those that need context, you can add captions to offer more information.
• Consider image file structure: From a technical standpoint, your image should be the correct file size and pixel width for the web page.
• Save your images for the web: Reduce the file size of your image by using the Save for Web feature in Adobe Photoshop. Strike a balance between decreasing it to the lowest file size possible while also maintaining quality.
• Include images in sitemaps: By including image content in an XML sitemap, you can help Google discover content to include in image search results.
• Ensure images don’t create a new HTML attachment page: Doing so can result in your image getting indexed and duplicate content issues.
• Add metadata to your image: There are three categories of metadata: technical, administrative, and descriptive. Only worry about the latter since it’s the only type that makes the image more easily searchable.
• Select the right format: While there are a ton of image formats to choose from, JPEG and PNG are the most common. JPEG allows you to adjust the quality level of your image. PNG typically comes with a larger file size but produces higher-quality images with transparent backgrounds or other elements. SVGs for icons and logos that maintain quality at any size. 
• Compress images for faster load times: SEO for an image should also entail compression. Doing so makes image file sizes smaller without compromising quality, allowing for faster load times for a better UX and improved SEO.
• Create descriptive image file names: Use relevant keywords in filenames for image optimization for SEO. They should describe the image and its contents, replacing generic filenames like “IMG_1244.jpg.” For instance, if an image contains black boots for men, the filename could look something like “black-boots-men.jpg.”
• Consider a content delivery network (CDN): You can ensure images load faster, which supports image optimization SEO with a CDN. It’s a group of servers that enable quicker content distribution to separate locations. You can easily set up one with plugins for your web content management system.
• Add structured data: To help your images stand out, consider adding structured data, including image schema markup. This will result in your images being displayed as rich results and, ultimately, drive more traffic to your website. Google Images supports structured data for a product, a video, or a recipe.
• Leverage browser caching: Another SEO image optimization tip is browser caching, which stores files on a visitor’s browser. Assets load faster, and it can benefit high-traffic pages with return users.
• Utilize lazy loading: Lazy loading keeps images from loading until they’re in the viewport, which will help optimize page load times and the overall user experience.
• Ensure mobile-friendliness: To appeal to mobile users and search engines, SEO image optimization should incorporate mobile responsiveness. You can use the srcset attribute to optimize image resolutions for various mobile devices.
• Apply AI to streamline image SEO optimization: AI can have a role in supporting image SEO through image recognition, a subfield of AI. It involves training algorithms to recognize features in images and classify them based on characteristics. It can be a tool to automate alt text, image optimization, image search, and user experience.

Practicing these image SEO tips ensures you’re doing all the right things to optimize imagery to support search rankings. Now, let’s look at image optimization for social media.

How to Optimize Images for Social Media

The quality of your images on social media matters, especially when trying to maintain a cohesive brand image across each channel. Since you’re competing with so many other online businesses, you must pay attention to every element.

It can be challenging to keep track of all the social media image dimensions on the web. To help you format your high-quality images faster, check out this cheat sheet for each site.

Facebook

With over 3 billion monthly active users, Facebook is the largest social network in the world. One poor image choice could be the difference in engaging an audience or being another post they scroll by. Here are the latest recommended sizes.

• Profile photo: 170 x 170 px
• Landscape: 1200 x 630 px
• Portrait: 630 x 1200 px
• Square: 1200 x 1200 px
• Stories and Reels: 1080 x 1920 px
• Cover photo: 851 x 315 px

X

Formerly known as Twitter, X will only display part of the photos tweeted; users can access the full image by tapping on it. To ensure your photo is visible even when it’s collapsed, you’ll still want to adjust the center and focus of the image. Note that you can tweet up to 4 images per post.

• Profile Photo: 400 x 400 px
• Card: 120 x 120 px
• Landscape: 1600 x 900 px
• Portrait: 1080 x 1350 px
• Square: 1080 x 1080 px
• Cover Photo: 1500 x 1500 px

Instagram

Instagram is a social network that specializes in photo-sharing. The platform supports square, horizontal, and vertical pictures, which makes image dimensions harder to get right.

• Profile picture: 110 x 110 px
• Landscape (feed): 1080 x 566 px
• Portrait (feed): 1080 x 1350 px
• Square (feed): 1080 x 1080 px
• Display thumbnail: 161 x 161 px
• Stories: 1080 x 1920 px
• Stories ads: 1080 x 1920 px
• Carousels: 1080 x 566 px (landscape), 1080 x 1350 px (portrait), 1080 x 1080 px (square)
• Reels: 1080 x 1920 px
• Ads: 1080 x 566 px (landscape), 1080 x 1080 px (square); minimum width 320 px; maximum width 1080 px

LinkedIn

Pairing your LinkedIn updates with high-quality images boosts comments and sharing. The better optimized your photos are for the site, the more professional your brand will appear.

• Profile photo: 400 x 400 px
• Profile cover photo: 1584 x 396 px
• Blog post link images: 1200 x 627 px
• Sharing link in update: 1200 x 627 px
• Company logo size: 300 x 300 px
• Page cover image size: 1128 x 191 px
• Life tab main image size: 1128 x 376 px
• Life tab custom modules image size: 502 x 282 px
• Life tab company photos image sizes: 900 x 600 px
• Square logo: At least 60 x 60 px
• Company logo size for ads: 100 x 100 px
• Spotlight ads logo size: 100 x 100 px
• Spotlight ads custom background image: 300 x 250 px
• Sponsored content images: 1200 x 627 px (1.91:1 aspect ratio)
• Sponsored content carousel images: 1080 x 1080 px (1:1 aspect ratio)

Pinterest

Like Instagram, Pinterest focuses on visuals than other pieces of content and can be a great way to drive referral traffic to your website. Most Pinterest pages are external links, so optimizing your page using the appropriate image sizes for your pins and boards is critical.

• Profile photo: 165 x 165 px
• Profile cover photo: 800 x 450 px
• Pins: 1000 x 1000 px or 1000 x 1500 px
• Story pins: 1080 x 1920 px
• App install ads: 1000 x 1500 px
• Carousel pins and ads: 1000 x 1000 px or 1000 x 1500 px
• Shopping ads: 1000 x 1500 px

Important Tools for Image SEO

In mastering how to optimize images for SEO, there are some tools that can make it easy. Here are some to check out.

• Image4.io: It includes an image CDN, optimization for web and mobile, integrations with WordPress and others, and uses smart detection to recognize the user’s device.
• TinyPNG: This image optimization tool compresses JPEGs and PNGs. It can selectively decrease the number of colors to cut down its size and can optimize animated PNGs, too.
• ImageRecycle: It’s an image compressor that can also analyze your website and deliver a report of what images need optimization.
• ShortPixel: This WordPress plugin supports all image files to compress and convert with no file size limitations.
• Imagekit.io: This CDN option has image transformation, automatic image optimization, and performance monitoring and analytics.

Start Measuring the Success of Your Image SEO

You can track and measure image optimization SEO in the same way that you do standard SEO. Some key metrics would be:

1. Site Speed: Test this regularly after any optimizations to identify improvements.
2. Keyword Position Ranking: Any time you conduct optimization of images within your content, you could measure if these worked by looking at position rankings. To correlate this directly to your image SEO, don’t make any other changes on that page for 30 days.
3. Page Traffic: Another way to determine if image optimization had an impact is to look at the traffic for the pages where you made adjustments. Again, you wouldn’t want to make additional edits, so you can know for sure that image SEO tactics drove more traffic.

Another way to track how well you’re doing with image SEO isn’t a metric. It’s an audit process to see what images need optimization, either by sizing or adding alt text. If your audits improve every time, and there are fewer fixes, then you are consistently applying image SEO best practices.

Common Mistakes Marketers Make on Image SEO

There are several mistakes businesses can make relating to image SEO optimization. Try to avoid these:

• Leaving alt text blank
• Forgetting to set the max image preview; if unspecified, Google will show a default size.
• Not using the keyword in the alt text.
• When using dynamic SEO strategies, neglecting to consider the impact on the types of images and their alt text could impact the value of such an approach.
• Alt text that’s not relevant
• Using the same alt text for multiple photos
• Not properly sizing and compressing images
• Failing to create image sitemaps

If you stick to the best practices, use appropriate tools, and continue to audit the process, you’re less likely to make these errors.

FAQs: Image SEO

1. What role does AI play in image SEO today?

AI can be a tool to help you optimize your images for SEO, including finding and creating alt text and compressing images. AI can also aid with image creation. With the right prompts, an AI image generator will provide a unique image that can complement your content better than stock images.

2. Can image SEO influence voice search and visual search results?

Voice search occurs when someone uses a digital assistant to start an inquiry. The results they receive relate to the best organic rankings for that question or term, so any optimizations to your content, including image SEO optimization, can help.

Image SEO can support visual search when your imagery that someone may search for, most commonly a specific product. When you follow image SEO best practices, search engines will correctly display these images in results, which can lead to clicks.

3. How do you optimize images for Local SEO?

There’s not a big difference, and it follows the same best practices for standard SEO. All the ways you enhance images with keywords would just include the local aspect, like a city or ZIP code.

4. How does image SEO impact mobile user experience?

One goal of image SEO is to render the right images on any device and to create an excellent user experience. If you consistently do this with every page, the pages should load quickly, and images appear as they should.

5. How frequently should images be updated for optimal SEO?

You can follow the schedules you do for refreshing content. Whenever you update content, also change out photos. Additionally, if you add products or services to web pages, you’ll want to change out photos and include any new keywords.

Master Image SEO Now With the Help of Ignite Visibility

SEO for images can help you succeed with your SEO campaigns in many ways. If you would like some help with SEO image optimization, the experts at Ignite Visibility can help.

We’ll work with you to:

• Create SEO image assets that can complement other SEO content
• Optimize images using filenames, alt text, structured data, and other components
• Ensure your images show up in visual search results
• And more!

If you like this idea and want to excel with SEO for images, reach out to us today!