Images can have an important effect on websites. Aside from changing the visual appearance, adding images can also alter aspects of a website such as page speed, user experience, accessibility, image search visibility, and the whole page performance.
For search engine optimization purposes, images do make a difference, even if the correlation is indirect.
How Images May Impact SEO
Images can impact your website’s SEO through page loading time, user experience, accessibility, and search engine understanding.
User Experience
Adding images to your page helps with comprehension of your pages’ information and its appearance. For example, images can break up walls of text and make your content more digestible. Long pages of text are daunting to read, but breaking up paragraphs with a couple of high-quality images can help to keep readers engaged and keep them on your page for longer.
Including relevant images to your page, improves understanding of concepts and provides more information to your readers.
Page Speed
A website’s page speed is dependent on what type of content is presented on a page. Large images or an abundance of images can slow down your page’s loading speed.
Loading speed determines whether or not a user will stay on your page. If a website takes more than 2 seconds to load, most users will abandon your page and get their information elsewhere. So to optimize your website’s user engagement and bounce rates, it’s important to ensure that images are suitable to the page.
If large images are slowing down your website’s load time, it’s important to compress them to help them render faster. Compressed images won’t affect the quality or visual look, but will help them appear more quickly on a users screen.
Visibility for Image Search
Images can also serve as a path to bring users to your website. Some users use image search to look for similar content, so optimized images can come up in search results.
In addition, images can come up in search results as part of a featured snippet or AI overviews. In some cases, images from your website can populate into these results and prompt users to visit your page.
What makes an Image SEO-Friendly?
In addition to image compression and relevance, there are a number of best practices that can be followed to ensure your images are optimized for search.
- Descriptive file names help search engines decipher an image. As opposed to leaving the file name as “IMG4637”, naming it “New-York-Skyline-Sunset”, for example, will give search engines some context about what the image is, and what your website content is about.
- When uploading an image, it’s also important to add alt text to your image. While alternative text has a primary purpose for accessibility for people with screen readers, it also provides helpful information about page content for search engines.
- Mobile responsiveness also makes a website more SEO friendly and improves the user experience. Make sure that the images you use have responsive design and adjust to the user’s screen size to help them scroll through your page and view your image properly.
- Removing unnecessary images can also help your page. Having irrelevant images or too many images can overwhelm the page. While there’s no standard for how many images your website needs, it’s key that they add value to your page and balance out your content.
Optimize your Website with Boston Web Marketing
Images are beneficial to your page and to SEO as long as they are optimized. Boston Web Marketing can help you improve your website to help you reach your engagement goals. Sign up for a free website audit today or contact us at (857) 526-0096 to learn how our team of SEO specialists can help you reach your business goals.