2021 has already started, which makes it the perfect time to begin building a checklist of search engine optimization needs for your business. As discussed previously on the BWM blog, new SEO trends and initiatives for the year ahead include optimizing your online search results with videos, voice search, and other innovative search methods. But for users and businesses that are just starting to expand their search engine marketing it may help to consider first optimizing any images.
Mastering the basics of SEO, or even giving your website and digital profiles an early year clean up, is still the most crucial SEO need for all business types. Leaders at Google Search recently explained that keyword variation and optimized images are still used as the main data points to rank and crawl websites for search terms.
For this FAQ, we’ll dive into the use of images to help improve your search engine results. Updating your website’s landing pages, social media profiles, and other listings with optimized images are increasingly helpful in gaining more keyword searches. If you need a brief overview on the importance of image-based search optimization, then check out this helpful guide here!
Metadata optimization for website images
Images are increasingly helpful for websites that want to rank for specific keyword searches and appear for business categories. Google’s search engine algorithms are so advanced that they can identify the context and details of an images and use the in-picture content to help users find search results. SEO managers and digital marketers can also improve image results by adding what is called “alt text.”
Alt text is backend data that is added to an image to help Google identify the content of the image as well. Alt text was originally introduced as a means to help visually impaired users that use voice-readers to identify the content of the image. Alt text is also extremely helpful to rank page content and the images themselves for related searches.
However, when editing alt text or similar alt attributes, it is important not to stuff the image with keywords. Describe the image content as efficiently as possible to maximize the usefulness of your alt text.
Robust image volume on social media and Google My Business
Image volume can also help social media profiles and your Google My Business listing increase search engine performance. A detailed and frequently used social media page that includes original images is the best way to help your social profiles improve their general Google Search ranking.
Additionally, Google My Business profiles that have ample amounts of images outperform competitors with conversely fewer images. Google has made it increasingly clear that images are a major part of the search engine’s data points for ranking local business search results.
Simply upload your images onto your Google My Business profile, where you can add specific labels and descriptions to help users learn about your business.
User-friendly images and fast loading images on landing pages
Adding images to your website is a fast and simple way to improve your keyword variation and the overall quality of a landing page. A step above this that can help your website in multiple ways is to add minified and fast-loading images onto a website.
Uploading a large image onto a CMS like WordPress or onto your site directly can cause loading difficulties on the page. Pages that have larger images may not fit properly on mobile devices and lead to slower-than-normal rendering for users. In fact, pages that load faster and load on mobile-friendly browsers are more likely to outperform non-optimized pages for keyword searches.
When adding new galleries or images, make sure that you use a plugin or image optimization tool to reduce the file size on images. Also make sure that images are formatted properly on web-editing tools to help pages render properly on mobile devices.
If you’re not sure where to start on improving your image-based SEO, or need to build a comprehensive SEO plan, then make sure you contact Boston Web Marketing for a free website audit and next steps for improving search results!