Image SEO means optimizing images of your website to get more traffic from Search Engines. Image Optimization can help you rank your images in google search and build successful online E-Commerce store.
Image SEO can help you reduce your website load time to attracting visitors from google search.
Search traffic is very important we all know that, but here is something not everyone realizes – Core search engine makes 64.8% of searches on all web properties (including Amazon), google images make up another 21.8%.
Google search images are ebay bigger than you think. 25% of all google searches are image searches.
The reason why people don’t spend too much time talking about image search is that the traffic coming from that has low buying intent.
However, I also want to be clear is that there is no way we should be neglecting 25% of google searchers.
This is really important especially for E-Commerce websites. Image search is a great way to put your product in front of image searchers.
Why Image SEO is important?
It’s very easy now to get visitors from google image search. There are dedicated buttons like ‘Share’, “Add to Collection” and “Add to bookmarks” in google image searches.
Here’s how image search in mobile version looks like –
Mobile version are tailored towards browsing products. Google image searches show structured data markup. This make google images compelling starting point for shopping online.
Another important feature google image search provides in mobile version is “related image”.
If your images aren’t ranking on the top of page of google they can still be shown in related images.
If you have an E-Commerce website google search images are important for you. Visual search is going to be huge sales driver for E-Commerce websites.
Platforms like Pinterest already bring in hundred of million of searches.
What is Alt Text?
Alt text or alternative text is a written description of an image. SEO experts sometimes refer to it as “alt tags” or “alt attributes”.
Optimizing your alt text is crucial to rank your images on Google. Alt text tells Google what the image is about. Alt text add relevancy signals to a website page resulting in improving website SEO.
Alt text is used within HTML code to describe a specific image.
Optimizing Image Alt Text – Your alt text should be descriptive without overdoing it. It’s also important to include relevant keywords in your alt text.
Here’s an example of a good alt text vs bad alt text.
Bad Alt Text – Brown boots for men.
Good Alt Text – Premium Brown boots for men upto 50% off.
A good optimized alt text helps Google understand the content of your visual, “keyword stuffing” can be a signal to google that your page is spam.
10 Optimization Tips to improve your Image SEO -
Alt tags are very important but there is much more to image SEO optimization. There are few things you can do to improve the SEO of your website.
1. Resize your Image to the Display Dimensions -
Page speed is really important when it comes to user experience. Images with heavy size can slow down your pages. Let’s say you take a picture from your phone. Most smartphones take photos that have size of 4032 pixels by 3024 pixels.
If the maximum width on your website is 700 pixels, the image that you have uploaded is larger than it needs to be.
Whenever you upload images make sure to resize images to the maximum display dimensions.
If you use WordPress you can use a plugin like Resize Image after uplaod. Enable the ‘enable re-sizing’ feature, choose the image size you want.
Also make sure you are scaling images responsively with CSS.
2. Choose Right Image format -
Amazon, Shopify, BigCommerce and WooCommerce have their own recommended image file sizes.
Following are the requirements you have to meet for a major E-Commerce platforms.
WooCommerce – It is a E-Commerce WordPress plugin. It adds more functionality to your website turning your WordPress website into E-Commerce website.
There are no guidelines for product pictures. But for photo uploading these are following requirements
- File cannot be more than 64 MB.
- Recommended file size is 100 KB.
- 2056 pixel size is broadly recommended.
- JPEG, PNG, TIFF and GIF files can be uploaded.
Shopify –
- 4472 x 4472 pixels upto 20 MB of files size is ideal.
- JPEG, GIFF, PNG, TIFF file formats can be uploaded.
- 800 x 800 pixels is a minimum size.
Magento – Magento is an open-source E-Commerce platform. It installs on your hosting provider unlike BigCommerce and Shopify. For product pictures there are no fix guidelines in Magento.
- 2056 pixels size is recommended.
- Recommended file size is 100 KB.
- PNG, TIFF, JPEG, GIF files can be uploaded.
There is no wrong or right image format to use.
1. JPEG – Most common image format for E-Commerce product images. Can be compressed to very small sizes.
2. PNG – PNG files are usually heavier than JPEG. If you need transparency in the image background go for PNG format.
3. WebP – If you need higher compression than PNG or JPEG you can use WebP. Animated images can be compressed without sacrificing animated frames, color depth etc.
4. GIF – This format is great for animated images or small images. GIF format is the best choice.
3. Use a CDN -
A CDN loads your website and images very quickly. In CDN a group of servers are located at different locations around the world.
Let’s say you are located in Argentina it will be much easier to load page in Argentina than in India. You can easily setup a CDN on your WordPress website using W3 Total cache.
4. Browser Caching -
In browser caching files are stored by visitors web browser. So, whenever that visitor comes next time that assets loads faster.
Let’s say you visit a website the images & content is downloaded. Next time when you will visit the website same content will be downloaded again if there is no browser caching.
With browser caching all these files are already stored and the page loads much faster.
5. Optimise for Twitter Cards and Open Graph -
Open Graph is an Internet Protocol created by Facebook to standardize the use of metadata within a page to represent the content of a page.
It helps you to choose how a social media post preview appears.
You have to include this image tag in <head> section of your pages HTML to make sure the image of your choice shows up when you share a page.
<meta property="og:image" content="http://site.com/image-link.jpg" />For Twitter you need to add following code to the <head> section.
<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary"></meta>6. Name your Images Properly -
It is really important to use descriptive filenames according to googles image SEO guidelines. Give your images a descriptive name before you upload them on your website.
Google also recommends using hyphens rather than underscores to separate words.
Let’s use this picture of Nike shoe as an example –
Your computer may generate a file name as img12544.jpg but it doesn’t tell Google what this image is about. A good image desciption would be Nike-white-air-force.jpg.
And if you are going translate or localized page, change the file names acordingly.
7. Image Compression -
Compressing your images is the best way to reduce file size. Compressing your pages helps in reducing page load time. You can use tools like TinyPNG, Imageoptin or Optimizilla to compress your images. Try Smush plugin, if you are using WordPress.
8. Create an Image Sitemap -
A Image sitemap is similar to XML sitemap other than that it only includes only URLs to images. Image sitemap of your website helps google discover your images and put them in search results.
How to create an Image Sitemap – You can create an image sitemap using sitemap generator or manually. To create image sitemap manually follow Google example and instruction.
Example from google of a sitemap : two pictures are included.
A list of image tag is also provide by Google. You can include upto 1000 images for each page in a image sitemap.
9. Implement lazy loading -
Whenever a page loads slow heavy images are problem everytime. Best way to solve this problem is to implement lazy loading.
If a visitor doesn’t scrolls down to the second half page, those assets will never be loaded.
Google also tells you to avoid lazy loading above the fold images as this would create poor user experience.
10. Adding Image structured data -
Structured data is a data vocabulary that helps search engines like Google understand your website information more easily.
Implementing structured data also helps your images show as “rich results”. Example of Recipe schema in action structured data improves your image search listing.
Conclusion
If you use all the tactics listed above and take time to optimize your images it will have significant improvement on your website.
It also improves user experience when images load faster. Using CDN and implementing lazy loading also strengthens your SEO efforts.
Optimize images for your SEO is critical for your E-commerce success.
About Author
Hi, I’m Jatin, SEO Specialist by profession and entrepreneur from heart.
I have been in the SEO industry since I was 16 years old and have helped small &
medium-sized businesses grow through Search Engine Optimization.
I help E-Commerce websites improve their online visibility and generate more sales through Technical SEO.
I’ve worked with E-commerce websites fo almost 8 years, I know what you care about.
If you want to talk more about SEO just email me: jatin@jatinthakur.com
