Visual SEO: How to Improve Your Rankings with Images
Web positioning is vital when it comes to highlighting any brand or website, so improving SEO with images is an excellent alternative within digital marketing, since through the visual, there are also ways to better position our content.
More than just making your website look good, image SEO plays a critical role in loading speed, user experience, and ultimately, brand visibility.
What is improving SEO with images?
Image SEO is an important aspect of search engine optimization that aims to improve the visibility and performance of images on a website. This process is often underestimated in SEO strategies and involves more than selecting aesthetically pleasing images.
It is a set of methods and practices aimed at making images more efficient and effective from an SEO perspective.
The purpose of image SEO is twofold. On the one hand, it strives to improve the user experience by ensuring fast loading and correct rendering on different devices. In the meantime, their goal is to improve their search engine presence.
Optimized images are easier to index and can contribute significantly to a page’s relevance to certain searches.
Benefits of Visual SEO
The benefit of improving SEO with images is that your search engine rankings will gradually increase. In this battle, every strategy counts to boost Google’s ranking engine.
But sometimes images are one of the most overlooked elements. This is despite the fact that it can take up to 80% of a website and can therefore affect performance if ignored.
For this reason, we offer you several visual content strategies to improve SEO with images. These tips will affect your site’s performance positively, as well as Google’s site analytics.
Choose the right format
Google recognizes a variety of formats (BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, WebP, and SVG), but depending on the file type, choosing the right format won’t affect your site’s performance. As a general guide, we recommend the following:
- For SVG logos and illustrations.
- For JPG or WebP photos.
- GIF or WebP animations.
- WebP or PNG transparencies.
Size & Resolution
In fact, most images, except for banners, don’t need to be large. In general, we recommend a size of approximately 1200 pixels or less and a weight of 250 KB or less.
Rename the image file
The name of the image file will positively affect SEO because it helps Google understand the topic of the photo. You won’t be able to choose a title based solely on a description, but you should try to include keywords from the page where the image will be placed.
Use alternate tags
This is the description that accompanies every image on your website and is used by search engines to understand the image. It’s a good idea to enter the keywords used in the file name here and describe what’s in the photo.
Use Appropriate Photos
Google always recommends using images that are original and relevant to the page they’re hosted on. Therefore, we recommend that you do not use Photobank, or copyrighted photos.
Strategic location
Also, if possible, place images around the text that is relevant to the page and your main photo near the site header. In addition to these rules listed above, there are other content quality rules that can positively affect the SEO of images.
Competition for top positions in search engines can be a cruel battle, so the more visual content strategies you can use to improve your SEO position, the better results you can expect. To achieve SEO improvement with images, we recommend having the full support of a communication agency that offers digital marketing services and has experience in keyword comparison.
