How to Rank Well in Google Image Search
Having good eye-catching content can be a major factor in increasing the rank of your website but did you know that visual graphics can make your website rank better?
Just as optimizing content for your website, optimizing images can make a huge impact on the increase of traffic and popularity of your brand. Adding an attractive image to your content and optimizing both in a user-friendly manner makes users spend more time on your website. But that doesn’t mean stuffing images and visual aids that aren’t relevant. You might be familiar with how to optimize your content, well, here is how to do the same with images.
Types of image size
Before we hop into the main part of optimization, are you familiar with the different types of image sizes?
The size of your image can have a huge impact in respect to the site speed of your website. Images that go way beyond the perfect pixels can slow down your website slow as a snail. Uploading and inserting pictures that are not larger than the user will see, can slow down your website which can be of no benefit to you or the user. Knowing how to optimize images on your page to increase the site speed can be of great help.
Did you know PNG, GIFs, and JPEG are the three major file formats that make up 96% of the internet’s image traffic?
- JPEG uses lossy compression to optimize and make the file size small. You have the advantage to adjust the quality of your image file with a compression ratio between 0% to 100% for a good balance.
- PNG is a lossless image format. Even though it produces higher quality images the file size of images is comparatively larger. Although you can benefit by not losing any data and quality during the process of compression.
- GIFs have a limit of color palettes of 256 colors. It uses lossless compression which produces an exceptionally larger image file size.
Elements to rank images in Google search:
There are certain ranking factors for Google in order to decide which keywords in images are to be ranked and which don’t.
Here are a few elements that are required to rank your images for google:
- Image file name: Whenever you try to save a file, keep in mind to rename the file with the contents of the image rather than names like img01 and DD001.
- Image Size and Dimension: It is better to insert images after compressing them. With a compressed image, you can have better loading speed which can turn out to be a great user experience. Also, it is vital to keep the images between 75kb to 100kb.
- Image Metadata: This is one of the most crucial elements. After you insert an image, try to fill in the title, meta description, and alt text for the image which can help to rank your website better. Although you may not find these while posting on social media, it’s better if you do when you insert images to your website.
- Image engagement: The more the click and views, the more chances to be ranked in Google.
- Hosted page elements: When inserting the image, make sure to include the appropriate keywords in the page URL, page title, and description as it will help Google to determine the relevance of your image which will help boost up the image to rank with the right keywords.
Optimize to stand out from competitors
Now that you are familiar with the different types of image formats and the elements, let’s discuss how to optimize your images to stand out from competitors.
Differentiating from competitors with respect to content, images, and even format is important as the users expect to see something different or special that they haven’t seen before. But in order to attract those visitors, you need to optimize your images.
Here are a few steps to optimize your images:
- Track your image-based traffic: Routine check on how many visitors you get through google image search. You can track your image traffic in the google search console and analytics. In GSC, lookup search results in underperformance and change the type of search to the image.
In analytics, you can look it up from the referral report.
- Usage of relevant images: Make sure to insert and upload images that are relevant to the whole page or at least the part of the content where the image is to be uploaded.
- Using proper file format: Use image formats that search engines can index as it can affect the quality and download speed.
- Create alt attributes: Giving alt attributes can help google to understand what the image is and if it is relevant to the content. Use relevant keywords for the content and images.
- Use proper image title, caption, and description: Create an attractive title, caption by describing the image and description including naming the photo with the appropriate keywords.
Looking ahead
Google is now optimized for a better user experience. With well-optimized content and images (videos and infographics too) the quality of your website can increase to a level that will meet Google’s standards. Implement these techniques and leg up on the competition with more eyeballs on your website.
