Are you looking to gain an edge online? If your image SEO isn’t up to snuff, you could be missing out on traffic, user engagement, and sales.

While optimized images alone won’t make weak content rank highly, it can help you stand out from competitors that don’t optimize their images.

The good news? Image optimization isn’t particularly complicated. A few changes to your current image process could help your site gain more traffic and leads, resulting in more sales.

Key Takeaways

• Image SEO uses optimization techniques to help your site rank higher and increase visibility. 
• Descriptive, relevant alt text, compressing file sizes, and optimizing for mobile are still essential for image optimization, but you also need to optimize for new tools like Google Lens and multimodal searches.
• Optimizing your images enables your site to load faster, gives a better user experience, and makes your site more accessible.
• Compressing your image files, ensuring your images are mobile-friendly, and building an image sitemap are simple steps you can take to enhance your image SEO.
• You should also focus on technical SEO techniques such as using a content distribution network, lazy loading, and browser caching.

• What Is Image SEO?

  Image SEO involves using tried and tested image optimization tactics to increase your visibility online in the SERPs. Visual content is highly popular and appears in places like sponsored ads, the knowledge panel, and rich snippets.

• Google also shows images across its regular search results, within text results images, Google Discover, and, of course, Google Images.

  Image SEO is easy to start with, including picking the right formats, resizing images, and using image compression.

  Why Is Image Optimization Important?

  When you use image optimization for better visibility in Google, 

  Image optimization:

  • Improves the user experience: Well-optimized images that display correctly improve user experience (UX) by making your site easier to navigate. Large images, for example, can take up the entire screen or cover other elements on the page. You don’t want that.
  • Delivers faster load times: When it comes to SEO,Speed matters.. Images that are large or formatted incorrectly can slow down your site, hurting your ranking and annoying site visitors. The average loadtime is2.5 seconds,but 0-2 seconds is ideal.
  • Makes your site more accessible: Some optimization steps, like adding alt tags, can make your site easier to navigate for those using screen readers. Web accessibility  is important for both site visitors and SEO, too. 

  • While this might feel like another step in a never-ending quest to improve SEO, it can significantly impact ranking and UX. 

    Below, Nikki Brandemarte, Sr. SEO Strategist at NP Digital, highlights the evolving nature of image SEO and its importance:

    “SEO best practices for optimizing images still apply – things like using descriptive, keyword-rich alt text, compressing file sizes, etc., are essential. But now we must also focus on optimizing for new landscapes like Google Lens & multimodal searches, which combine both text and images. To do this, focus on implementing structured data and integrating images seamlessly into current content to complement & improve user understanding”.

    So, how do you make sure images aren’t holding your site back? By sticking to proven techniques, and adapting to new tools.

    Image Optimization Tips For Your Website

    Of course, you’ll want to focus on technical Seo But image SEO best practices also include on-page SEO, such as schema markup, page speed, and high-quality, original, engaging images.

    The tips I discuss below cover you from both angles, so if you’re ready to ensure your images are SEO-friendly here’s what you need to know.

    Make Sure Your Image Choices Align With Your Audience Needs

    I’m sure you put a lot of effort into your written content; your images deserve the same care and attention. Images should be original, high-quality, and visually guide your audience through the content. Take a look at this infographic from one of my past assets:

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