Images are beneficial to your website for a range of reasons. This includes bringing your pages to life as well as to provide more informative content to visitors.
Images are also important for SEO as all good Auckland SEO companies know. There are several reasons for this:
- Gets you traffic from image search
- Adds rich results to your listings
- Keeps visitors on your pages for longer
- Increases engagement on social media
Let’s look at each in more detail.
Gets Traffic from Image Search
One of the options you have when searching on Google is to search only for images. This is an increasingly used tool and can bring additional traffic to your website.
Furthermore, there is usually a lot less competition on image search results pages than there is on the main Google search results page. This can make it easier for you to rank in a high position.
Tips for Getting Traffic from Google Search
- Make sure you complete the alt text field or alt tag on your website’s images. The alt text tag helps Google understand what your image is about. Therefore, it’s important you make the alt text as descriptive as possible. You don’t need to write a paragraph of information. Instead, just a handful of words or a short but highly descriptive sentence. Include relevant keywords too, as this will help ensure your images rank for the right searches.
- It is also helpful to match the filename of your image and the alt text to keep everything uniform for Google.
- Make sure your image is high-quality as potential visitors will not click through to your website if they don’t know what the image is about, or if they don’t like the quality.
- Use original images as much as possible. Remember, on a Google image search results page, your image will be displayed alongside many others. Standard stock images are not as attention-grabbing as original images.
- The image should have relevance to the keyword. This will make a connection between the keyword used in the search and your image.
Add Rich Results to Your Listings
Rich results are expanded search results you can get in Google by adding structured data. In relation to images, structured data can help your image appear as a rich result on the main Google search results page as part of your standard listing. This will make your website stand out more on Google.
Tips for Getting Your Images in Rich Results
- You need to add structured data to your images if you want them to appear in rich results. You can do this for product images or recipe images.
Keeping Visitors on the Page for Longer
High-quality and informative images will keep visitors on your website for longer. This is particularly the case if the image improves the visitor’s understanding of the content on your page and answers the original query they typed into Google.
Keeping visitors on your page like this is good for SEO.
Tips for Using Images to Keep Visitors on Your Pages for Longer
- The tip above on getting traffic from image searches apply to this point also.
- Adding captions to your images can help too as captions explain the image more clearly, making the image more relevant to the visitor.
- Make sure you optimise the file size of your images to ensure they don’t increase page load speed.
Increased Engagement on Social Media
Images are also important to social media as posts with images get higher rates of engagement. This increases the number of people who will see your post, who will click through to your website, and who will potentially link back to your website, all of which is beneficial to SEO.
Tips to Increase Engagement on Social Media
- The points above all apply, particularly those on the use of original, high-quality images
- You should also make your images as engaging, interesting, and eye-catching as possible
Making Sure Your Images Are Optimised for Google
By working closely with your SEO company in Auckland, you can ensure you have good-quality images on your website that are optimised for Google. This will improve your website’s overall SEO.