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Small- and medium-sized businesses are often tempted to relegate their search engine optimization (SEO) analyses to the free reports offered by online platforms like WordPress and Google Analytics. Unfortunately, those reports rarely provide the details you need to make improvements. One of the things they tend to glaze over is image optimization.<\/p>\n
One of the reasons images tend to be overlooked when auditing SEO is because it\u2019s easy to forget just how many images your website has. Maybe you only had a few photos on your homepage when you first built your site. Over time however, you probably added countless visual elements to blog posts, landing pages, and team photos \u2014 drastically increasing the influence of your images on your SEO.<\/p>\n
The first thing to check is how your images affect your site\u2019s speed. If you\u2019re using ultra high-resolution photos, those with mobile devices or satellite data connections will have trouble loading your site. Site load times affect your site\u2019s ranking on Google, so make sure to pair your images down to a more reasonable resolution and save them as web-friendly file types.<\/p>\n
The days of keyword-stuffing are long gone, but that doesn\u2019t mean you can get away with uploading images with filenames like \u201cDSC2558.jpg\u201d. Before doing so, make sure the names of your images are relevant to their content, such as \u201cgym-trainer-helping-lift.jpg\u201d or \u201ccall-center-customer-service.jpg\u201d. This makes it easier for search engines to derive information from the images on a page.<\/p>\n
Even though Google is getting better at recognizing image content without any help from text identifiers, describing your images in your website\u2019s back-end is still important for SEO. Every image on your site should have enough text-based information without disrupting the user experience.
\nTo see how this works in WordPress, open your site dashboard and click on Media. This will display all the images, videos, and audio there. Click on any photo and you’ll have access to text editing tools. Whatever you include in the Caption field will be shown below the image, so check that it corresponds with your content. If not, skip it. In this case, user experience takes priority over SEO.<\/p>\n
The Alternative Text and Description fields will be visible to visitors only if the image doesn\u2019t load or if they select it manually. They may not seem that important, but these should be considered non-negotiable for SEO purposes.<\/p>\n
Check that your site is doing all these things before requesting another SEO report. If your score changes, audit your image optimizations regularly. If you\u2019re still seeing red, there are a number of web- and cloud-based platforms that can help improve your content. Give us a call today to find out more!<\/p>\n