5 ways to increase your SEO performance using unique imagery
Here is a guest post by the very knowledgable SEO expert Georgina Jones, from Every Trick Marketing.
Using images on your website can be a fantastic way of capturing the attention of your desired audience. Well-placed, high-quality images and photographs on your website are imperative to make your website and content accessible, attractive, and engaging to viewers, and used successfully can often mean the difference between a potential customer choosing to use your product or service, or choosing to go with another business.
However, did you also know featuring high-quality, original images can be a great way to increase your SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) performance? It helps you to rank higher on search engine results pages and reach a much broader audience. SEO is an essential part of online marketing that focuses on bringing more relevant traffic through to your website by ranking higher on Google for relevant search terms (keyword phrases). Here, we’ll talk through some of the ways that high-quality imagery can help your website be seen by more people than ever!
Use high-quality, unique images
The first step to using images to improve your SEO is by making sure you use high-quality, unique, and interesting images on your website. Search engine algorithms always tend to rank original website content higher than duplicate copy, and the exact same goes for imagery. While many websites use stock images, high-quality, relevant and engaging images are much more likely to be picked up by search engines, increasing the variety of content to be viewed by any potential audience.
Choose your file name
One way to elevate your SEO performance using images is by optimising your image file names. It’s important to make sure your file is named with a relevant keyword that also matches the description of your image. It is best to separate words in your image title using hyphens, as underscores will not be recognised by search engines, which will not be able to “see” the individual words. File names should also make sense to humans as well as search engines, with more clear and more descriptive titles far more likely to match up to what your audience is searching for than placeholder names and gibberish.
Optimise the image alt text
While people viewing an image online can understand it just from looking at it, search engines are a different story. Search engines use the alternative text of the image to accurately index it. Alt text can also be useful in helping people who are visually impaired understand your image content. The best way to optimise your alt text is by picking the most relevant and highest-performing keywords from your research and adding these. The alt text should be longer and more detailed than your file name, using multiple keywords relevant to both the image and your general website purpose should help your image to be ranked higher by the search engine algorithm.
Make sure your images are mobile friendly
Search engine algorithms including Google use mobile-first indexing, which means that the crawlers used to index web pages and images mainly look at a site’s mobile version. This means it’s incredibly important to make sure the images are sized and formatted to look just as good on your mobile phone as your laptop or tablet! Many website builders will automatically resize images for different formats, but you can also customise your image size for various devices using CSS.
Ensure that your website content matches your images
The quality and relevance of the copy on your page towards your chosen images also can have an impact on your SEO performance. The page copy can also give search engines more confidence in the relevance of your images to your site, particularly if successfully optimised with keywords.
All in all, using high-quality, original images can be a fantastic way of helping your website rank higher on search engine results pages, particularly if they are relevant to your website copy and optimised with keyword research for the alt text and website titles. Contact EBM Brand Photography to start creating engaging and eye-catching imagery for your brand, and book a free strategy session with Every Trick Marketing to learn more about SEO!