Lost and Found: Optimizing Your Online Images

Search engine optimization (SEO) is not simply a marketing buzzword. It’s the digital marketing practice that takes your website from lost in the Internet jungle to found at the forefront of consumer search engines. SEO doesn’t just pertain to your content’s text; it’s crucial that your images are optimized for search engines and that’s best completed by a competent SEO agency.

Finding the Motive

Ensuring your images are found online is important for a number of reasons. Think of images as bait. Once your consumer takes the bait, you can reel them into your website. By piquing consumer interest, they’ll click on the content posted alongside the image. Viewing your content also means increased traffic to your website where consumers may explore your services and other information. This leads to a greater online presence, which is important for consumer recall and your position as an industry thought leader. Images serve as the inciting factor for much of your organic consumer reach.

Additionally, images may show favorable aspects of your company. Whether you want to show your services and portfolio work, or allow consumers to view your company’s culture, they are the gateway to creating positive associations about your business in the consumer’s mind.

Don’t forget the written portion of your content—optimized images work in tangent with catered text to improve overall SEO functionality.

Cracking the Case

Now that we know “why” image optimization is important for search engines, there are three major keys to effectively do so with the help of a qualified SEO team:

File Name

The name given to your image serves an important purpose in getting that image discovered by search engines. The more descriptive and specific your file name is, the better chance it will match with words consumers are searching.

Alt Text

Alt text, short for alternative text, has the same mantra as file names with one difference: keywords. Alt text should be descriptive and specific, but most importantly it should include relevant keywords that’ll get your images found with ease. Beware of keyword stuffing. Google disapproves of this tactic, which may adversely affect your content’s ranking by placing it lower in the search engine.

Image Size

The size of your images makes a difference, too. The larger your image is, the longer it takes for the website to download it. First, this negatively impacts consumers who will, on average, wait five seconds for a page to load on mobile and just three seconds for a page to load on desktop. Second, longer download times affect your page ranking in search engines. Among other factors, like previously mentioned alt text, Google ranks pages based on the load speed to give their consumers the fastest results. If your page load speed is slow due to large images, you’ll be placed lower in search results.

Optimizing your images for SEO is a crucial element in getting your content seen by your target audiences, but it’s only a start. Working with a digital marketing agency that specializes in maximizing websites’ SEO will turn the digital traffic generated on your website into revenue.

Appleton Creative is an award-winning, full-service Orlando marketing firm that specializes in search engine optimization. Appleton works with local, national and international clients to deliver inbound marketing strategies that put your website ahead of the competition. At Appleton, we want to learn about your business, empower your marketing team and be your creative resource. Your SEO advertising goals are worth a conversation: contact us at 407-246-0092 or info@appletoncreative.com