When trying to rank your website successfully on Google, you need to make sure that you are ranking successfully across the different areas of the search engine. Approximately a third of all searches on Google are for images. It is an incredibly important part of SEO and you need to make sure that you are taking advantage of the opportunities it can give you.
Why Should You Spend Time on Your Google Image Rankings?
Even with a third of searches occurring through Google Images, you might be hesitant about focusing on this area of SEO. However, Google is making significant changes to this area of the search engine to help improve it. It will focus on four key areas; the authority of the webpage, the context of the image and its relevance to the search terms, the “freshness” of the page, and the position of the image on its webpage.
These updates will allow you to provide more context and explanations to your images on your site. This should help the Googlebot to index your site faster. If it knows exactly what your images are about, it will be able to rank them more accurately.
How to Improve Google Search Image Rankings?
Keen to learn how to improve your Google Search image rankings? Here are some of the steps you should be taking to ensure that you are doing everything you can to rank your images properly.
1 .Track Your Organic Google Images Search Traffic
You can find the necessary tools to track this traffic in the Performance section of the Google Search Console of your website. Filter just the image traffic out so you can be certain that you are focusing on this. You can also ask for a Referral report from Google Analytics. It is important to track your traffic throughout this process so you can be certain that improvements are being made.
2. Focus on Your Content
When trying to rank on Google Images, you want to make sure that your content is high-quality and completely original. This means that you should be taking your own photographs as often as you can and making your own infographics. If you want to use stock photos, you can modify them to help make them unique by adding a filter or an overlay text.
You also need to make sure that you are meeting the relevance quota Google has introduced. Try to only use images to give more insight into what the page is about.
3. Optimise Your Images
While it is difficult to write a complete guide on how to optimise your images, there are some steps you can easily follow. The first is to choose a good image format which won’t affect the quality of the image if it is repeatedly downloaded. Some of the most popular image formats currently used include PNG, JPEG, GIF, and SVG.
You should also make sure to resize the images as necessary. Be aware that you might have to save the image at different resolutions to be able to properly.
4. File the Image Properly
There are several pieces of extra information you can add to an image when you post it on the webpage. These are the key things Google needs to help when indexing. Something you should always include is the alt-text. This describes the image to the visually impaired and gives search engines information about the image.
You should also make sure that you are including image titles, captions, and descriptive file name. Even the metadata of the image is going to make a difference in how the image ranks. These are all important steps which are often overlooked but they can make a real difference to how the search engines view the image.
5. Check the Webpage Too
With so much focus placed on the image itself, you might forget to focus on the webpage it will be placed on. However, this is still something that Google will look at. It likes to favour images placed earlier on the page which are clearly very important. However, it will still rank the image well if it is relevant to the search term used; even if it is closer to the foot of the page.
The most important thing you need to do is make sure that the content around the image is relevant to it. From the caption you have given it to the body of content underneath, the clearer the entire picture is, the easier it will be for Google to understand.
6. If Relevant, Add Structured Data
Did you know that you can add structured data markups to the images? If you add these markups to the HTML of your page, your page will have more data overall for the search engines to see. This means that the information from the markup might be displayed alongside your image; potentially driving traffic through to your site.
7. Optimise the Page
A slow load time will be as bad for image SEO. You need to ensure that even a page with larger images is loading quickly. Optimisation is key, from ensuring that the images are the right size to making them responsive so they can adapt quickly to the user who is viewing them. These might seem like unnecessary steps but they will make a massive difference in your traffic. Make sure you have optimised the page as a whole before you set it to be live.
Rank Better Today
Overall, the single most important thing you can do when trying to rank better on Google Images is to focus on your content. High-quality, original content is always going to do better than if you were to source your images from other places on the internet. When you have these images, make sure you are loading them with information to help Google index the image correctly. Through practices like this, you should notice an upswing in your organic traffic coming from Google Images. Analyse your website’s images and start to make changes as needed today.