7 tips to optimise images for search

How essential are images to your website? Lots of sites rely on them as part of the design – but the opportunities they provide go far beyond this. Images can help to support SEO, meet the needs of a wider variety of users and play a vital role in branding.

SEO is frequently a game of incremental improvements, and image optimisation is an often overlooked area. Common problems with website images include:

• Unnecessarily large file sizes, which cause pages to load slowly and frustrate users.
• Unoptimised text-based elements – which are not only a lost SEO opportunity, but also impact on accessibility.
• Heavy use of unedited stock images, which can weaken or damage branding.

Whether you’re looking for traffic from image searches – or simply helping your content to perform better – image optimisation can help. In this week’s blog, we’re going to take a look at 7 quick tips for making the most of your images:

1. Resize your images for the web

Camera technology is constantly improving. It’s no longer just professional DSLR cameras which create high quality images – the phone cameras we carry around with us are creating bigger and better images than ever before. Far from the days of an 8MP phone camera, there are now phones available with 50MP, 108MP and even 200MP cameras.

Put it into action:

There are plenty of options available, depending on your workflow. I usually use Adobe Photoshop, where images can be resized either on an individual basis, or processed as a batch. To resize an individual image, click ‘Image’ then ‘Image size’ and select your new dimensions. Use the link icon next to width and height to lock the ratio – this means the whole image will resize, rather than just changing the width independently which would crop the height.

Canva is another popular tool which can be used for cropping or resizing images where the original file is up to 25MB in size. Create a new project with the image dimensions you want, and simply drag and drop your images into it and then download them at the new size.

2. Choose the best file format

There are different types of image files, each which have different properties. Here are a few of the common ones:

Put it into action:

There’s no one ‘best file format’ which covers everything – it all depends on the image and what you want it to achieve.

Many Content Management Systems (CMS – the platform your website is built on, e.g. WordPress, Squarespace) support next gen formats like WebP. It’s worth checking if your site will support this as it’ll help you to reduce file sizes and improve loading speeds across your site.

My process is to resize an image and save it as a PNG if it needs transparency, or JPG if not. Then I run these files through ShortPixel (more on that in a sec!) to compress it and download it as a WebP file to use on the website.

Put it into action:

I mentioned ShortPixel above and this has become my go-to tool (although there are others available). You can process 100 images for free each month, and there are affordable packages available if you need more.

If you want to create WebP images, then before you start, click the ‘settings’ button and toggle ‘Generate WebP’ to ‘on’. I usually start with the ‘lossy’ level of compression – if this doesn’t affect image quality, it will reduce the file size the most. Once you’ve uploaded and processed a file, you’ll be able to view the difference between the original and the compressed image. If there’s a noticeable change, adjust the level of compression and process it again. Once this is done, you’ll be able to download the compressed image as WebP or in the original file format.

Too many images to process manually? There are also plugins available which will run on your website and compress images automatically. These include ShortPixel, TinyPNG or WP Smush.

Before you add any of these to your website it’s really important to create a backup first, and trial the plugin on a staging server if possible. I’ve seen an image plugin ruin a whole website full of images before, so you want to test it in a safe environment where you can revert the changes if needed.

It’s also worth running speed tests both before and after installing a plugin. The benefits of the file size savings need to outweigh the additional code required to run the plugin for this method to be worth it. ‘Before’ and ‘after’ speed tests will help to clarify if a plugin is a good way forward for your site.

4. Optimise your file names

Ever paid much attention to the file names of your photos? Usually they look something like ‘IMG_9940’ – or even complete gobbledegook! These file names don’t give a search engine any indication what’s in the image, which is a missed opportunity for your SEO.

Image filenames form part of the URL of your image. If you’re looking to update these on existing images, check first if those URLs are getting traffic or backlinks. If so, it might be better for your SEO to leave those file names as they are. If you want to change them, make sure to use redirects to the new URL.

Put it into action:

When creating your alt text, keep in mind that the main purpose is to describe the image. You can use keywords, but these need to be relevant – resist any temptation to add more keywords than necessary. In the past, alt text has been abused as a way of cramming additional keywords into a page. This goes against best practice, and is more likely to harm than help your SEO efforts.

Keep your alt text concise – most screen readers will cut off at 125 characters, so you should aim to keep the description shorter than this.

6. Use original images

Previously, we’ve discussed how Google’s looking for original content – and this covers images as well. While stock images can help to fill a gap, unedited stock photos don’t offer anything new. In a similar way to original written content, search engines understand if they haven’t seen an image before. This can be a useful opportunity to add something original and of value to your website.

Use images that are relevant to the content they’re used with wherever you can – images should add to a piece of content! This could be by showing something (e.g. a screenshot, a product), supporting a concept or showing the people behind the content.

Whilst it might be ideal to only use original images, most businesses will find they need to use some stock photography to some extent. This can be done better by:

• Creating a moodboard, and being careful to select stock images that fit with your company’s brand style.
• Editing stock images to fit with your brand. This could include bringing in additional design elements or only using part of the stock photo as an element in a different image.

Put it into action:

You can either create a separate image sitemap, or include image sitemap tags within your existing sitemap. As far as search engines go, either works – so go for the option that’s easiest.

Your website CMS might come with an option to automatically create and update this sitemap out of the box. For other CMS e.g. WordPress, you can use a plugin like All in One SEO or Yoast to set a sitemap up.

It’s time to make your images earn their keep!

Image optimisation may be regularly overlooked, but it’s often a straightforward task! As you add new images to your site, aim to keep on top of these steps. This can help you improve your website performance, user experience, accessibility and search engine rankings.

In competitive rankings, where every incremental improvement can play a part, it’s worth considering if image optimisation could help nudge the needle!

And if you’re looking to gain traffic from image search, these steps are an essential part of the process.

If you’re looking to get more traffic and customers from search, get in touch to discuss how we can help: 📨 hello@heyyou.digital 📞 01159 902779