How to Optimise Your Website for Image Search?

Image search is an underrated yet excellent way to generate targeted traffic to your website. Over 21% of all online searches carried on Google are Google Image searches. 

When you want your images to rank high in visual search results, you must optimise your images. 

Here are 5 tips to optimise your website for image search. 

Optimise Your Images

To start with, edit the file name of each image. 

Second, modify the alt tag of your images. An image alt tag tells search engines what your image is about. Ensure the alt tags are short and optimised for your keywords. 

Alt tags serve a specific purpose. Visually impaired users rely on this description to understand an image. Ensure your al tags serve this purpose. 

For every image you use on your site, be sure to include a descriptive alt tag that clearly describes the image so the search engines can identify it and show it in reply to relevant search queries. 

Use Original Images

Stock photography is good to an extent but if you consistently use stock photos, it may work against you. 

Stock images do not have a personality. What’s more, they don’t reflect your brand. 

Instead, create your own images that represent your brand. 

It’s not too difficult to make out a stock photo from an original one. So from time to time, aim to create your own quality imagery. 

Use the Right Format

When you want to improve your rankings in image search, use clear, high-quality images in a format Google supports – GIF, BMP, PNG, JPEG, SVG or WebP. 

Use Relevant Images

The images you use must have relevance to the topic.

If it’s not directly related to the content, the search engine bots may not understand what those images are doing there. As a result, you may not receive any ranking. So be sure to use relevant images at all times. 

Compress the images

Large images can slow down the load speed of your page thereby hurting the rankings while also delivering poor user experience. Be sure to optimise your images for faster load speed. You could even consider turning pages with lots of images into Accelerated Mobile Pages to reduce load time. 

Conclusion

Image search should be an important part of your SEO strategy. Use these strategies to improve your visibility in Google Image search results.