With ever-growing SEO competition in the market, sometimes it becomes extremely challenging to outperform competitors and replace them. But, image SEO is a powerful strategy that can help you gain an edge over your competitors and outflank them even for competitive terms.
If you are new to advanced SEO techniques and want to know the right way to optimize the images, we are here to help. In this article, we will have a look at how to optimize your website’s images smartly and gain more traffic for your site.
Image SEO is important
Many people overall the image SEO and they put all their time on content optimization. But this is not the right way of optimizing a website. There is a huge chunk of traffic that is generated by image search and it’s a highly underrated concept. It is underrated because it does not sound too technical or hard to implement. But the trust is that if you implement the image optimization techniques properly, there are high chances that you will generate a lot of traffic.
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Image SEO is a smart technique to outperform your competitor because when using this technique, you can rank on the above position of your competitor by coming into the featured Google image results. With so many benefits of SEO services, let’s dive in and check how to plan a perfect image SEO strategy and outrank your competitors.
Discoverability
Discoverability is the main factor in which you need to focus on as more the visibility of images to Google, the more the images will arrive in the search results. Only uploading images on your website is not enough, you need to have an image XML sitemap just like our site’s normal sitemap. This image sitemap will help the crawlers to know how many images are there on your site and the bots will index them in a much faster way.
Crawlability
While creating a new site, many people never pay attention to the Robots.txt file. By mistakes, the robots.txt file blocks the images’ crawlability and it creates a hurdle while indexing the images. So always check that the Robots.txt file is not blocking any important resource of your site.
Don’t miss image captions
Image captions give an extra context to the users as it helps them to know more about those particular images. Google always prefers to return image results that are fully optimized and have all the necessary information that a user needs to know. If the images are explaining some events or an incident, make sure you give a short and crisp caption to the image.
Add all the important details
The best way to outperform competitors using image search is by adding all the important details to the images as most people don’t do it. Be it the image’s file name, alt tag, or caption, never left any field empty as it’s an underlying opportunity for your brand to thrive. Focus more on your images’ Alt Tags as Google’s search engines bots heavily rely on this single factor to identify your images’ context.
If the images are only for decorative purposes then you can leave the Alt tag place empty as Google doesn’t need to know much about it. Once you optimize your images then you will also gain traffic under various web compliances like ADA, and WCAG. As the compliances are designed to help specially-abled persons, your site can thrive in that section.
Image size matters
In this world of mobile-friendly web, it becomes important to ensure that your images are not making your site slow. To get ahead of the competitor in image searches, you need to have your images of high-quality but of less size. You can use any image compression tool to perform a lossless compression and then use them on your site.
By doing this, and following the above step, there are high chances that your images may appear on the first result page of Google. You can also do a quick test— search for any query and check the images that are ranking on the first page. You will find that almost all the images are of low size but they are fulfilling their purpose.
Use schema markup for images
Google ranks sites that are properly organized leveraging the schema markups and you can gain an edge over your competitors using this technique. Use schema to markup all your important images as it will give the search bots a better context about the images.
If you are running an eCommerce website, then managing these images with schema markups becomes even more important. Once you organize the images using schema markup, it will give you an edge over your competitors for sure.
These were the best practices of image SEO to take an edge and outperform your competitor. Follow these simple steps and you will notice a surge in your image traffic also. You can also take help from an SEO Company in India.
