Why Optimising Images is Integral to SEO

9 July 2021

Search engine optimisation involves tweaking different elements of your website to make it easier for search engine bots to crawl. In the simplest terms possible, you're making it easier for search engines to find and categorise

As a result, this is reflected in how you rank for certain keyword searches. The more optimised your website is, the higher up the rankings you are going to place.

While there are plenty of things you can do to improve your SEO, one significant factor often gets overlooked: image optimisation. Optimising images is crucial, and allow us to explain why...

Loading times

Page loading speeds matter a great deal to SEO as slow websites offer a poor user experience, so they rank lower. When you have multiple images on one page, the page itself becomes bulkier and harder to load. Therefore, you need to optimize your images by compressing them before uploading them. If they're all under a megabyte in size, your site can load up quickly without slowing down. A faster site will rank better as you aren't forcing people to wait around.

Name and tag the images

Naming your images is another way to optimise them for SEO, and it's crucial for one key reason. By giving images natural names that reflect what they are, it is easier for search engines to find them. This means they will find the images when people are searching for keywords that relate to the image title. In short, the right image titles can help your site appear higher in the rankings. The same goes for tags - use alt tags to provide more context behind your images and make your site easier to crawl.

Provide high-quality images

The quality of your images will impact SEO because it plays on the user experience. Firstly, low-quality images with pixels showing will not be helpful to the user at all. It will most likely put them off your website, meaning they leave straight away. This increases your bounce rate, which search engines look at as an indicator of how user-friendly your site is. They are unlikely to rank you highly if people keep landing and bouncing straight away.

High-quality images make a huge difference as they can draw people in and keep them on your site for longer. Unique images go one step further as you can use them to illustrate and demonstrate things to users. This is especially important when you have product photos - display professional photos of the products in action, encouraging users to stick around for longer. As a result, the bounce rate is lowered and search engines suddenly start driving traffic to your site as you seem to provide a good enough experience for people to stay on your site for longer.

Understandably, the idea of optimising images for SEO can be confusing for some. In summary, image optimisation will improve your SEO by making your site easier for search engines to find and categorise. If you need help optimising your images, please don't hesitate to contact us today!