User experience and page speed are two essential ranking factors for your website. Unfortunately, both can be impacted by the images you choose and the image SEO you use.
Image SEO is such an important factor that Google makes documentation and tools on this subject; however, some people still ignore its importance. The term “image SEO” refers to the strategies that will help boost organic traffic through the images you use on your website.
This includes things like how the image goes with your content to the type of image format you choose. Every aspect of your site images can help bring in additional organic traffic if SEO efforts are used.
How Images Impact Your SEO
Images can impact your SEO in three ways:
- User experience
- Organic traffic generated through Google images
- Page speed
If you fail to optimize images properly, there is a risk that page load speeds will fall, that you will miss out on traffic from an image search, and that your content won’t be as engaging for users. Every problem can damage the SEO efforts that you make. If you want to ensure your page is well-optimized, using the below SEO image tips is necessary.
Choose the Right Image Format
The image format you use matters. These will impact the usability, quality, and size of images on different web browsers.
While there are several image formats to choose from, the top three include WebP, PNG, and JPEG. JPEG, which is also called JPG or PNG, is the most popular image format option. That’s because they have been around forever and work with all the main web browsers.
With JPEG images, you have smaller image sizes, which ensures faster load times. However, sometimes using these can result in a loss of image quality. In this situation, choosing PNG over JPEG is recommended.
Utilize Image Compression
With image compression, you can reduce the file size of larger images. This is going to help make the loading time faster. The trick to successfully use image compression is finding the proper balance between file size and image quality. In some cases, changes like reducing the colors used in an image will help shrink the file size significantly while ensuring the image quality remains high.
You don’t have to worry about compressing the images on your own because you can use tools that do this for you or hire a third-party SEO company to handle this for you and your clients.
Getting Help with Your Image SEO
There’s no question that image SEO requires time and effort. While this is true, it is something that you must focus on if you want to ensure searchers find your site. If you are overwhelmed trying to handle image SEO for your clients, let us help. Our team is here to ensure that your clients get the best of the best when it comes to SEO services and solutions. With our help, you can ensure your SEO will meet needs and search expectations.