Image SEO Best Practises For More Organic Traffic

Are your images invisible to search engines?

Search engines like Google rank images the same way they rank blog posts or pages. If you’re not optimizing your images, you’re letting hundreds of not thousands of pageviews slip through your fingers!

I started as a travel blogger, which meant 10+ images per post. They were massive, had 0 proper formatting, and never ranked on a search engine.

Until I started optimizing them properly!

Here’s an example of one I optimized for fun that gets me consistent traffic each month:

It’s pretty easy to do. Open up your website in another tab and follow along with this blog post. I’ll go through, step-by-step, how to optimize an image for SEO. We’ll go over image formats, the right way to name images, how to stop images from causing speed issues, and how image SEO is essential for EEAT.

Your blog will start getting more traffic without needing any new posts!

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2. Add SEO-Friendly Alt Text

Alt text is mainly for visually impaired users. It’s the descriptive text that a screen reader will read out for someone who can’t see the photo.

Great alt text should describe what the image is and why it’s relevant.

Search engines don’t have eyes, so they rely on this text for context, too.

Alt text should be about 2 sentences, unless it’s a PDF or infographic with heaps of text. In that case, it should include all of the text from the image.

Like a file name, your alt text should be keyword-rich, but not keyword stuffed.

Every picture needs a unique description that actually describes what’s in it.

Here’s an example of great alt text: “Nina, with purple hair and sunglasses, sits with her happy golden retriever, Theo, on a rocky trail by a crystal-clear lake, surrounded by mountains and trees in Banff National Park. This Moraine Lake hike is one of the best for dogs in Banff, and a great photo stop.”

I stopped keyword stuffing my alt text (unfortunately, the advice of a now retired SEO course that was very bad) and within 2 weeks had 1k more pageviews. That was partially from image search, and partially from improved text search rankings.

People don’t realize it, but alt text also matters on social media. I add alt text to all of my Pinterest pins, my Instagram pictures, my Facebook pictures, and my Twitter pictures. It helps all of those search engines understand the context of my images, and makes my content more accessible.

Don’t skimp on alt text!

If you hate writing it, check out my free GPT that’ll write it for you here.

Examples of Bad Alt Text:

• Best Lokrum Beaches
• Laptop screen with dog.
• Banff National Park hiking trail with a dog.
• photo of Nina and Theo
• [no alt text]

Are you a visual learner? Here’s a video of this in action:

3. Add Image Title Tags

Most people don’t even realize image title tags are there.

Remember: an image is basically a mini blog post. Just like a blog post has a title, so does an image.

Search engines look at the title tag of the image as another layer of metadata to understand what’s in the image.

Similar to file names, your title tags should be descriptive and include relevant keywords, yet remain concise and natural.

They can influence search engine results and improve click-through rates.

Don’t just default back to your image’s file name. Instead, treat this as an opportunity to provide an additional context and intrigue that compliments your alt text and file name.

Here’s an example for this photo of my dog and I in Banff:

Image Title: Dog-Friendly Hike at Moraine Lake in Banff National Park with Nina and Theo

Image File Name: nina-and-theo-hiking-banff-moraine-lake.jpg

Image Alt Text: Nina, with purple hair and sunglasses, sits with her happy golden retriever, Theo, on a rocky trail by a crystal-clear lake, surrounded by mountains and trees in Banff National Park. This Moraine Lake hike is one of the best for dogs in Banff, and a great photo stop.

💡 Pro Tip: If you use RankMath (free plugin), you can set your image titles to auto pull from your file names for past photos so you don’t need to manually add it to old photos. I only recommend this if you used optimized file names in the past, otherwise do it manually.

4. Use Unique, High-Quality Images

I know I’ve said search engines need to read your photos to understand them, but they can also kind of see them.

Think of reverse image searches: search engines can find exact copies of the same image across the web.

Use original images that you took yourself to prove your experience. It builds trust with your audience and helps you stay more authentic.

You don’t need to be in the image yourself. Your image can be crooked and taken on an iPhone 4. You don’t even need great lighting.

You just need a photo that no one else has to add something unique and valuable for your audience.

That being said, high resolution images do tend to do better.

Search engines do prefer quality, so don’t upload a 50px image and scale it 10x larger. It’ll be a pixelated mess.

Original images aren’t just images you’ve taken yourself. They can also be images you’ve created or edited.

For example, on this blog I often use screenshots as demos. I put them in a mock up laptop frame on Canva, and add text overlay to point to relevant sections or explain things further.

It’s an original image because before I did all that, it didn’t exist.

💡 Pro Tip: There are many ways to make unique images online. You can use Canva to make infographics or example images. You can use Niche Toolbox to make memes. You can use Photoshop to do complex edits. Or you can make custom images with ChatGPT (although we don’t know if search engines will index these long term, but they do right now).

5. Convert Your Image Formats

Choosing the right image format plays a crucial role in load speed and quality.

WebP is the best option at the moment for speed without sacrificing the quality of your images. It compresses your pictures and essentially turns them into an html attribute so they load as code. I don’t fully understand it, but I know it reduced my homepage loading time by 1s when I made the change!

If you can’t use WebP for some reason, then use JPEG. It’s faster than PNG.

I only use PNG if I have a transparent background I need to maintain.

💡 Pro Tip: You can automatically convert your images with ShortPixel. I recommend their 50k credit pack since it doesn’t expire.

6. Compress Images For Faster Load Times

Large images will significantly slow down your blog.

Use image compression tools like ShortPixel or TinyPNG to reduce file size while maintaining your quality.

Compressed images load faster, which means they show up faster for your user. No one wants to wait 10s for a picture of a beach in Bali to load. They’ll leave and go to the next site.

Search engines know that, so they won’t rank sites with slow-loading images.

💡 Pro Tip: You can automatically compress your images with ShortPixel. I set mine to “lossy” compression levels.

7. Resize Your Images

Have you ever gone to website and an image shows up that’s too large for the page?

It’s annoying AF!

Search engines don’t want to annoy users, so they won’t show websites with images that extend beyond the screen, are outrageously large in the middle of the text, or that are so big that they take 4s to load.

I resize all of my images to 1200px wide maximum, since that’s the minimum size Google Discover will consider.

You can do this with Canva, Lightroom, the free Mac Preview app, or let ShortPixel do it automatically when you upload your images to your WordPress library.

<meta name="robots" content="max-image-preview: large">

8. Add Captions When Appropriate

Captions add context to images, that even someone who can see the image might need.

I always use captions when I have a graph or chart in my blog posts, cause people may not understand what’s going on even with the legend.

Use captions to improve the readability of your content and add some extra context you haven’t otherwise added. This helps search engines and your users.

Please don’t keyword stuff your captions, or put your alt text in your captions. That’s not what they’re for.

9. Use Structured Data Markup

Structured data markup is schema, or code, that basically tells search engine robots what things are. It kind of sign posts information for them to speed up it’s processing.

Images should have structured data. But you’re probably already doing it without noticing!

WordPress’ image blocks do a bit of this, but any free SEO plugin will cover the rest. RankMath automatically does this in their “Images” settings area.

If you have an image in a recipe, then you’ll also want a recipe plugin like WP Tasty or WP Recipe Maker that will add a recipe schema to the images in the recipes.

Ensure your website is equipped with the necessary code to support structured data, hence boosting chances of showing up in featured snippets.

10. Be Mobile-First

Most people use phones to go online now. That’s why most search engines are mobile-first.

Optimize your images for mobile so people can actually see them on phones.

That means that vertical images typically perform best, and images with large font sizes so they can be read on a smaller screen.

💡 Pro Tip: Preview your posts and page in mobile (it’s the little computer icon before “Publish” or “Update” in the WordPress editor) before you publish. Make sure they’re readable, or resize them if they aren’t.

11. Lazy Load Your Images

Lazy loading means that an image doesn’t load until the user scrolls to that part of the post.

It’ll speed up your whole website, but it will slow down the load of your images a little bit. It means that the text content will be available ASAP, instead of waiting for an image at the end of your 3k word blog post to load.

💡 Pro Tip: WP Rocket, and most other cache plugins, can do this with literally one click of a button. It’ll auto apply across your site.

12. Location, Location, Location

People need text context to figure out why a picture is in a post.

Earlier, I shared a photo of my dog and I in Banff National Park. If someone was skimming, they’d be like, “why is there a photo of girl and a dog in this post about image SEO??”

But someone actually reading the text around the image would understand that it’s being used to show an example of an optimizing image.

We’ve already talked about giving the image itself context in it’s file, title, and alt text. But did you know the location of the image also gives it context?

Place images near relevant text to help search engines, and your user, understand their purpose and meaning to the piece.

Don’t just use images for decoration. Give them meaning!

💡 Pro Tip: Location also matters for speed! Avoid images that load above the fold. They’ll slow down the load of your whole post and add Cumulative Layout Shift errors.

Evaluating Your Image SEO

Now that you’ve optimized your images like an SEO pro, it’s time to check if it’s actually working.

Here’s how to evaluate your progress and fine-tune your strategy to keep those pageviews climbing:

1. Use Google Search Console to Monitor Image Performance

Google Search Console is your best friend when it comes to tracking your image SEO. Here’s what to do:

• Log in to Google Search Console and go to the Performance tab.
• Select Search Type: Image to see how your images are doing in Google Image Search.
• Analyze the impressions, clicks, positions, and click-through rates (CTR) for your images.

💡 Pro Tip: If an image has high impressions but low clicks, it might mean your alt text or title isn’t enticing enough. Update them to be more descriptive or better aligned with user intent.

2. Evaluate Your Image Queries

Scroll through the “Queries” section to see what search terms are bringing up your images.

Are they the keywords you intended to target?

If not, tweak your file names, alt text, and surrounding content to align better with those queries.

For example, if people are searching for “dog-friendly hikes in Banff” but you’re ranking for “hiking trails in Canada,” refine your metadata to match the more specific query. Or adjust it to fit the query you didn’t mean to rank for so you can rank higher.

3. Check Your Top Image Pages

Under Performance, beside “Queries” click on “Pages” to see which blog posts are generating the most image traffic.

Look for patterns—do they all have highly optimized images?

Try to rinse and repeat what’s working on your other posts that aren’t succeeding.

4. Test Load Speeds

Use a speed tester to check if your images are slowing down your site. Look for these common culprits:

• Oversized images
• Uncompressed files
• Missing lazy loading

💡 Pro Tip: I recommend using WebPageTest.org since it shows each image file. Fix any issues flagged to keep your site lightning fast and search-engine friendly.

5. Experiment with Updates

SEO isn’t a one-and-done deal. If you notice certain images aren’t performing, update them!

Swap out generic images for more unique visuals, add better alt text, or test new captions.

6. Don’t Forget the Bigger Picture

Image SEO is just one piece of the puzzle.

Combine it with well-written content, optimized headings, and a great user experience, and your blog will be unstoppable!

The Reason Your Images Aren’t Ranking

If you’re following all these steps and doing everything correctly, you might still not be ranking on search engines, or getting the traffic you want.

Here’s why: your content is holding you back.

Images might be worth a thousand words, but they can’t replace a great blog post! You need a well written, helpful, and to-the-point blog post to go along with them.

Let’s rehab your blog posts with my SEO content writing checklist. Check out my SEO Content Writing Checklist to learn how to write blog posts that rank consistently and keep your readers hooked.

Let’s make this the year you hit your organic traffic goals!