How can your website speed improve SEO? The 10 point checklist
There are no two ways around it; your website speed is fundamental if you want to improve your SEO. But don’t worry, we’ve got you covered with our ultimate 10…
Whether you are a product or service based business, the strength of your SEO can either maximise your audience or leave you with a majorly missed opportunity. That’s why we decided to launch the SEO Support Series – a handy, 5 episode guide to take you through the core elements of SEO success.
We’ve already talked about metadata, content and keywords. Next up, image optimisation.
Your images are a crucial part of boosting your position on Google and driving audience engagement. These images need to resonate with your readers and tick all the search engine boxes.
By now you’ve probably realised that your SEO strategy can be as broad or narrow as you want it to be. With so many different options, it can be tricky to know what are the most important tasks to pull underneath your SEO umbrella.
Luckily, we can help. Read on to find out our top 7 ways to use images to boost your SEO ranking.
Image optimisation tip #1 – Make sure your images are relevant to the content to your content.
A big contributor to your SEO ranking is how engaging your content is. AKA, can you show that you are creating content built with the user in mind?
It is suggested that the human brain can process images up to 60,000 times faster than words. It’s far easier to focus your attention on an image, which means it’s crucial that you make sure your images are as impactful as possible.
If you are using irrelevant images on your content and different pages, your readers will quickly lose interest. Your image should connect with them on the appropriate emotional level. As a result, they will continue reading, stay on your page for longer and absorb your full message.
Image optimisation tip #2 – Use unique images or find alternatives.
In addition to this, unique images work better to boost your SEO ranking.
While there are some great royalty free image resources available – ones we make use of ourselves – an image that belongs to you will always help your SEO ranking.
For example, if you are a product business, it stands to reason that your website should feature original images of your product, rather than a royalty free image that your audience has seen countless times. The same goes for service providers; try to think of ways that you can limit the amount of unoriginal images across your site.
If you’re struggling to take high quality images yourself, remember there are alternatives that you can turn to in order to keep your content original. Gifs, infographics and illustrations could also be dispersed throughout your website, showing search engines that you are dedicated to sourcing unique content designed to offer something new to your visitors.
Image optimisation tip #3 – Reduce your image file size.
Page speed is pretty vital when it comes to your SEO ranking: pages with a longer load time will suffer a far higher bounce rate than those that load within the click of a finger. Images that are too large in their file size will weigh heavily on your website, slowing it down and chasing your potential customers away.
Plus, with the rise in mobile usage for browsing, it’s more important than ever to speed up your website. Increasing page speed is crucial for mobile viewing, and so it’s well worth your time scaling down your image sizes.
There are a bunch of online tools to minimise your image size (and boost your SEO), including:
This optimisation benefits both your user experience and the technical SEO required from search engines: it’s a ‘must-have’ step!
Image optimisation tip #4 – Use images that are as high quality as possible.
Although we recommend using smaller images, these images should still be of a high quality. This is because search engines favour images that are both high quality and high resolution.
The quality of your images comes down to the format they are saved in, their resolution, lighting, space and composition: a mixture of generally high end photography skills and a few technical additions.
If you can get a professional to take your images, fantastic! You can solve all your quality problems in one fell swoop. If not, you can keep these prompts in mind when uploading images:
Image optimisation tip #5 – Include (snappy) captions with your images.
Similar to URLs and metadata, your captions can be crawled by search engines; a blank caption is therefore another missed opportunity for driving more traffic to your site!
Your caption should include your keyword or key phrase, and should be both page and image relevant. If it is not relevant, your bounce rate will shoot up and Google will realise that your content is not the right match. The result? You’ll slip further and further down their page listing.
Plus, captions are genuinely craved by readers. KissMetrics even reported that captions underneath images are read around 300% more than the body copy of a page!
Image optimisation tip #6 – Organise your image stream in a logical way.
It’s clear that the user experience is just as important as the Google checklist when optimising your images for SEO. Another way of fulfilling this is by organising your images in a way that makes sense.
Think about your reader’s train of thought while reading your content; what would be the most useful way for your images to appear?
Let’s say your business is a spa. On your treatment pages, it would be beneficial for a consumer to see images that take them through different elements of the treatment, as well as their physical journey through the spa into the treatment room.
Or perhaps you sell children’s toys. Your product pages should feature different images of that specific product, showing any unique parts, any additional elements and perhaps the toy in use so that the viewer can have an easier understanding of the size.
It’s all about intuition, really. You need to give the people what they want.
Image optimisation tip #7 – Don’t forget your ALT descriptions!
Our final tip is the one that is most often forgotten… your ALT descriptions!
Similar to an image caption, your ALT caption is designed to provide an accurate, concise description of the image. It is used as a facilitator for those with visual difficulties or physical disabilities, and will provide a better experience for a wider range of people while telling Google that you are not alienating anyone from your content.
It is also another opportunity to connect with web crawlers, and so it’s beneficial to pop your keyword or key phrase in there (if it is relevant!).
In a nutshell, this is your chance to help search engines better understand what your image actually is.
How can Littlebigbox help you use images to boost your SEO ranking?
We’re so glad you asked! Here at Littlebigbox, our website packages come with SEO built into the service: this includes making sure all of your images are optimised for SEO.
We also offer SEO training and implementation packages if you need a revamp for your current website.
To find out more, get in touch with a member of the Littlebigbox team – we look forward to hearing from you!
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