
Are you looking to gain an edge online? If your image SEO isn’t up to snuff, you could be missing out on traffic, user engagement, and sales.
Google looks at more than 200 factors when deciding which website to rank for a specific search query, and we have more insights into these since the Google leak earlier this year. While optimized images alone won’t make weak content rank highly, it can help you stand out from competitors that don’t optimize their images.
The good news? Image optimization isn’t particularly complicated. A few changes to your current image process could help your site gain more traffic and leads, resulting in more sales.
Key Takeaways
- Image SEO uses optimization techniques to help your site rank higher and increase visibility.
- Descriptive, relevant alt text, compressing file sizes, and optimizing for mobile are still essential for image optimization, but you also need to optimize for new tools like Google Lens and multimodal searches.
- Optimizing your images enables your site to load faster, gives a better user experience, and makes your site more accessible.
- Compressing your image files, ensuring your images are mobile-friendly, and building an image sitemap are simple steps you can take to enhance your image SEO.
- You should also focus on technical SEO techniques such as using a content distribution network, lazy loading, and browser caching.
Table of Contents
- Key Takeaways
- What Is Image SEO?
- Why Is Image Optimization Important?
- Image Optimization Tips For Your Website
- Make Sure Your Image Choices Align With Your Audience Needs
- Choose The Right Image File Type
- Resize Your Images
- Compress Your Images
- Optimize Image File Names
- Add Descriptive Alt Text
- Ensure Images Are Mobile-Friendly
- Build an Image Sitemap
- Use Schema Markup
- Take Advantage of Technical SEO Opportunities
- Optimize for Google Lens
- How To Find Image Optimization Problems
- FAQs
- Conclusion
What Is Image SEO?
Image SEO involves using tried and tested image optimization tactics to increase your visibility online in the SERPs. Visual content is highly popular and appears in places like sponsored ads, the knowledge panel, and rich snippets.

Google also shows images across its regular search results, within text results images, Google Discover, and, of course, Google Images.
Google Lens (a generative AI app that gives context to searches), also runs off image SEO. People are using it for nearly 12 billion searches every month, so you want your images to be visible to those users.
Image SEO is easy to start with, including picking the right formats, resizing images, and using image compression.
Why Is Image Optimization Important?
When you use image optimization for better visibility in Google, it brings in more traffic, but there are many other benefits as well.
Image optimization:
- Improves the user experience: Well-optimized images that display correctly improve user experience (UX) by making your site easier to navigate. Large images, for example, can take up the entire screen or cover other elements on the page. You don’t want that.
- Delivers faster load times: When it comes to SEO, speed matters. Images that are large or formatted incorrectly can slow down your site, hurting your ranking and annoying site visitors. The average load time is 2.5 seconds, but 0-2 seconds is ideal.
- Makes your site more accessible: Some optimization steps, like adding alt tags, can make your site easier to navigate for those using screen readers. Web accessibility is important for both site visitors and SEO, too.
While this might feel like another step in a never-ending quest to improve SEO, it can significantly impact ranking and UX.
Below, Nikki Brandemarte, Sr. SEO Strategist at NP Digital, highlights the evolving nature of image SEO and its importance:
“SEO best practices for optimizing images still apply – things like using descriptive, keyword-rich alt text, compressing file sizes, etc., are essential. But now we must also focus on optimizing for new landscapes like Google Lens & multimodal searches, which combine both text and images. To do this, focus on implementing structured data and integrating images seamlessly into current content to complement & improve user understanding”.
So, how do you make sure images aren’t holding your site back? By sticking to proven techniques, and adapting to new tools.
Image Optimization Tips For Your Website
Of course, you’ll want to focus on technical SEO. But image SEO best practices also include on-page SEO, such as schema markup, page speed, and high-quality, original, engaging images.
The tips I discuss below cover you from both angles, so if you’re ready to ensure your images are SEO-friendly here’s what you need to know.
Make Sure Your Image Choices Align With Your Audience Needs
I’m sure you put a lot of effort into your written content; your images deserve the same care and attention. Images should be original, high-quality, and visually guide your audience through the content. Take a look at this infographic from one of my past assets:

They should also fulfill user needs according to content type.
For example, JPEGs work well for e-commerce images as they have a smaller file size. This means you can display plenty of photos without slowing down your site. Or, if you want to make information easier to absorb, you could use infographics.
Also, if you’re considering using AI, there are pros and cons. Yes, it can create fantastic images, but don’t go overboard. You need to take care with AI-generated images, as Google’s indexing algorithms prioritize content authenticity and the user experience. If you rely solely on AI your images may not get indexed properly.
Whichever image format you’re using, remember that small image files without compromising the quality is best. Typically, 500 KB or less allows faster loading. I’ll talk about some of the different image formats you have to work with next.
Choose The Right Image File Type
Using the wrong image file type can lead to blurry or misaligned images. Google supports a ton of different image formats, like:
- BMP
- GIF
- JPEG
- PNG
- WebP
- SVG
- AVIF
Which should you choose?
WebP is a solid option in most circumstances as it’s fast-loading and provides a better user experience.
However, Google recently announced that it supports AVIF files for Google Search, Images, and Discover. AVIF is another widely used compression technique similar to WebP.
WebP and AVIF help SEO by improving loading times over other file formats, but JPEGs and PNGs are still useful in certain situations. For example, JPEGs work well for featured blog images and similar, while PNG offers versatility, detail, and transparency.
Resize Your Images
One of the best ways to speed up your website is to resize your images, but that doesn’t mean sacrificing quality. Ensure your images are optimized for performance and display well across all devices. For the most part, a maximum of 2,500 pixels is generally adequate for website images.
But you’ll also want to think about:
- Device compatibility.
- Viewport (visible area of a website) size.
- If you need a stand-out hero image, aim for 1600 x 500 pixels.
- For background images, you can usually go with a lower resolution; the same applies to thumbnails.
If you post on social media or use images for decorative purposes, you can probably get away with a lower pixel count. Each social media site has different guidelines, so checking the platform for up-to-date details is a good idea.
Compress Your Images
Image compression makes large image files smaller, so they’re easier to load on the internet or store on your device. When done well, image compression strikes the perfect balance between size and image quality.
The two types of image compression are lossy and lossless compression. Lossy compression, which JPEGs use, essentially throws out some of the data, while lossless preserves all the data. (PNGs use lossless, as I mentioned above.)
Therefore, the type of compression you use depends on the image type you select.
Here’s an example of compressed images:

The image on the left is slightly more grainy than the lossless image on the right but is a much smaller file size.
The goal is to strike the right balance between size and quality.
When deciding how much to compress your images, think about your user. In most cases, they are unlikely to care whether an image on a blog post is a tiny bit less crisp. However, if you are sending a client a new logo, that’s a different story.
The point is to use the compression type based on your file format and select the file format based on how the image will be used.
Now, how do you compress images? There are several tools.
I like Resizing.app, it’s a free Chrome extension that lets you convert file formats and crop and resize images in just one click. Other photo compression tools include Photoshop and PicResize.
Optimize Image File Names
Google uses the URL path and the file name to understand your images better. This means organizing your image URLs logically and including key terms in the file name.
Doing so helps you stay organized and helps Google understand your images: a double win.
File names don’t have to be complicated. I usually use the alt text as the file name, making uploading posts to WordPress easier. For example, here’s one of my recent blog posts about developing your brand’s tone of voice.

I use keywords derived from the blog’s title in the image file name. Easy, right?
Add Descriptive Alt Text
Alt text (aka, alternative text) is a written description of an image that describes what it is and its purpose. Screen readers use this data to describe images to their users, and Google uses it to determine whether an image is relevant to a search query.
Here’s an example from Google:

To add alt text to WordPress, either add a plugin or include it manually by following these steps:
- Click on Media and select Library from the menu.
- Find the image you want to add alt text to.
- Go to the Attachment Details pane and go to the Alt Text field.
- Add your text.
Make it descriptive and as accurate as possible. Google says you should write “useful, information-rich content that uses keywords appropriately and is in context of the content of the page.” Avoid overloading your alt text with keywords, as this can come across as spammy.
Pro tip—if you want to see how your competitors use alt tags, navigate to their site, right-click an image, and select “Inspect.” You’ll see the alt tags in the code of their site.
Ensure Images Are Mobile-Friendly
If you’ve used the correct file type and compressed your images, they should be pretty mobile-friendly. However, sometimes things don’t always display the way we expect.
Over sixty percent of internet traffic comes from a mobile device, so you want to ensure images don’t mess up the mobile experience.
For that reason, I recommend viewing your site from several different mobile devices to ensure images look their best. Remember, tablets, iPhones, and Android devices may all display your images differently.
That’s why you need to use responsive images that automatically adjust their size or resolution according to the device by using CSS. You can also use tools like Responsinator or Browser Stack to simulate how your images appear on different devices.
You can also use Google Chrome Inspect to check your images. Right-click on an image, hit inspect, and then look for the settings icon at the top right when the code window opens. Choose ‘Devices’ from the menu, and select the device you want to emulate. Your image will appear in a window to the left as it would on your chosen device.

Build an Image Sitemap
An image sitemap is an XML sitemap that lets search engines find and index your website images.
It looks like this:

Image sitemaps provide search engines with information about which images to index and include details like a URL, title, and caption.
You can have several XML sitemaps, so if you want to dedicate one solely to images and videos, that’s fine. Remember that the maximum sitemap size is 50 MB uncompressed or 50,000 URLs.
Use Schema Markup
Schema markup, also called structured data, is a type of code that helps search engines better understand your data.
Imagine you want to collect recipes to make a book of family recipes, and you send out a form asking your family to share their recipes so they’re in the same format.
Essentially, that’s what schema makeup does. It formats your data so Google can understand if it’s a list, a recipe, an image, and so forth. Here’s what it looks like:

And the image it produces:

Schema.org lists the properties associated with images. The more fields you can accurately complete, the more optimized your schema will be.
Take Advantage of Technical SEO Opportunities
You’re doing great so far, but don’t forget about some extra technical SEO opportunities you can take to support image SEO. Here are a few of them.
- Lazy loading speeds up load times because web pages only load when needed instead of loading everything simultaneously. This cuts down initial page load times to keep users engaged and boost performance. Be careful not to accidentally hide content from Google, though. Check out Google’s guide to fix and test lazy-loaded content.
- Content Delivery Networks help speed things up using a network of interconnected servers worldwide so users get faster download times no matter where they’re located.
- Finally, browser caching stores previously accessed data on a user’s device, reducing load times on return visits.
You can add browser caching to WordPress using plugins like Total Cache or WPRocket.
Optimize for Google Lens
Struggling to find the right words? Google Lens lets you search using your camera, screenshot, or image on your desktop or mobile.

Google Lens compares your image to others and ranks them according to how similar and relevant they are to items in the original picture.
For example, maybe you’ve seen some gorgeous bedding for your apartment in an image online and want to track down the brand or where to buy it. Just snap a screenshot, upload it to Google Lens, or use the app, and you’ll get results.
You can increase your chances of appearing in Google Lens by:
- Using the tips in this article (high-quality, contextual, and relevant images, alt text, structured data, and optimizing for mobile, etc.)
- Listing your products on Google Shopping.
- Completing your Google Business Profile to enhance local visibility.
- Including descriptive file names and alt text.
How To Find Image Optimization Problems
A regular technical SEO audit can help you find issues such as deleted images or an incorrect URL. Image loading delays can reduce your page speed, and I’ve already mentioned how slower loading times can impact your ranking.
You can use Ubersuggest for a site audit to find potential issues or ScreamingFrog. Common problems are:
- Broken internal image links: These links don’t go to the intended locations, resulting in 404 errors.
- Slow loading images: Use image compression tools like TinyPNG or ImageOptim to reduce file sizes while maintaining quality.
- Missing alt text: Ensure all images have descriptive alt tags that accurately describe their content.
- Lack of responsive images: Optimize images for various screen sizes by adding the <picture> element and srcset attributes.

FAQs
What is image optimization?
Image optimization is the process of adjusting image formats, size, and quality along with optimized file names and alt text to improve image performance in search results and user experience
Why is image optimization SEO important?
Image optimization plays a role in improving your rankings while also improving user experience and accessibility.
What is the best image format for SEO?
There’s no specific format that is best for SEO. In general, you want images as small as possible while preserving as much quality as possible. I recommend WebP or AVIF for most circumstances.
How do I optimize images for SEO?
You can improve image SEO by ensuring images are mobile-friendly, compressing and resizing large images, adding descriptive file names and alt text, as well as building an image sitemap.
Conclusion
Google gives us a lot of information about optimizing our sites and image optimization. It’s easy to get overwhelmed by all the small details.
The tips above will help you make the most of your images; however, I recommend making sure your visual content brings value to users. Avoid overloading with images, keyword-stuffing alt tags, or including unrelated visuals.
You’ll also want to look at the technical side of image SEO. Utilize a content distribution network, use lazy loading to stagger load times, and browser caching to improve the overall user experience.

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