Importance & Benefits of Image Optimization (with Tutorial)
“When people take the time to optimize images, those images magically start showing up on the Image Search tab.”
I find myself constantly answering this question: “Is it actually that important to optimize images?”
This is something that comes up in coaching conversations, DMs, & especially anytime I talk with photographers.
And while I haven’t always been the best at putting this into practice myself—so YES you will see places where I’ve made mistakes—taking the time to optimize your images can GREATLY impact your business.
In this episode, I’m going to get into all the ways image optimization can support your business, as well as what you actually need to do to optimize your images.
Topics covered in this podcast episode:
How image optimization benefits a business
Where optimized images count the most
How optimized images impact the user experience
Why image optimization matters for accessibility
3-step process to optimize your images
What to do for lifestyle images vs graphics
Favorite SEO image optimization tools
How to prioritize things if you have LOTS of images
Image optimization can feel like a really BIG project. It can be one of the more time consuming parts of SEO, but it is so worth it!
Start where you’re at, with whatever your capacity will allow for, & move forward with best practices that will help you get found online for the long haul.
Mentioned Resources:
Related Episodes:
Google Business Profiles w/ Lydia Fine
Connect w/ Brittany:
This episode of The Basic B podcast is brought to you in partnership w/ Leah Bryant Co.! Help me reach more service providers like you by following the show & leaving a rating or review on Apple & Spotify!
The unedited podcast transcript for this episode of The Basic B podcast follows
Brittany Herzberg:
hello and welcome back to the Basic B podcast. I'm your host and favorite SEO strategist Brittany Herzberg, and this is something that continues to come up in coaching conversations, DMs, and especially anytime I talk with photographers we have this discussion about is it actually that important to optimize my images? And while I haven't always been the best at putting this into practice myself, I so yes, you will see places where I have made mistakes or things are lacking. Taking the time to optimize your images can greatly impact your business. In this episode, I'm going to get into all the ways this shows up, as well as what you need to do in order to have those images optimized. I want to start with real life examples of the ways I've seen image optimization make a difference in my and my clients businesses. When I was first diving into the world of SEO, one of the very first things I did after creating and implementing SEO titles and meta descriptions and H1 headlines was renaming my images. You'll never ever believe what happened. In just a matter of weeks, my images were dominating the Image Search tab for that keyword. And I think that keyword was Healthcare Copywriter, because at the time I was offering copywriting services to healthcare providers. And when I say dominating, it was taking up the top two or three rows of this Image Search tab. Not only did it not take a whole lot of time, it gave me amazing exposure very, very easily when clients optimize thumbnail images for their blog posts, or when clients have optimized images for their podcast episodes. Oh, and when they have taken the time to optimize images for guesting opportunities, whether that's speaking gigs, podcast interviews, or guest blogs, those images magically start showing up on the Image Search tab. And if people like what they see or they find it helpful or interesting, guess what? They click over to your site. If you've tuned me out, I need you to come back. Because this means you could potentially end up in front of an ideal client or customer in the Image Search tab. And we can actually see this stuff happening inside Google Search Console. If you go to the Insights tab, it's on the left hand side in your list of options. Toward the top it says Insights and scroll all the way down, you might see additional traffic sources. It's going to be in the lower right corner and if you showed up and someone clicked over to your site because they saw one of your images, you'll see how many clicks you got. It's pretty cool, right? If you want you can even toggle to the three month option up at the top and see how many clicks you had in that amount of time because it usually defaults to about 28 days. So how does image optimization actually help a business? Well, according to Semrush, there are an estimated 9.5 million Google searches done every minute and over 60% of searches occur on mobile devices, at least in the U.S. over half of U.S. consumers start with Google when they shop for a product online. And mind you, product typically means physical product, but if you play the game right, that could include digital products. So when people are looking to make a purchase, book with a coach, find a service provider, buy something they are going to Google. And whether or not you're a service based business owner or a product based business owner, images play a huge role in your discoverability. Here we go, I'm breaking it down even more Optimized images help you show up in image search we we talked about this already, but this is clearly a point that I need and want to emphasize. Google Image search is now showing up for one third of all searches, according to some reports. In real life, what that actually means is that when you go to Google, you type in whatever you want to type in. You hit enter. The search results page or SERP populates a few different things. Articles, websites people also ask. And toward the bottom you've probably seen things like video, thumbnails and images. People can and will click on those just like they click on the links to a blog post. Optimized images can also help you show up in AI searches. Searches are being done everywhere, including on AI platforms like ChatGPT and Gemini. In order to show up in all of the places though, you've got to optimize your images. I'm laying out the steps shortly, so don't go anywhere. But how cool is it to know that if you take the time to do just a little extra work on something like an image, that can help you get discovered. Another you can provide Google with images to boost your visibility. With your Google Business profile, you can upload images you want it to connect or associate with your business. These could be anything from lifestyle headshots to graphics you create in Canva, walking someone through your framework to images of your physical location, especially if you're an in person business. I did this with my massage practice and all. Oh my gosh, was it helpful? Clients would actually tell me how much they appreciated being able to see where to park, which door to use, what the inside of the space looked like all before they arrived. And you know what all these types of images do? They build that know like trust factor with strangers which is key to getting the right leads to your digital door or your physical one again if you're an in person business. Lastly, optimizing images also helps with the user experience. I'm talking accessibility. For anyone who's visually impaired. Being able to still understand what's happening in images makes the user experience light years better. Imagine hearing IMG9340 over and over and over, woven between words on a page. That's what's happening when we don't take the time to optimize an image. We're leaving people hanging by not providing them with critical information so they can make sense of what's happening on that page or on that post. When you do that, people who actually need the information to grasp the main point will leave your site and not likely come back. Optimizing images isn't just a helpful thing to do for SEO, it is really important to do for accessibility. So with that, how do we actually optimize these images? This is my three step process to optimizing your images. Step one Give it a keyword rich image title. To ensure the new title actually sticks, you're going to want to update the title on your computer. I know, I know, I know. It's. It's a pain in the tush, but it's worth it. You want to do this renaming step first. And the easiest way to name images is just to combine the target keywords. If you've got two or combine a target keyword with your name, or combine a target keyword with a supportive keyword. And this, what I'm saying will make a whole lot of sense. If you're working from the SEO Basics checklist, which I will make sure is linked below. That's one of my hacks that I found and I've been sharing it almost weekly in the SEO and Grow program is just to put dashes between the keywords. That's another thing I should mention is that you want dashes between the keywords. So let's go into a couple of examples and just know this. With image titles you can be direct. So here are a few examples of keyword rich image titles online Dash Bookkeeping, Dash Review. Another one, SEO Coach for Entrepreneurs Therapy, four Black Dash Female Therapists and then another one, Virtual Medical Astrology Readings. So the dashes are really, really critical. You don't want to have just words smushed together. The dashes between the words help these robots actually understand what the image is all about and to actually see what those keywords are. Last thing, if your face is in the photo, I want your name in the title. Okay, so we have retitled our image on our computer and we've saved it. Now we are going to go into step two, which is resizing the image. You can do this for free up to a certain point with something called tinypng. It's just tinypng.com. this is a pretty straightforward part of the process. You take your image, you drag it into tinypng and you download the resized image. There is so little work for you to do here. The software automatically resizes the images without affecting the image quality. And this is something that I find myself repeating to my photographer clients. It will not distort the image. And if you don't believe me, go in there and try it again. It's free. Try the free version before upgrading to paid. If you even need to upgrade to paid. Most people don't need to. This is the part where you upload the image to your website, you're pulling it into the blog post or you're putting it on the webpage. And then step three, we're going to include appropriate alt text. I don't know when or where I found this, but I've discovered that you want to keep alt text at 125 characters max. There are different ways you can actually do alt text depending on the type of image you're writing it for. Here are a couple of examples. For a lifestyle headshot image, you want to paint a picture with your words first and foremost, where you're being direct with the image title. You're actually speaking like you would to a normal human here in the alt text. The next thing you want to do is weave in keywords where possible so you can include things like your location, your name, the business name, your title, client names, professional titles for clients and beyond. If you're doing alt text for a graphic or a screenshot, you're going to want to highlight the most important thing about that image. If it's social proof I'm a client, you would say something like bookkeeping client review that says and then you would insert one line. You could do something entirely different and have the alt text just say screenshot and then write the text under the image on the webpage or on the blog post. This is a really great option if you are just like, I cannot contain what I want to say in 125 characters. I need more space. This is A really, really awesome option. If you have a graphic you created in Canva, for example, it could say something like a graphic showing the three step approach Britney has to SEO, which includes understanding, implementing and maintaining SEO, end quote. So it's pretty straightforward, but like I said, there are different ways that you want to approach the alt text just based on the type of image that you're working with. Make sure to save your changes and that's it. I have noticed personally when I'm working in Squarespace that I have to write alt text for one image and immediately click Save before going on to another image. So just keep that in mind. That may apply to your website host, it may not. Once you've got the changes made and the page is saved, you can resubmit the page to Google Search Console so it knows you've updated things and then you'll get to watch leads come in via the Image Search tab. One thing I definitely want to say about image optimization is that it can feel like a really big project. It's probably the biggest project that people face once they start looking at SEO optimization. There's a couple others, but this one feels the biggest. If this is you and you're like, oh my goodness, I don't even know where to begin. I have so many pictures. Maybe you're a photographer, maybe you're a home organizer and you have just bookus of photos on your website, on your blogs, know this. You can start today with best practices, just with whatever you're going to touch next. You could also take it one page at a time and go through and optimize each page. And it's okay. It's okay if you need to leave some stuff in the past and just let it be not optimized. I have done that myself. I have come to peace with it. Like it's going to be okay. This can be a big project, but there can be a really big payoff. Here's another idea. Even if you only go in and optimize one photo per page, even that would be helpful to have some keywords and some SEO juice sprinkled in there. Let this be easy. It doesn't have to be this overwhelming project. You do not need to have it done today, or this weekend, or this week, or this month even. It's going to be okay. If you don't want to do this work yourself or you just need a little help getting started, you can book one of these done for you. Keyword Research in this, I gather a list of the best keywords for you to use and include some examples for you to create image titles and alt text you using those keywords. This is more of a DIY option where I'm giving you the tools, I'm giving you the information, I'm telling you the steps, but you are the one going and doing the doing. Or you could book an SEO strategy session. If you'd rather spend time working through some examples together, this is going to be the best option for you. We can look at examples for your website, for blog posts, for digital or physical products, and podcast episodes, even if that's just for podcasts that you've been a guest on. With this option we're looking at things together and you're able to ask questions in real time as we work through some examples. Image optimization can be one of the more time consuming parts of SEO, but it is so worth it to have your images out there working for you. 247 thanks for joining me today and know that I'm always over here cheering you on on your SEO journey. And if you have any, any, any questions, make sure to use that button at the top where you can text me directly. And if you want me to respond to you, just give me some kind of information and I'll respond to you. Otherwise, you may see your question featured in a future solo podcast episode.
