Have you ever analyzed your choices towards search engine result pages? Generally which pages you spend the most time and feel more informative to you? The obvious answer to this question is those pages containing more image or graphics… is not it?

Two pages there may cater to the same information, but the particular page which presents the information through nice eye-catching graphics and uses relevant images gets visitors’ attention almost instantly.

Why image SEO is important for any site?

Images play a very crucial role to improve the quality of a blog’s content and its visual appeal. Images also make the message of any blog far easier to understand for the reader. Naturally, a content reach with images gets more traffic from the search engine.

Images not only make your webpages attractive, but it also makes you webpage searchable through the image search option. This change is new and Google very recently brought this feature in which, if any visitor clicks any image of his choice found through Google search, it navigates directly to the webpage containing the image.

But… page loading speed is also important!

Page loading speed is a very important deciding factor for any site to rank. Visitors are highly sensitive to page loading speed. It has been observed in various search engine analytics that, an improvement of 1% in page loading speed, increase the conversion up to 2%. 

An increase in conversion 2% is highly significant for any commercial website. Thus, page loading speed is a major factor deciding the rank of any page in SERP. Also, a reduced page load time of 2.2 seconds increases the download by 15.4% !!! 

Page loading speed is directly proportional to its size. As the page gets heavier the page loading speed gets higher. Images play a significant role to make a web page heavier. It has been found from web page analytics that in general any webpage, images almost occupy 63% space. The figure below shows the proportionate distribution of different components of a typical webpage.

So, how to strike a balance? Here comes… image SEO

It is now clear that for higher quality content and search volume webpages need images, but again bulky images can cause higher page loading speed. So, to balance the effectiveness of images, they must be optimized to use on webpages.  

The infographics below show very important 6 SEO steps for image optimization of any webpage. If should perform all these six checks for any image of your blog:

Conclusion

Proper use of images can enhance the visibility of your webpages significantly. It does not only makes your content more appealing to page visitors but the image search facility can drive huge organic traffic directly to your website. 

New inventions by Google like Google lens, incorporation of AI algorithms, use of machine learning products like Vision AI indicate Google’s focus towards understanding web images more categorically. Google wants to provide more and more relevant image as well as content to its users. So, it is very clear that in near future images are going to play a very crucial role in Search Engine Optimization.

Evolution in image SEO is passing through a rapid transition phase. But, the basic steps of image optimization mentioned here will hold true in any circumstances. Follow these steps to optimize images for high-quality content as well as a fast website thus get an edge to rank higher. 

You have to stay relevant and dynamic following these steps tips mentioned here and provide optimized high-quality content.