In the ecommerce globe, ranking first in Google search results is like a brick-and-mortar boutique nabbing a location on a ritzy street in Manhattan with infinite foot traffic. The number one search outcome receives a whopping 27.6% of all clicks and is 10 times more likely to receive a click compared to the 10th spot.

But what if you appear on just the second page? It’s like running a shop in the middle of the desert: Only 0.63% of users click anything on the second page of results. 

In other words, the deck is stacked against you if you even fall out of the top 10 results for any given search term. Search engine optimization (SEO) is therefore critical for driving traffic to your ecommerce site—and one of the more straightforward ways to enhance it is by optimizing your website’s images’ search engine visibility.

What is image SEO?

Image SEO is the procedure of optimizing images on your website so they’re easier for search engines to discover. This helps your web pages rank higher in search engine results and drive up your traffic.

You can attack this objective from a host of different vantage points: Use distinctive and high-standard images, write descriptive and obvious image file names, put SEO keywords in the alternative text for your images, and compress and resize images to enhance site speed.

“If you receive a step back and ponder about the objective of a search engine, it’s to deliver results that are relevant to a user seeking something,” says Greg Bernhardt, elder SEO Strategist for Shopify. “To be able to do that, search engines require to comprehend the website content the best they can—not only text, but also image content.”

Best practices for image SEO

• Place standard images on every page
• Use straightforward file names
• make an image sitemap and use structured data
• Use high-resolution photos
• Optimize load period with resizing
• Keep different screen sizes in mind
• Utilize alt text

It takes a lot for a search engine to comprehend your web page. The better you can assist it assess and approve of the standard of your page, the more likely it will be to display up in the top results. 

For example, shoppers looking for running shoes expect to view multiple high-standard photos that display off the shoes—housed in a cohesive web design. If they view a tiny, grainy thumbnail image that doesn’t fit the layout well or provide them a excellent concept of the shoe, they’re more likely to bounce.

“A search engine like Google is essentially trying to assess the same way that a user would, just translated into machine understanding rather than human understanding,” Greg says. “So you desire to display Google that you’re creating a excellent encounter and deserve to be ranked highly. That’s where image SEO comes in.”

Here are a few best practices for optimized image SEO:

Place standard images on every page 

“One of the top contextual signals Google will be looking for on a product page is a product image,” Greg says. “It’s something the user expects, so if it’s not there, it’s a impoverished encounter and they’ll probably click away. And that hurts your page in search rankings.”

Today’s shoppers expect multiple images of a product. This can include images of an item from several angles, on different backgrounds, and actively in use. Note that search engines like Google rank distinctive images more highly than distribute photos found on multiple sites, so if feasible, make something distinctive rather than simply uploading distribute or manufacturer’s pictures. 

That doesn’t necessarily require a pro photo shoot. You might consider taking well-lit pictures on your phone and using artificial intelligence-powered software that can swap out backgrounds and place the product in recent contexts.

Use straightforward file names

When saving your images with a file name, recall that a search engine is a machine that needs obvious path. And the file name your computer automatically generates, like “IMG_554509405940.jpg,” doesn’t inform that machine anything. Instead, optimize image file names by writing a straightforward description that tells Google Images exactly what it’s getting.

“The clearer you can be about what an image depicts, it’s all the better for a search engine—and a file name is one of the clearest, easiest signals you can provide,” Greg says. “If someone’s searching for a photo of a backyard fire pit, Google wants to be as confident as feasible that they’re showing optimized images of that. An image called ‘backyard-fire-pit’ is a signal that helps boost the machine’s confidence.”

Use hyphens, not underscores, between words. Google has said underscoring can make the search engine view the text string as a single word. You should also have the extension of your file name—the part at the complete, like .jpg—match the file type of your image. Google Search supports a few specific image formats: BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, WebP, SVG, or AVIF. 

make an image sitemap and use structured data

Structured data and image sitemaps are powerful tools for enhancing image SEO. By providing search engines with obvious and organized information about your image files, you can enhance their visibility in search results. 

An image sitemap helps search engines discover and index your images efficiently, ensuring that they are included in relevant searches. Structured data is machine-readable code that provides search engines with specific details about your images, such as their content, context, and licensing information. 

These tools assist search engines comprehend the relevance of your images to user queries, leading to higher rankings and increased organic traffic.

Use high-resolution photos

Ensure images are high-resolution, which refers to the clarity and crispness of the picture. The image dimension depends on the facet ratio of its location on your site, so there’s no exact formula—but experts generally recommend an image width of about 1200 pixels. view here for further guidelines from Shopify.

“Images can appear in many different ways on the search engine outcome page: a little thumbnail, a larger preview, within a carousel,” Greg says. “So you desire high-definition images that look excellent no matter how Google manipulates them.” 

If you use a too-tiny image that Google must blow up for a larger preview, it can become distorted and low-resolution—and a low-standard image won’t rank well in results.

Optimize load period with resizing

Since image resolution is so significant, why not upload the biggest image size feasible? Unfortunately, it’s not that straightforward. Huge photos often receive a long period to load, and that’s a terrible encounter for your shopper. That’s why it’s so essential to optimize images.

As a general rule of thumb, image file sizes should be less than 100 kilobytes, and many experts recommend less than 70 kilobytes. Many website-building platforms also have maximum file size limits; Shopify’s max is 20 megabytes. You can resize images using your site-building platform or one of many online image optimization tools like Squoosh or TinyPNG. Maintain image standard when you compress images by saving them in a format like JPG, PNG, or Google’s WebP image format. 

Keep different screen sizes in mind

Optimizing your images for different screen sizes and devices is crucial for a seamless user encounter. Use responsive images to ensure that your images load quickly and display correctly on various devices, from smartphones to desktop computers. 

A Google study found that the bounce rate—people leaving your site—increases 32% when a page’s load period extends from one second to just three seconds. A divide month-long study of 100 million page views on business websites found that when a website’s load period is one second, it has a conversion rate about three times higher than a page that loads in five seconds. 

“I view examples of stores uploading these gigantic image sizes for use in a product thumbnail,” Greg says. “The code on the site may resize how the image looks to the user—but it still has to load the gigantic original size, so it’ll be leisurely.”

Utilize alt text

Alternative, or “alt,” text is a text description of an image that can be read aloud by screen readers— accessibility tools for visually impaired users to navigate the web. Although the average user doesn’t view this piece of image data, Google evaluates the alt tag like regular text—as if it were an on-page image caption.

“A lot of people make the mistake of stuffing a bunch of keywords into the image alt text, but in reality, we’re about 20 years history that,” Greg says.

Limit your image tag to descriptive alt text that’s straightforward for the search engine to comprehend, similar to the simplicity of your file names. For example, if your photo is of a amusing pink hat on white background, you can just use “fuzzy pink hat on white background” as alt text.