When it comes to SEO, most of the attention goes to written content. Image optimization for SEO is usually an afterthought.
However, you can and should optimize your images to boost your ranking in the SERPs.
Here are some tips on how to optimize your images for SEO.
Table of Contents
1) Audit
Like any other SEO activity, the first step is to identify areas of improvement.
These are some tools and practices that we suggest:
– Screaming Frog free version allows you to crawl the images on your website. It will show you the images with the largest size and where an image is being displayed.
– Google Lighthouse or PageSpeed insights: These both provide an audit for your page experience and suggest the images you could provide in next-gen formats (WebP and AVIF) for less data consumption.
– Cloudinary provides a free tool that lets you identify optimization opportunities for images.
2) Image resizing
Once you identify the images that need resizing or compression, go ahead and optimize them.
You can use a tool like BeFunky to resize them.
Cloudinary shows you the suggested size to use to optimize the images for SEO.
3) Compression
Once you define the right size of the image, it’s time to compress them. Smush is a popular WordPress plugin.
You can use different tools, but Squoosh allows you to have control over how much quality you lose when compressing the image.
4) Image renaming
Include relevant keywords in the name of the image.
You can get click-through from images.
5) Alt text
When you add the optimized images to your CMS, you’ll need to add an alt text as well.
This is used to describe the content of the image.
Use relevant keywords to provide context to search engines, as long as these keywords make sense.
This is the basic optimization process, but there are further steps you can take:
- Lazy loading
- CDN for images
- Image sitemaps
- Images redirect in a site migration
