Is your team taking the time to optimize images on your website? Are you unsure of how to leverage visual media on your website to get more traffic from search engines?

Whichever camp you fall into, we can answer the questions you’re asking. We’ll be looking at how to optimize images to draw more traffic to your website.

Why Optimize Images?

Just about every part of every page on your website can now be manipulated to work in your favor in the wide world of search. Many small business owners aren’t aware that images present a valuable SEO opportunity. Visual content is one of the most important content you create because it’s the first thing your audience sees. Visual content needs to look awesome (obviously!) and it needs to make an impact. Optimizing your images is one easy way to boost the impact of your company website.

You can find plenty of stats that underscore the value of visual media, but here’s one that’s pretty mindblowing: content with relevant imagery gets 94% more views than content without relevant images (HubSpot)!

Images, particularly infographics, help you generate more backlinks, which in turn helps you earn more traffic, more trust, and more time spent browsing your website. This, in turn, leads to more sales and opt-ins. That’s what you were looking for, right?

The 4 Elements That Need Your Attention

When you’re ready to optimize images, there are four important things you need to pay attention to:

• Alt tags. This is what search engines “see” in connection with your images. One of the most common SEO mistakes is to not use the alt text. To optimize alt text, use up to 10 relevant words, include long-tail keywords, and make it easy to read.
• Title tags. This is the text real human people see in connection with your image. When the reader hovers over the image with their mouse, they see the title tag of the image. Focus on creating relevant call to actions with your title tags – they are primarily meant to improve user experience and make it easier for visitors to navigate.
• Outbound links to credible sources. It may seem more valuable to have links pointing back to your site, but you can actually boost your trustworthiness by linking to high-authority sites in your industry. This can help create more connections in your industry, too!
• Image captions. Captions under images are read on average 300% more than the body of the article (Kissmetrics). Quite simply, this means that you can boost engagement on your posts by including image captions. This can help with optimizing bounce rates and time on page.

 

Bonus: Social Media Marketing

With regards to SEO, social signals are growing in importance. When a post is shared on social media, people see the image first – especially on sites like Facebook and Instagram. Of the content types that we share on social media, visually interesting content is far and away the most likely to prompt engagement. Infographics, for example, often get a high number of shares on sites like Pinterest.

Final Thoughts

Unoptimized images are a missed opportunity for website owners. They present a quick and relatively simple way to boost the effectiveness of your content and – let’s be honest – it makes everything look better!

If you want to get the most out of your images, be sure to:

• Create keyword-rich alt tags for your images.
• Use title tags to create calls-to-action.
• Use outbound links outside of your images to spread the link love. Be sure not to include all of your sources in an infographic (non-clickable), and fail to actually link out to the sources.
• Create captions to boost time on page and reduce bounce rates.

 

By the way, are you looking for help with search engine optimization? Make sure to contact us so we can get your next project underway.