Google’s goal is to show you the most relevant information on the Internet. In the process, they want you to be able to find what you’re looking for quickly. And that means that you need to optimize your images so that Google can understand what’s important.
There’s a lot of buzz around Google’s image search algorithm changes in recent years. A couple of years back, Google announced an algorithm update called Hummingbird, which aimed to make the search results more relevant to users and better reflect user intent. But, the algorithm update wasn’t just about making search better—it was also about improving the relevance of images.
That’s why Google has been investing heavily in machine learning in recent years, particularly with its image search. Google has been able to develop algorithms that are able to understand the context of an image and determine the most appropriate image for the context. The best way to ensure that your images are indexed for search by Google is to optimize them for quality.
In this post, we will discuss why a digital marketing agency or your SEO consultant highlights the importance of optimizing images along with the other SEO services.
What is image optimization?
Image optimization is a process by which you make sure the quality of your images are at their best. That is choosing the right formats and reducing the file size of your images without sacrificing quality in order to ensure that they load quickly and appear correctly in a user’s browser. In short, you’re making sure your images are sharp, and not blurry.
Why Does Image Optimization Matter?
1. Improve the User Experience
The last thing you want to do is waste your customers’ time. Your customers are already visual creatures; it’s your job to make sure they experience your site in the way you want them to see it.
Optimize images to look beautiful and to improve their usability for screen reading. Large images can consume the entire screen or cover other elements on the page, thus affecting the overall UX.
2. Enhance Site Speed
If your images are optimized, they will load faster and display better in the browser. This will make your page load more quickly, which will keep the visitor on your site for longer periods of time, and ultimately lead to higher conversions.
Most mobile users will leave a website if it takes longer than 5 seconds to load. So, if you’re having an e-commerce site, always consider how fast your images appear because your revenue is on the line!
3. Impact Google Ranking and Supplement Other SEO Tactics
Image optimization is a big part of the whole process, and it must be included in your overall SEO strategy. It is an important part of your overall website and can have a major impact on your traffic, rankings, and more.
If you want your website to rank high in search results, it is essential that your images are relevant and in appropriate image format, title, alt text, caption text, and more. Optimized images allow Google to have an idea of your site’s content. Thus, it affects your site’s visibility on SERPs as users search for related queries.
While great images can appear in the image carousels on search engines, users tend to click those images, hence, increase traffic to your website. A website with great images and content can garner shares and backlinks which contribute in building a brand authority.
In a nutshell
Image optimization isn’t the most important SEO strategy among the very long list but it can help you stand out against your competitors. It contributes to the user’s experience, site speed, and page ranking.
If you like this article, you may want to read this article about 4 Steps to Optimize Your Website for AI.
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