What is image SEO and how do you optimise images?
Image SEO is the practice of helping Google find, understand and rank the images on your website. Done well, it does two things: your pictures can appear in Google Image Search, and the images themselves help the pages they sit on perform better in normal results. The techniques are simple, but many websites only do half of them.
Why image SEO matters
Images are search results in their own right. Google Image Search brings in real traffic for many businesses, and every photo on your site is a chance to appear. There is a quieter benefit too. Uncompressed images are one of the most common causes of slow websites, and speed feeds directly into the Core Web Vitals metrics Google uses as a ranking factor. Our guide to Core Web Vitals explains what Google measures.
Image optimisation also helps accessibility. Screen readers describe images to visually impaired visitors through alt text, so the same work that helps Google helps real people. And as AI search engines increasingly answer questions by pulling from websites, descriptive alt text gives them something clear to read about your images.
What to optimise on every image
- File names. Name files with words, not camera codes. red-leather-brogues.jpg tells Google what the image shows; IMG_4821.jpg tells it nothing. Separate words with hyphens.
- Alt text. Write a short, natural description of what the image shows. Do not stuff it with keywords. If an image is decorative, an empty alt attribute is better than a generic description.
- File size and format. Compress every image before upload. WebP is the sensible default for most sites today because it looks the same as JPEG at a fraction of the file size.
- Lazy loading. Tell the browser to load images only as the visitor scrolls to them. This speeds up the first paint on every page.
- Responsive sizing. Serve different file sizes to phones, tablets and desktops so nobody downloads a 4,000 pixel photo onto a 375 pixel screen.
One habit saves the most work: settle the file name, alt text and compression before you upload, and treat it as part of the publishing checklist rather than an afterthought. Our guide to optimising image meta data covers the naming and alt text rules in more detail.
What about image search visibility?
Google finds images the same way it finds pages: it crawls your site, reads the page and follows links. There is no separate index you need to submit to. An image sitemap can help Google discover images on pages that are not linked internally, but for a typical business site, clean file names, sensible alt text and fast pages cover most of the work.
Where to start
Run the free SEO report and it will flag the technical issues on your site, including images that are slowing pages down. SEO plans start at GBP 980 a month and scale to GBP 3,920 for larger programmes, with on-page work such as image optimisation included and progress reported through the client dashboard. AI visibility is tracked separately in Metrona, so you can see whether the work is showing up in the places customers now look.
See what image and on-page optimisation covers at https://victory.digital/search-engine-optimisation
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