More people are performing image searches on Google and Bing these days. And yet, many businesses–including large corporations–haven’t fully optimized their images with relevant keywords. They’re missing out on a great opportunity to bring people to their websites.
Here’s an example of why you should consider image SEO.
A well-known brand has a third-generation hardware device that’s been on the market for months. And yet, when you do an image search on the company and product name, the majority of top-ranking images are of the company’s first- or second-generation device. Needless to say, the Company in Question (let’s call them that for convenience’s sake) isn’t happy with these search results and wanted to know 1) why this is happening and 2) what they could do about it.
My answers to them were:
1) Why this is happening. Many of the top-ranking image files I found when I searched on the name of the Company in Question and their hardware device were posted by bloggers and journalists and depicted the first- or second-generation hardware. Why did they rise to the top of the image search results? Because, in part, the image file names contained the company and product name. For instance, the file name for the top-ranking image was something like new-apple-ipad-is-coming.jpg. I’m making this up, by the way; the Company in Question isn’t Apple. In this case, the image file name contains two important keywords: Apple iPad. That helps the search engines understand what the image depicts, enabling them to match that image to a relevant query. By comparison, when I looked at the image files on the Company in Question’s site, most did not have their company name or hardware device name in their file names. So right off the bat, those images aren’t likely to rank well when people go looking for the company or its product.
2) What they could do about it. For their images depicting their third-generation hardware, I suggested the company go back and add keywords to the image file names, to the image alt text (the text that tells search engine what the image shows), to captions, and in surrounding text (if appropriate) on each page where the image is published. Taking those tedious but necessary steps will help the company’s third-generation hardware images, over time, push down the outdated images on other sites. In addition, the company could reach out to the bloggers, journalists, and webmasters of sites with the outdated images. Ask them to post the updated images (again, where appropriate), and then send them the optimized image files to use. Yes, this is another tedious task, but there’s no easy, quick fix to a problem like this. Many SEO efforts take time to show results–but they’re worth it.
