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Companies keeping up on the latest techniques to optimize their search engine rankings know that SEO algorithms love original, useful, informative, and entertaining content. But why is it when we think “content,” we think “print”?
Get Visual and Add More Images
Shoppers today are very visual, and will often search by Google Image Search rather than with words when they’re looking for specific products they want to buy. If your business operates in the world of e-commerce, good product images accompanied by product details in text form may be just what it takes to grab the attention of shoppers…and search engines.
According to Pratik Dholakiya writing for Search Engine Journal, Google image searches make up 25.2 percent of all Google searches (and, astonishingly, over 900 percent more searches than Bing). While this means that yes, three-quarters of Google searches are still non-visual and text-centric, that 25.2 percent becomes particularly important when you’re selling clothing, jewelry, home goods, sporting goods, furniture, or food-related products.
Use Images to Increase Your Market Share
With optimizing images for search, it’s not just about customers who are looking for your brand. It’s about falling into the path of customers looking for your competitors. The idea is that while shoppers are online clicking through and viewing image results for the keyword terms they have searched, that they will stumble upon your product and be so enticed by the imagery that they’ll want to buy your product instead and click through to your site to make the purchase.
Get Your Image Optimization Right
Parking a lot of photos on your Web site isn’t enough however. You need to optimize them properly if they’re to boost your SEO, according to Shopify’s Mark Hayes.
“Image optimization is about reducing the file size of your images as much as possible without sacrificing quality so that your page load times remain low,” he wrote. “It’s also about image SEO. That is, getting your product images and decorative images to rank on Google and other image search engines.”
Hayes recommends that e-commerce Web sites name their images descriptively and in plain language (and using relevant keywords, since search engines not only crawl the text on your webpage, they also crawl your image file names), provide simple product descriptions for images, choose image dimensions wisely and reduce the file sizes so they load easily, choose the right file types and use image sitemaps effectively. Most importantly, test your images after you’ve chosen them, and use caution when using content delivery networks.
Use More Than One Image
Using multiple professional images of a product not only gives you more opportunities to improve your SEO, it helps your customers feel confident about their buying decision. A consumer psychology infographic prepared by Vouchercloud noted that 92.6 percent of people said that visuals are the top influential factor affecting a purchase decision.
More photos and graphics can help search engines help your customers (and future customers) find you. It’s fast and relatively inexpensive way to improve your SEO today.
At Keyword Performance, we help companies optimize their image search strategies to improve SEO rankings and become more visible to online shoppers. We pride ourselves on using thorough SEO research and the best keyword tools to develop effective content. We work closely with every client to accurately align with the company and its services.
Interested in improving your search results? Let’s chat!
