When it comes to SEO and fighting for the coveted top spot in Google, we often imagine a text-based result of the query we searched for. Whether in the form of a featured snippet or a meta title and description. Keywords and quality descriptions are important for telling Google who you are and what you want to rank for.
Whilst we can’t deny the power that quality product descriptions have on improving CTR and conversions for E-commerce. According to MozCast, 32% of Google search queries are answered as images. This shows potential for increasing sales and time spent on your E-commerce store just through image optimisation alone.
Your E-commerce imagery can act as one of your highest performing salespeople online and should be treated as an equally important part of your SEO strategy as product description. To help you along the SEO process we have put together 5 simple ways to improve your E-commerce imagery.
- Use concise image names for on-page SEO
Having concise names for your images allows crawlers to understand what your image is portraying. If your image has any relevance to any of your keywords, then naming your image accurately will improve your ranking for the chosen keyword.
Google likes concise image names as this prevents individuals from ‘keyword stuffing’. Google considers anything too long ‘spammy’.
Not only is it important to give images short and precise names but it’s important to optimise your alt attributes. Not only can filling out the alt text improve web accessibility for individuals unable to view images, but it also helps crawlers to pick your image up in search results.
- Compress images
Image size and file size are two completely different things.
Images with larger size dimensions (height x width) can cause a larger image file size. To prevent large image file sizes from slowing your site speed down it’s important to keep image size and resolution as small as possible.
The goal for e-commerce photography is to have the highest quality imagery with the lowest possible file size.
As most E-commerce stores have more than one product to sell we recommend that you keep each image file size below 70KB whilst keeping an eye on image quality.
Canva is a great tool for resizing images as it’s a lot cheaper than it’s Adobe Photoshop rival. It’s also a lot simpler to use and it allows you to save images in many different formats from PNG to JPEG.
If you’re worried about not being able to create your own high-quality imagery, then we recommend hiring a professional photographer. The world of E-commerce is extremely competitive and it can take a fully trained expert to enable you to stand out from the crowd and create eye-catching imagery for your product photography.
- Use image sitemaps
Google has a full list of best practices for image sitemaps on its ‘Control crawling and indexing’ section of Webmaster Guidelines.
It recommends that you add images to an existing sitemap or create a separate sitemap just for your images. Either way, Google wants you to tell it that your images are there.
Google Search Console is a great way for you to make your sitemap known to Google.
- Monitor your ROI
If you’re going to invest in your E-commerce imagery, then it’s important to track and monitor your ROI.
ROI can be measured through analysis factors such as how many impressions an image received, how many clicks an image got, and how many people converted.
Not only can monitoring data such as CTR help monitor your ROI but analysing the data from your images can help you to find what your customers prefer to see on your site.
Do they prefer to have more product choices or fewer? What angles do they prefer? How many products do you list per page?
If you’re a small-medium-sized business that doesn’t have a team to monitor traffic for you then we recommend hiring a digital marketing agency.
- Try an image optimization plug-in
An image optimization plug-in such as TinyPNG can help you to mitigate site speed issues with ease. A plug-in can take all the heavy lifting off image optimisation. This is particularly useful for sites such as E-commerce stores that often have a lot of images on them.
Most plug-ins come with more than just a standard file size compression. Most can now improve lazy loading and even auto-resize themselves.
We hope that you enjoy these quick and easy wins for improving image optimisation for SEO. If you would like to work with us or require any more information, fill out our quick and easy contact form here: Contact us
