I hope it’s a prosperous one for all. I wanted to start the New Year off by talking about image search, mainly because I think it’s a massively underused method for driving search traffic. In the last year, I have had the privilege of working on a few image-focused SEO campaigns and the results I’ve seen are unreal. Of course, there is a major caveat to image search and that is some industries are particularly difficult, if not impossible to optimize for, however the ones that don’t hold major riches. So let’s begin by going over some basic optimization advice, and then we can delve into a bit of strategy.

The Rules for Image Optimisation

The file name
Alt attribute
Image Title
Page Title
Text around the image

You have probably read the above many times before so I am not going to bore you with the details, however, there is one word of warning, don’t just stuff random keywords into these areas, not good. Try and be as descriptive as possible and specific to the image, not just in your alt attribute but in every part of the page that matters.

Stick With JPG

Out of all the testing, we did our JPG images always performed the best, this is probably due to the fact they are the most common and can be read by all browsers. Plus you can easily compress them reducing the load time on image-heavy pages.

We try and stick to between 1KB and 60KB for all our images, anything over 70KB tends to take too long to load and never performs as well. It has been mentioned a couple of times over the last couple of years, but in my opinion, this is massive. Even if you have a fairly new website you can still benefit from publishing fresh unique images, and you can rank not only on image search but within global search as well. Make your images fresh, make them as unique as possible, and push them out on a fresh article, fully optimized, and Bam! You’re onto a winner. You could also consider using tools like Google Trends to take advantage of search spikes, which works very well.

Amount of Images on a Page

SEOs in the past have advised against having too many images on a page, however in the last 12 months I have found the complete opposite, consistently the pages with the most images have outperformed the ones with one or two, massively outperformed. Keep your images as clean as possible, reducing file sizes and if you’re using WordPress, super cache and lazy load are perfect plugins. So in my opinion, more is better.

A Quick Case Study

Now I can’t give you the full details due to client confidentiality, however, I can display the potential in terms of search traffic. After taking advantage of some celebrity booms towards the end of last year we managed the following through image search alone on a fashion website;

Think of an Angle

Unless your aim is to drive up the amount you can charge for ads, you’re going to have to seriously consider the type of traffic you target.

Here are a few examples:

Clothing I worked on a project with a clothes retailer, one of the first things we did was to roam the web for celebrities that were wearing their clothes or clothes that were similar. We would then Photoshop the images enough to make them unique and then publish them on the blog, fully optimized.
Tons of search traffic for fashion tips around a particular celebrity, conversion rate? Around 0.3% was not great but the traffic was easy to get.

Cosmetics

So, first things first, get the blog set up and begin writing tons of tips (with images) about hair and makeup techniques. You’d be surprised how much search there is in this area, obviously not as much as the celebrity space but enough to make a material difference to the online performance of this business.Drove an additional 10,000 visitors per month through image search, increased Twitter and Facebook following by over 1000%, and continue to benefit the business in terms of conversions and revenue.

Think about it, if you are pushing out fresh, interesting content that is ranking highly in global and image search, the natural consequence is a lot of people finding your content, and hey presto! Linking back to it. Seriously, ranking highly on Google with interesting fresh content is one of the best link-building techniques there is, in the last 12 months using these exact same techniques I have managed to secure links on sites like The Daily Mail, TMZ, The Huffington Post, and even CNN!