30% Increase in Traffic using Google Images

One of the most underrated hack for SEO in 2019 is Google Images.

Almost for all the websites which I have optimized in the past 6 months, I have seen a bump of at-least 30% traffic via Google Images alone. There is a reason for that.

Till January 2018, Google images came with an option of “View Image” which allowed you to view the clicked image in its full size. Further you get an option to visit, save, view, and share the image.

But in February, Google removed the option of “View Image” button. It was a deliberate move by Google to redirect the traffic to the actual website containing the image instead of merely viewing the image and slipping out!

Surveys done after the removal of “View Images” button showed magical statistics. It has been found

out that an average of 47 % traffic has increased in image searches which comes to a single website has

generated 6,00,000 more visitors from the image search on a monthly basis. This is enormous!

10.1 of all Google traffic is for images.google.com. Since 55% is for google.com, and 24.7% is for mail.google.com, that shows you how big of a traffic chunk images are receiving.

Daily page-views of Google Images is greater than 1 billion!

Basically, we’re dealing with some huge numbers.

When it comes to SEO for Shopify and store with 50+ products, Google Images is the fastest way to drive traffic to your store even before your website starts ranking with conventional SEO.

Internet today is flooded with incalculable content in two forms:

# Written text

# Images

With each passing day, people leave no stone upturned to garnish and enhance their text content to make it SEO friendly, pretty much forgetting that IMAGES form an equally important part of their content.

Here are the simple steps to optimize images on your store.

1. Choose a Descriptive File Name

Naming the image files is small yet most overlooked part of SEO. Most cameras name the images by default using some numbers or characters which are much irrelevant to the picture. A lot of images are automatically named something like DSC_0001.jpg. Google is good with interpreting words. The better you give a description of your image, the better it will be read by Google.

Let’s say you have a picture of Mt. Everest during snow. The Google will read Mt.Everest-in-snow.jpg better than just

IMG1221.jpg. The best way to optimize your images is to integrate the keywords in the file name. Don’t forget to keep the file name short and simple and provide an easy explanation of the image in the naming process.

2. Add Alt Text to your Images

The image alt tag describes the same meaning that the image is supposed to convey when it can’t be shown or to help visually impaired users. In replacement of the image your alt text will appear on screen. Alt tags are bits of metadata that alerts search engines of the presence of an image and gives a

brief description to the search engines what the images are about.

Alt text is particularly important for product images on e-commerce sites as it will help customers find your goods when they search for products that you sell. Think about the terms people might use to search for your products and include them in your alt tag.

While writing your Alt Text,

# Be descriptive, honest and concise

# Include any keywords that you want to rank for

# For product photos, include keywords people might use to search for the product in the image

3. Compress your Images

Compressed or small files take lesser time to load. The time taken to load your web page greatly influences Google ranking. You can use various image manipulation tools to compress you file size without compromising on the image quality to speed up the loading time of your web pages containing ample images.

Of-course, quality keyword research is the basis for this strategy to work. I usually pick 200+ long tail low competition keywords with decent search volumes and then use them for optimizing images across the website.

Optimizing all images on your website for the purpose of SEO might require more efforts than optimizing texts, but they will rank much faster and provide accelerated results within a short span of time. Just follow the above steps and Google will reward you with quality traffic.

Cheers!

Rahul Bhatia