Four Proven Tips to Optimise Images for your Website

Undoubtedly, images offer tremendous benefits. A great user experience, high engagement, and brand exposure are a few of them. That is why almost every content creator tries to incorporate them into content strategies. 

Though they transform a text-heavy write-up into a visually appealing piece, they require search engine optimisation. 

Inability to optimise images can have a poor impact on SEO. Since image searching is in full bloom, competitors are working hard to bring their sites to the top. Therefore, image optimisation needs no compromise. 

But before discussing the tips and tricks, let’s try to understand what is image optimisation: 

What is Image Optimisation? 

Optimising images refers to delivering the best quality with minimum image size. To achieve this goal, we change various elements like image title, file format, dimensions, etc. 

When the image size is small, it brings less burden to the site, enabling it to load fast. A fast-loading website provides a great user experience and increases conversions. Besides this, well-optimised images are easier to crawl and help in boosting the SEO rank. 

Thus, to boost the business in the digital landscape, every marketer should learn about image optimisation. This article will share some valuable tactics to help you out. 

• Never Forget to Add Context to the Images 

SEO experts always try their best to let search engines understand their images. Thankfully, adding context to the images is not difficult. Here are a few useful ways: 

Use Titles and Captions 

Since the attention span of visitors is low, adding titles increases the probability of converting them. In some browsers, titles appear when the visitor hovers over the image. It should be short and specific. 

For instance, if you use an image of a Palm Tree, a good title is “Palm Tree,” whereas just “Tree” can refer to a broad category. 

Likewise, captions appear below or above an image. They are the short description of the image. You can use keywords at the start of the caption but try to make them brief and catchy. 

For example, “best sites for stock images” is a good caption. But “cheap and reliable websites to get high-quality stock photos” look unnecessarily lengthy. 

Alt Text 

It is the text that appears in place of an image when the internet is working slowly. Thus, users get to know which image will appear. Likewise, as the name suggests, it is an alternative to an image and appears in front of people using screen readers. 

For creating a compelling alt text, incorporate keywords smartly. If you stuff multiple keywords, it will sound spammy, and search engines won’t understand the context of the image.

For example, a “Chocolate walnut brownie topped with white chocolate glaze” is a good alt text that makes sense. However, brownie glazed white walnut chocolate is inappropriate.

Structured Data 

Structured data is a pre-defined format through which we tell Google about the page contents. It provides rich results for the images, which also enhances the consumer experience. 

If we don’t back up the images with structured data, they won’t provide us any SEO benefits. They will just enhance the visual appearance of the page. 

• Always Submit an Image Sitemap 

An image sitemap is a map that describes all images of your site. It includes an image URL, short description, alt text, licence, title, etc. The purpose of this map is to enable search engines to understand the purpose of each image. In this way, they will find it easier to index your site. 

Luckily, WordPress users can enjoy this feature for free. They don’t need to create a separate map for images as the platform automatically saves all their images in the main sitemap. 

Also, those already having a main sitemap don’t need to create an image sitemap separately. You can easily add information to your existing sitemap. 

But make sure to add accurate detail to each image. Otherwise, you won’t get any SEO benefits as search engines cannot match the information with the image. 

• Use High-Quality and Royalty-Free Images 

Finding images for your site is not difficult. Start searching, and you will find billions of options. But every image is not the right choice for your site. You firstly need to see the copyrights and licence of the image. 

Stock images are available on several sites, but people only prefer reliable sources as they provide customisable and high-quality assets. These pictures portray a positive image of the site besides providing context to the search engines. 

Additionally, paid stock photos are a better option than free ones. Since they are not overused, they leave a positive impression on the visitors. Many new and established businesses use paid stock photos and provide a great user experience. 

• Consider the Right File Format and Image Compression 

Try to understand the purpose of each file format. You can use JPEG when you want a drastic reduction in file size. However, consider PNG if the quality is your first concern in comparison to file size. If you are using animation, GIFs are the best option.

Once you have chosen the file format, thinking about compression should be your next step. Adding pictures without compression will take a lot of space and increase the loading time. Thus, the user experience will spoil. No one wants to do it, so compressing images is essential. 

Try to understand the two types of compression before proceeding: 

Lossy Compression 

It is a type of compression in which you compromise the image quality to decrease the image size. Thankfully, the quality compression is negligible. WordPress users can automatically get this feature for JPEG files. 

Lossless Compression 

Here you don’t compromise on the image’s quality, but you cannot significantly reduce the file size. The reduction of file size in lossless compression is just 5%. In some cases, marketers want to keep the premium quality of the images. Therefore, they opt for lossless compression. 

Final Words 

Image optimisation can let you achieve your SEO goals. If done correctly, it can help you compete well with your rivals. 

Tips like providing context to the images, choosing the correct format, and providing an image sitemap are helpful. Likewise, using the best quality images and considering the correct form of compression is essential. 

Following all these tips can let you optimise your website images without increasing the loading time. Add them to your SEO strategy today!

Ruler Analytics: ‘How SEO became our best acquisition channel’

Laura Caveney, Head of Marketing at Ruler Analytics, has over six years of experience in digital marketing, working across digital content and SEO. She has worked in a variety of sectors, from the charity sector to the travel industry. Laura settled into Ruler in 2020 mid-pandemic to support the marketing team build on their current marketing strategy. 

Here, she explains how SEO has become their best acquisition channel over the past couple of years.

Thank you for taking the time to chat with us! We love seeing examples of SEO becoming the best acquisition channel for businesses. Tell us why you decided to make this your main focus?

When I first joined Ruler, we were getting the majority of our inbound leads via partner referrals. While it was fantastic to have this resource and strong relationships with our agency partners, content and SEO felt like a huge opportunity to improve results. 

The first job was assessing what we currently had and what was missing. Ruler had a small number of really high intent, middle-of-the-funnel blogs that were working well to drive demo enquiries. 

When we looked over the content we had and compared it to the marketing funnel, we found we were missing content from the top and from bottom of the funnel. We know that many marketers aren’t aware of attribution or that it could be a solution to their problem. As such, there was a huge untapped opportunity there with keywords we could use to kickstart customer journeys. 

Conversely, at the bottom of the funnel, we wanted to support current customers as well as those in the decision-making stage of the process to fully understand what Ruler was capable of and why it’s a better product than our competitors. 

While we knew building our SEO would take a lot of time and effort, it was clear even just from the handful of blogs we already had driving demos, that it would be worth it. 

How long have you been focusing on this?

Organic search has always been a priority for us and we have been making small waves of improvement incrementally. But, we really saw a shift after we realigned our strategy in January 2021. That’s where we found our feet in terms of content and SEO and started seeing amazing results. 

Now, we regularly assess our content and our strategy and shift to ensure that organic traffic grows month on month. 

Talk us through your strategy over the years. Has anything shifted through trial and testing?

When I first joined Ruler, the aim of the game was to just write more content. We got through a lot of blogs, and while traffic went up, there wasn’t a huge shift in traffic. 

We assessed what we had done and looked critically at what types of content we were creating and who they were aimed at. We found that a lot of our content was very top-of-the-funnel heavy. And, we were popping in demo CTAs left, right and centre and hoping they would stick. 

So, we decided to split out our content strategy into three funnel stages and we defined six content pillars. We went through all of our current blogs and applied each to the relevant stage and pillar. 

This exercise left us with clear gaps in our content that made it easy for us to see what was missing. From there, we researched keywords and titles that would fit the gaps that were left and got to work. 

While we created huge numbers of new blogs, we also capitalised on the SEO goodness of existing content. It took a year to get through our rewrites but we’re now in a position where we can do short, snappy updates and get our content into top rankings with much less effort. 

Our final focus for content in 2021 was creating data-driven pieces of content. We found highly relevant keyword opportunities and created our own data. Whether that was using the data from our product or tapping into our community, we were able to create strong, relevant statistics that other marketers would find interesting. 

This helped in two ways. First, we were creating highly-optimised content that was ranking well. And second, users were landing on our data and linking back to it. As such, our domain rating increased from 55 to 69 in a year with very minimal work on backlinking. 

Now, for 2022, we’re shifting again. We’ve nailed our SEO process, but now, we want to expand out into thought leadership. While our SEO content is working great at driving new inbound traffic, what we’re missing is the key to getting more people to stay. 

So this year, we’re going to share more data still. Our own tests and successes as marketers, plus insights to what we’ve learned during our time in marketing. I’m excited to see where this latest shift takes us. 

How have you found the process so far?

The process has been a long slog but our traffic has increased by nearly 300% from December 2020 to January 2022. And that year of hard work has put us in good stead to diversify our traffic while knowing that we can expect fairly consistent levels of organic traffic month on month. 

Some months we were writing 20 blogs between just two of us and at the time, it was hard to believe that that hard work would be worth it. And while getting through that big push of content was difficult, it’s got us to a really good base of organic traffic now that we can improve on and optimise. 

SEO is definitely a long-term game, but the rewards are so worth it. What advice would you give to others in a similar position in terms of timeline expectations?

Stick at it. The hard work is worth it in the end. There were times in 2020 when I felt like I couldn’t write another word. But, by getting through a big content shift like that, you just don’t know where you could end up. And just know, while it feels like all that effort is futile in the moment, in three to six months it’ll pay dividends. 

Do you have any future plans for increasing SEO focuses, or perhaps focusing on other areas?

Yes, we’re looking to continue creating data that is useful and valuable. And we’ll always keep our ear to the ground. We’re very lucky to be able to use an attribution tool as part of our regular reporting. 

With it, we can see the levels of traffic blogs are getting and how that’s translating into leads and sales. Even better is that we can see how organic search is informing customer journeys. Whether it’s from a first-click view of a blog or last-click conversion, we can definitively prove the impact of our content. This insight helps us understand a blog’s role in the customer journey, better plan for future content, plus tweak existing content. 

It’s been particularly useful from a CRO perspective too as it shows us if a blog is getting high traffic but low conversions, or vice versa. That gives us clear actions when it comes to rewriting and updating existing content. 

Ahead, we want to use this inbound traffic to develop our email offering. We love the idea of creating a community and want to use our success in dominating niche keywords to better support marketers with attribution, lead tracking and more.