When Google crawls your website to find content, does it care about the quality of the images that you use?
The answer to this question depends on which algorithm is being used to index your site. If the crawler is looking for content to be added to the search engine results page, then images don’t matter, but if you want your images to rank in Google Images, making sure that your images are of quality does matter.
When looking at images and their effect on rankings for web search, Google only focuses on two main signals, which are:
1. Does the image have alternative (alt) texts?
Alt text is important in search engine optimisation (SEO), as when it’s used properly, it can help you improve your website from an on-page SEO standpoint. Every image on your website should have alt text that describes what the image shows, as Google web search crawlers are unable to see the image, so they need to be told what the image is.
2. Does the webpage have image schema?
Schema (sometimes called Structured Data) is code in the backend of your website that helps search engines like Google to understand more information about the web page. To give Google web search crawlers more information about the image, you will need to have Image Object schema setup on your website, as this enables Google to easily find out more information about the image used on the webpage. You can find out more about schema here*.
If you want your images to rank on Google Images, then making sure that you have quality images on your website is really important, as Google image crawlers are different to the normal web search crawlers, as they can crawl both the webpage the image is on, and they can also look at images on your site that are in the following formats: BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, WebP or SVG. Therefore, making sure that your images are of quality and are optimised is key.
If you want to improve your website from an SEO standpoint to increase traffic from search engines like Google, get in touch with our Engage Web team.
- Key takeaways from Google’s latest search reviews update - November 10, 2023
- Mobile-first indexing: what is it, and why has it taken so long? - November 3, 2023
- Google updates structured data understanding - October 31, 2023