How to DOUBLE Your Traffic with Google Images

Most of what the SEO and traffic generation strategies that we perform, we do based on knowledge and experience. Sometimes, however, we get unexpected bonuses. One of our major clients is an ecommerce site, which ranks top of Google for a number of high volume keywords. Understandably, this brings high levels of traffic. A few months ago, they asked us to help get their product pictures included in the Google Image search results. This led to incredible results - they received DOUBLE the traffic they obtained from natural search and their turnover increased by 35%. Today, we will explore how you can use Google Image Search to boost your business.

Introduction to Google Image Search Optimization

Optimising your images is not a great deal different to optimising your article or website - ultimately Google wants to rank the most highly relevant results at the top of the search results. By including images within your pages which are relevant to the content of your article and by labelling these appropriately, you can drive huge levels of traffic to your website for free.

People use Google Image Search for many purposes. They may be looking for a picture of a product they are interested in buying, such as a brand of clothing, furniture of electronic gadget. Alternatively, they may be looking for pictures of celebrities, political figures or cars.

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what the content of your website is - adding images to it will not only give your site a nice look, but it will help drive free traffic via Google Images.

How to Optimise Your Images

The good news is that optimising your images for Google is very simple and requires only minimal effort. For this reason and for the potential benefits it brings, you should take a little time to maximise this opportunity. Below are some key guidelines you should follow.

1. Use Keywords in your Filename

One of the most basic, but important tips is to use relevant keywords in your filename, rather than camera-assigned filename such as DSC05443.jpg. Instead, if the image is of Britney Spears you should call your image britney-spears.jpg. Use hyphens to seperate your keywords. Keep your filename short and sweet, don’t use too many keywords or unnecessary words.

2. Use your Alt Tags

We have already covered the use of Alt Tags in a previous article but as a quick recap - this should be a slightly longer description of your filename. The most important this is that it is relevant to your image and page content.

3. Use Keywords Around Your Image

To maximise the effectiveness of your image, include it in a section of your page either directly before or directly after some descriptive text which includes your main keyword. This helps improve the relevancy of the image, rather than sticking it at the bottom of the page, far away from your content.

4. Optimise your Title Tags

Although not directly related to the image, optimising your title tags for your main keyword will improve the ranking of your image. This is because Google wants the user to find the most relevant result and a picture of Britney Spears which is on an optimised page about Britney Spears is more relevant than a page which has short profiles of every American singer whose surname begins with the letter S.

5. Use Adsense to assess your page content

One good way of testing your page to see if Google thinks it is relevant to your chosen keyword is to install an Adsense unit on the page. If the ads shown are about your chosen keyword, your page is regarded relevant for that topic and your chances of ranking well are improved. If it doesn’t, try optimising the page some more.

6. Link to Images Using Anchor Text

If you provide a link to your image anywhere on your site, do so using appropriate anchor text, which matches your keyword. So instead of linking via some text saying “Click Here”, use “Britney Spears Picture”.

7. Ensure your Image Folder is accessible to search engines

Ensure that your robots.txt file does not limit search engines from accessing your image files. This is essential if you want your images to be ranked on Google Image Search. Try not to use javascript links on image files as well as it will limit search engine access as well. 

Results with Google Images

The potential benefits of using Google Images are clearly understandable. We are keen to hear your own thoughts and experiences of this method of driving traffic, so feel free to post stories, questions, or additional tips and advice in our comments section!