The old adage ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’ is as true now as it was when it was written in the 1920s. And for your digital marketing efforts, using images is a vital component in the increasingly visual-heavy results on search engines. Photographs naturally grab our attention and a search snippet with an image for example, is more likely to be clicked than a text-only one. But you also have to be aware of the quality of that image as it can influence click-through rates.
How does Google Images work?
Images that show up on Google Images go through three steps. The first step is crawling -Google crawls thousands of websites to extract available images. Next up is indexing –the stage where crawled images are organized into general and specific categories. And finally, there’s ranking, when Google gathers the best images matching a user’s search query.
Image Optimization
Image optimization practices are a way to bring easy traffic to your Dealership’s site. Here are some tips on how to boost your images’ visibility on Google Images by optimizing your images for search engines.
Easy access for search engines
Ensure that search engines can access the pages and the content. Create and optimize the content of the pages and add and optimize metadata. And make sure your images are accessible to Googlebot by using Google’s free tools such as Search Console’s Inspection Tool and Mobile-Friendly test.
Content
Include descriptive text near the image as indexing uses the text around the image to identify what it’s about. You can also include a caption or text within your article. Just make sure it’s relevant to the image. Without text, Google will have a hard time identifying the image’s theme.
Alt Attribute
Adding an Alt Attribute that succinctly and accurately describes the image that you’re showing on the page can help a lot with ranking. This is for describing the image and should not be used to insert the query that you want it to be ranked for.
Add Structured Data
To stand out more in image search you can add structured data to your pages and images. It basically refers to any data that is organized –into a table, list, or column for example. Structured data helps search engines understand what the content is specifically about. It also allows users to see the value of a website before they even visit it, via rich snippets.
So implement some of these tips to optimize your images and make sure the age-old adage about pictures stays true to its word!
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