How to Rank in Google Images
Images are one of the top most engaging forms of content online. Having relevant images in your content is an effective way to grab the attention of your audience without you asking for it.
When you post the best quality images, you are bringing value to your brand which accurately reflects your story, product, service, or campaign.
Because our brain perceives the world visually, your customers will crave constant visual inputs that are attractive.
Visual content statistics show that images posted significantly impact important key performance indicators of a marketing strategy like reach, engagement, and sales.
How will you maintain constant connection and engagement with your customers with images?
On social media, visuals, including relevant images can boost engagement 2.3 times more than posts without visuals.
Blog posts with a visual inserted every 75 to 100 words, earn more shares. The key to the use of images to significantly impact marketing goals is to use meaningful and relevant images that will impress your audience.
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Benefits of Ranking Images
Authentic and high-quality images that tell who you are and what you can give to your audience to fill their needs dominate the internet.
These visuals are those that stand out because they show authentic slow-loading emotions that can easily tug the heartstrings of your audience and connect them with your brand.
When this happens, you get to appreciate why images play a very important role in your marketing strategy.
The benefits of ranking images are:
1. Leave a Branding Mark
When you upload images with great value and high quality, your website will be ranked higher. Being in the top ranks means that you will be more visible to your audience and reach a greater audience as well.
More potential customers will know about your brand and when you maintain your rank in the search engine results pages, it will reflect your commitment to delivering only the best to your users and those who look for the products and services you offer.
To obtain this brand mark and by including a logo watermark on the images that you upload on your site, you will be seen front and center whenever your images are shown. This can leave a lasting impression on the minds of your visitors.
2. Drive Considerable Traffic
Optimized images can automatically attract your users and potential customers. This means that with more organic traffic because you rank high on search, you can expect an increase in your conversions as well.
Images tend to move your users to act on what you ask them to do on your site. Great quality images help improve page load speed and user engagement which directly affect the amount of traffic you receive on your site.
When you get to provide the best overall user experience when all of these factors are present, there will be more users who spend more time on your site.
3. Rich Snippets
You can rank for rich snippet images that can rank high on google image rankings.
Optimizing images on your site will help make sure that you gain a rich snippet that will increase the traffic on your site and help you boost brand awareness.
4. Improve SEO Ranking
Users place a lot of value on loading speed. In fact, the speed of loading for your site will greatly impact user experience which will likewise impact your ranking.
Google and other search engines don’t love slow loading websites with poor quality images.
With high quality images that are optimized for SEO, your website will load at a faster rate, improving overall user experience, and thus, improving your site’s SEO ranking.
Image optimization holds a great significance in getting to the top of search ranking.
How to Rank Images in Google
Google regularly updates its search algorithm to rank website content. Although it does not reveal the details of its algorithm in ranking, the main content of a website has a significant impact on how the website will be ranked.
A crucial part of content that affects this ranking and other factors that impact ranking, is the quality of images being posted on the website.
To be able to rank an image in Google, consider the following steps:
1. Match the Alt Text and File Name of the Image to a Keyword That Your Website Is Aiming For.
Creating SEO-friendly images involves adding the target keyword to the image title and image file name.
The title should be written with purpose, describing and identifying the image. The file name is a label or tag that is connected to the image.
You can get the best ranking results for your image when you use target keywords your website is ranking for on both image title and image alt tag.
The Alt Text image that matches a target keyword should be both relevant to the search engine and your users.
Consider using a clear and more descriptive title that will allow your users to find your image and your website online when they are searching for your products and/or services.
Remember that a good Alt Tag should provide context and help visually impaired users. Write it in more detail than the File Name and include brand-related terms to boost visibility. Avoid Keyword stuffing for Alt Text and limit your words from 10 to 15 only.
2. Create Content Surrounding Your Image With Closely Related Target Keywords
The main content that surrounds your image on your website is the caption. It is best practice to write a caption that provides relevance to the image. This means that the content should be about what your image is all about.
The content around your image should capture your visitor’s attention and keep them on your website. This will reduce your site’s bounce rate which will help make your website rank higher in search.
Make sure that the content contains exactly what your users are looking for because it is what will make them stay and engage more. The image description for your image on the website should describe the essential information.
One effective way of writing good content for an image is the Object-action-context. This process involves captivating storytelling in writing descriptions.
The three main parts of the Object-action-context method are:
- Object: The main focus of the content
- Action: Describes what’s happening
- Context: Describes the surrounding environment
This is very helpful when writing content around an image that will help your website rank because it focuses on keeping your content objective, concise, and descriptive.
Being objective will allow your users to form their own opinions about what they are seeing in the image.
When your content is concise with only important and relevant details that tell your brand’s story and represent who you are and what you offer to answer the needs of your users, your users will be able to appreciate and absorb all the content.
This is especially important when you have multiple images on your site that come after the other.
Having descriptive content for your image will captivate your users attention and help them want to engage more. You should know your target audience well enough so that you will be able to create content around every image you publish on your site that is essential to the unique needs of your audience.
Relevant content will be able to paint a more vivid picture of what your users already see on the image. Use the object-action-context format to help fixate your content to the primary focus of your image.
It will allow you to prevent causing disorientation because you have more concise content with meaningful visual imagery. Only state what is not already obvious in the image.
3. Build Authority by Using Competitive Keywords That Your Website Is Trying to Rank For
Use snippets that have the same authority your competition is using. You can steal a rich snippet from a high authority site of your competition but make sure that you use the actual text snippet.
Snippets are search results that are featured in a box above Google’s organic search results and below advertisements. They are typically shown when users search with questions that begin with “who”, “where”, “what”, “why”, “when”, “how”, etc.
These snippets make it easier for users to find information they need at-a-glance. Snippets are also called “answer boxes” for a purpose. They contain essential information in the form of a paragraph.
When you include relevant snippets on images that you post, you can jump to the front of the line in search engine results pages. This will give you brand exposure and increased traffic.
Pull snippets from competitive sites that already rank in the top 10 positions of Google. Make the most of featured snippets with relevant keywords so you can increase your rank in search.
Consider following these steps on “How to Steal Your Competitor’s Featured Snippets for Better Rankings” from Neil Patel:
- Find your competitor’s featured snippets
- Use Ahrefs to grab low hanging fruit (snippets that are owned by your competitors)
- Use Google to identify potential snippets
- Learn what type of content in your niche is already ranking on page one
- Restructure your content with structured markup on your page
- Add SEO-friendly Alt Image tags with relevant Keywords and Keyword synonyms, explaining the image accurately and concisely
4. Syndicate the Image to All the Image Sharing Websites
There are various image sharing sites where you can syndicate your image and link them back to the original image.
Some popular image sharing sites are:
- Google plus
- Flickr
- Google Picasa
- Amazon Photos
- Dropbox
- SmugMug
These sites offer services such as uploading, hosting, managing, and sharing of photos (publicly or privately).
Google photos is one of the best free image sharing sites that you can use. Make sure to include a link that will lead users to your website where the image shared was taken from.
Syndicating the image to image sharing sites will increase brand visibility and increase traffic to your website. The more you are able to share a link with the image, the more links and backlinks you are able to create which will help improve your site ranking.
5. Juice the Image by Embedding It on a Few PBN (Private Blog Network) Site
A PBN is a network of websites that is used to link out from to increase rankings of one or more sites. You can embed your image to PBN sites to help boost your ranking. This follows the principle that the more backlinks your website has from high-authority sites, the higher Google will rank your site.
The best types of PBNs that you should be embedding your images with a link back to your website are the PBNs that rank naturally in the SERPs and actually draw traffic.
These are the PBNs that literally keep on top of search results because they have a significant traffic that helps them sustain their position in search. These are also the PBNs that can provide you with your juice.
How will you benefit by embedding an image on PBNs?
- Your users are reading the PBN sites that provide your juice so you can also increase in rank.
- PBNs receive a considerable amount of traffic that click on links on your image. This produces turbo-power link juice for your website.
- PBNs that have your image and link on their page are already ranked. This creates strong links between your website and the PBNs through your image.
- You can earn more conversions from the traffic that comes from the PBNs where you embedded your image with your website link.
A picture can paint a thousand words when it is used intentionally and with value. Create images that bring your website to the first page of search engine results pages with these tips.
Promote your website to the top level with appropriate and optimized images that will help you grow your business.
Our team of experts at Infintech Designs can assist you with your potential to rank in Google Images; get in touch with us right away!
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