Our internal tests suggest that optimized images actually improve your rankings in regular web search, too. So how do you make sure that your images show up in the Google results for your target keywords? I was just getting to that! Use Image File Name and Tags to Your AdvantageĪ lot of sites don’t properly optimize their images, whether from laziness or ignorance, which makes it easier for you to step in and outrank them. If they were looking for information in your field, they may need more help, in the form of products or services, in the near future.) Or set up a remarketing campaign in AdWords, so those visitors continue to see your display ads for the next month or so. ( Hint: Look for opportunities to capture some lead information, for example by prompting blog visitors to sign up for your email list, so you can nurture them with targeted offers. The thinking is, even for informational keywords like this that might not directly lead to a sale, you’re raising awareness of your brand and positioning yourself as an authority on the topic at hand. In all these examples, you’re going after traffic that is highly relevant to your business, and you’re using images to help you attract and keep that traffic. Here are some examples of how you can create visual content to support how-to keywords for different business types: (This is why some build-it-yourself furniture comes with instructions that are all diagrams, no language.) How-to keywords are also great for driving highly relevant long-tail traffic, and when you can provide the perfect answer to a question, you increase your chances of converting that visitor to a customer later on. “How to” keywords are especially conducive to image-heavy content, because it’s often easier to illustrate a process than simply explain it. Many keywords lend themselves naturally to visual content, but almost any kind of content can be enhanced with images. Similarly, when optimizing for image search, start with keywords and go from there. When trying to create content that ranks for your SEO keywords, it’s always a good idea to start with those keywords, rather than writing whatever and forcing keywords into your content after the fact. Create Visual Content that Speaks to Leads The trick is making sure that traffic is relevant and valuable. If you play your cards right you can start to drive traffic from image search pretty quickly. It’s often easier to drive traffic through image search or video search than plaid old regular search – in part because there’s less competition and in part because the competition is less likely to be properly optimized. (To look at your own Google image search numbers in Analytics, go to Traffic Sources -> Sources -> Referrals, then click on, then /imgres.) The bounce rate for this traffic is also relatively low – in fact it’s lower than our site average. Notice the strong upward trend in traffic from image searches:
Several months ago we made a conscious effort to better optimize our site for Google image search rankings. Think of Google Image Search as an Easy Win With that in mind, here are three ways you can optimize images in your content marketing to maximize your Google image search traffic. So you want most of your visitors, even new visitors who find you through a Google search, to be relevant to your business. But often with content marketing, the goal is to form a new relationship, to nudge the prospect down the funnel and one step closer to eventually becoming a customer. If people find your site and convert right away, great! Have a Hershey’s kiss. If you’re running a business site/blog, you should always be thinking about how you can build a return audience with your content. But sometimes, people are genuinely looking for information (or products) that can be represented visually. Sometimes people use image search because they just want to steal your cute cat pictures and put them on their own blogs. It bounces/doesn’t come back – Once visitors get what they came for and realize that I don’t deliver an endless stream of Jeff Bridges pics, they are unlikely to bookmark my site and put it into their regular reading rotation.My blog isn’t about Jeff Bridges or movies or acting or celebrities at all. It’s irrelevant – People who search Google Images for pictures of Jeff Bridges don’t really care what I have to say, about Jeff Bridges or otherwise probably – they just want to look at Jeff Bridges, or maybe they want to find a picture of him to use on their own site.As such, there are a few problems with this traffic: But let’s pretend for a second that I am running a business and have goals to reach. Well, traffic is traffic, right? Meh – maybe for a blog that has no real business goals.