When creating websites to sell, you need to consider both the communicative effectiveness of text and everything that goes with it. It's estimated that at least 32% of Google queries today target images, and failure to address their impact on SEO results in untapped beneficial opportunities.
Optimizing images for search engines like Google used to be just one of the activities to be done on the side, but now it has been promoted to an essential best practice.
If you sell emotionally charged (travel, wellness ...) or visually charged (sweets, jewelry, crafts ...) products or services you stand to gain from optimizing images as they can significantly contribute to converting visitors into real customers.
Why can images increase visits to your site?
Images are a powerful and often underestimated sales tool and deserve to be fully evaluated from an SEO perspective. If you notice, when you search Google for content that is highly relevant from an aesthetic standpoint, Google Images are often highlighted.
To produce real benefits, however, images are very important visual corollaries to attract visitors' attention, reduce the fatigue that walls of text cause, and are useful for emotional web design practices. You can use original and good quality photos to enrich and make irresistible especially. By the way, there are some free non-communicative image sites to illustrate your articles that you can certainly use to make your users happy.
Optimized images can be very important in providing Google with signs of authority and relevance for a given search type. Featured snippets, those boxes in the foreground that appear in front of organic results consisting of a text preview and a photo, can report on the content of a page and image from another site and can therefore position itself as a competitor when you can't do the same with text.
How to optimize images on the SEO side to increase visits?
Photos are indexed in the same way as text content, so much so that plug-ins such as Yoast for WordPress and JSitemap Pro for Joomla allow you to create site-maps dedicated solely to images to make them detectable by search engines.
If you want to make the most of visual content, don't forget to optimize all the SEO tags related to images, in particular:
File name: this is a very effective element to signal to spiders the relevance of a given topic. Remember to finalize it to the content of the page (of type "guide-blog"). The ideal length can be between 4 and 6 words. The more you place for long-tail search keys, the more detailed and specific the file name can be.
Description: this is content that highlights the context of the image. You can use it to provide more detailed information about the page it belongs to (e.g. "Help with monetizing the blog")
Title: it may not be relevant for SEO, but it is valuable on the UX side as it shows who is hovering over the image with the mouse cursor; additional information about the content of the illustration. This way you can quickly get an idea of what the page is about. For example, you can set it with a formula like "Find out how to make money with the company blog"
Alt tag: it provides information to the reader about what the image represents and helps visually impaired users. Alt text is very important in terms of usability and should explain in a simple and intuitive way why it is important to a hypothetical visitor. It can be between 70 and 100 characters long. For example, you can set it with a formula like, "Guide on how to monetize with blog."
To optimize photos for your blog, there are great tools for resizing images that allow you to get acceptable visual quality without requiring long load times and maintaining a very reasonable weight. Keep in mind that you should always upload a photo in the actual size you intend to display so you don't force the browser to resize it.
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