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Image SEO Tips for Ecommerce Websites

By Kieron Hughes on 16 January 2012 @ 3:07 PM.

Tags: seo, image seo, image optimisation, ecommerce, ecommerce seo, ecommerce images.

Many people running search campaigns for ecommerce websites can often get too caught up in gaining new traffic via standard organic listings as well as product aggregators (i.e. Google Product Search), meaning they miss out on a high-potential stream: image search.

It's common place for every ecommerce store to show product images, as people need these to make buying decisions, but this should be taken a step further to cater for the people who are actually shopping (or at least doing research) via image searches.

Here are some quick and easy tips to optimise your images on an ecommerce site:-

1. Get the Basics Right

The easiest thing you can do to optimise an image on your website right now, is to add relevant, descriptive ALT text, as well as an image title to each individual image. Google and the other major search engines are becoming increasingly better at scanning images, however their ability to detect the content of an image in this way is still in its infancy. Robots will essentially be determining what your image is, so giving exact signals via the ALT text is a good first step.

Example:- "Extra Large Blue Denim Jeans" - Make it as relevant and specific as possible.

2. Use Appropriate File Names

On extremely large websites, with hundreds of thousands of SKUs, it will be difficult to find the time to name each image with an appropriate file name, but it should be done where possible. The search engines look for a number of signals when analysing images, and the file name is certainly one of them. Use relevant and descriptive file names, with words separated by hyphens.

Example:- "extra-large-blue-denim-jeans-123456.jpg"

3. Consider the Surrounding Text

Leading search engine Google has openly admitted using the text that surrounds an image to determine its content, and this is becoming increasingly apparent online. When the crawlers are unable to determine what the image is based on from the file name, properties, and ALT text, they may look at the surrounding text to gain context - which is why seemingly irrelevant images show up in Google image searches sometimes.

Cater for this signal by ensuring the main product image appears next to a relevant block of text. The surrounding text is worthless if the image is shown next to the specifications of the product (in most cases), and the on-page descriptive text needs to compliment the image (and vice-versa).

4. Size the Images Correctly

One of the more interesting updates that Google recently announced to have made, was improvements to the "image size signal". With this update, they intend to favour "larger full-size versions" of images within their search results where possible. What this means for ecommerce websites, is that there is an increased importance on how images are presented.

Small image thumbnails still need to be common place for ecommerce product pages, as anything more would make browsing difficult, but that isn't to say you can't have high quality versions available. Provide an option for the user to view a full size version of the image, and potentially even take this a step further by having an entire page dedicated to the larger quality image (think Wikipedia) - with its own relevant text and optimised attributes. The only downside to this approach is the added time to manage the process - but it is worthwhile for high value items.

5. Maximise Load Time

In terms of standard ranking signals, website load speed is one of the newer ones to have emerged by the search engines - and it's becoming increasing important. If your pages take forever to load, then it's ultimately going to be a bad experience for the user, meaning Google and the other search engines will want to favour other websites.

Images are often the biggest contributor to excessive load times, as high-res versions of images can add tens of seconds to the overall load time of a single page.

In order to maximise the potential visibility of both a web page, and it's containing image, keep image file sizes down to a minimum, and compress images where possible (retaining as much quality as needed).