Being Found Through Image Search

Who this is worth doing for

Not everybody, and the difference is large.

Worth real effort: trades where the result is visual and where people search for ideas before they search for a supplier. Landscaping, renovation, cabinetry, decks, tiling, flooring, upholstery, and anything decorative.

Somebody browsing images for a deck design is at the beginning of a project, and being the photograph they save is a genuine route into that project.

Worth twenty minutes: most other local businesses, where the traffic is small and the work is trivial.

Not worth pursuing: businesses whose customers search by problem rather than by appearance, such as emergency trades.

What search engines actually use

An image is a file with no readable content, so understanding it depends almost entirely on context.

• The filename, which is the most direct signal and the most neglected.
• The alternative text, which serves accessibility first and search second.
• The surrounding text, including the caption and the paragraph it sits in.
• The page title and heading, which establish the subject.
• Whether the image is crawlable, which is where sites silently fail.

Alternative text should be written for the person who cannot see the image, and doing that well happens to serve search too. Writing it for search rather than for the reader produces text that serves neither, and the guidance on doing it properly is a separate subject.

Filenames

The easiest change and the one almost nobody makes.

A file called by a camera reference tells a search engine nothing. A file named for what it shows, in lowercase with hyphens, describes the image before anything else does.

Cedar deck with glass railing beats a string of digits, and it costs the two seconds it takes to rename before uploading.

This has to happen at upload, since renaming afterwards changes the address and breaks anything pointing at it.

The crawlability problem

Where sites fail invisibly.

Images loaded by scripts after the page renders, images inside galleries that only load on interaction, and images referenced only in stylesheets are frequently not indexed at all.

Lazy loading is the common cause. It is good for performance and it needs to be implemented so the image reference exists in the page rather than being invented by a script.

The check: view the page source and search for your image filename. If it is not there, a search engine may not find it either.

The other cause is images blocked in the robots file, which happens accidentally when a directory is excluded for another reason.

The page matters more than the image

Worth understanding, because it changes where effort goes.

An image on a page about nothing in particular has little context. The same image on a page specifically about cedar decks, with text explaining the project, is understood far better.

Which means the most effective thing is not image optimisation at all. It is having pages that are genuinely about the thing the image shows.

A gallery of forty images with no text is the weakest possible arrangement, and it is what most trades sites have. A page per project, with a description, outperforms it substantially.

What image traffic is worth

Being honest about it.

Somebody arriving from image search is frequently at the browsing stage rather than the buying stage, and the immediate conversion rate is low.

What it is good for: reaching people early, being saved and returned to, and being the reference somebody shows a contractor later.

Which means the page an image sits on should make the business identifiable and easy to contact, since the visitor arrived looking at a picture rather than searching for you.

A caption or a line naming the business, the location, and what the project was converts an anonymous image into a traceable one.

The additional steps

For businesses where this genuinely matters.

Including images in the sitemap, which some content systems do automatically and others do not.

Structured markup on product images for stores, which can affect how results are displayed.

Consistent image dimensions on gallery pages, which is a presentation matter that also reduces layout shift.

And watermarking, which is a trade-off worth thinking about: it protects against reuse and it makes an image less likely to be shown prominently, so a discreet mark is better than an obtrusive one.

The twenty-minute version

1. Rename files before uploading, descriptively.
2. Write alternative text for the reader who cannot see it.
3. Check your images appear in the page source.
4. Put images on pages that are about them, rather than in an untitled gallery.
5. Add a caption identifying the project and the location.

That covers most of the available benefit, and steps two and five are the same content-level work described in accessibility without the jargon.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.