Images Ranking on Their Own

A separate route to your site

Somebody looking for a finished kitchen, a paving pattern, or a particular kind of railing frequently searches images rather than pages.

They are choosing visually and then following whichever picture matches what they had in mind.

For a visual trade that is a genuine source of enquiries, and it is available to a business with photographs and no rankings at all.

Most sites forfeit it entirely by uploading files called a string of digits with no description attached.

The four things that decide it

• The file name.
• The alternative text.
• The caption and surrounding words.
• The subject of the page it sits on.

The fourth matters most and is the one people do not think about. A photograph of a cedar fence on a page about cedar fencing is understood; the same photograph in a general gallery with forty others is not about anything in particular.

Put photographs on subject pages

Rather than only in a gallery.

A gallery is a page about your work in general, so every image on it is described by the same weak context.

Three photographs on a page about one specific job, with text around them describing that job, gives each image a clear subject.

That also improves the page for a reader, which is the usual pattern.

Keep the gallery if you want one, and make sure the best photographs also appear somewhere specific.

Businesses with a gallery and no photographs on their service pages have the arrangement backwards.

Name the file before uploading

Since this is the cheapest of the four and takes seconds.

A file called cedar-fence-horizontal-coquitlam is describable; one called IMG_4471 is not.

Rename in batches as you copy photographs off the phone, before they reach the site, which is when the context is fresh.

Use words a customer would use rather than trade terms.

And keep it short and plain rather than stuffing every possible word in, which is both worse to read and treated as what it is.

A worked example

A business with a strong portfolio had six hundred photographs on one gallery page, all named by camera number, none with descriptions.

They received almost no traffic from image searches.

Over a few months they moved forty of the best onto eight specific pages, three or four per page, renamed those files, and wrote a sentence describing each.

Image search became their second-largest source of new visitors within a year.

The enquiries from it were unusually well qualified, since somebody who chose a photograph already knows what they want.

The remaining five hundred and sixty stayed in the gallery and continued to do nothing, which was fine and cost nothing to leave alone.

Describe the photograph properly

Which serves two purposes at once.

The alternative text exists so somebody who cannot see the image knows what it shows, and that is its primary job.

Written well, it also tells a search engine what the picture is of.

Describe what is actually in the frame: the material, the style, the setting, and where if it is relevant.

Avoid the trap of writing a keyword list, which fails the accessibility purpose and is recognised for what it is.

A plain sentence does both jobs and takes ten seconds.

Size and format still matter

Since a slow gallery undermines all of this.

Photographs at the right dimensions for the slot, in a modern format, load quickly enough that people stay.

An image page that takes nine seconds loses the visitor before they see the work.

And images below the first screen should load later, while the first one should not.

That is the same work as everything else in this area and it applies here with more force, since images are the content.

A visual trade that gets this wrong is losing people at exactly the moment the work would have persuaded them.

Watch what people find you through

The measurement, since this is easy to check.

Your search console separates image searches from web searches, and most businesses have never looked at that tab.

It shows which images are being shown, for what, and whether anybody clicks.

That tells you which subjects are worth photographing more of, which is a genuinely useful input to what work to document.

Check it quarterly alongside everything else.

Keep the originals somewhere

A practical point, since this work is done once and the material has to survive.

The version on the site is resized and compressed, so it is not the file to keep for printing, for a supplier, or for the next site.

Keep full-size originals in one place, named the same way as the site versions, so the pair can be matched later.

That is what makes a rebuild or a redesign a matter of reusing photographs rather than starting the whole exercise again.

It also means the best forty can be identified quickly next time, since they are already named for what they show.

The counter-case

This does not apply to every trade.

A business whose work is invisible, inside walls or entirely a service, has little to gain and should not spend time on it.

Image traffic also converts poorly in some categories, since a good share of those people are browsing for ideas rather than looking to hire anybody.

And photographs of your work are worth having for the pages themselves regardless of whether anybody ever finds them separately through an image search.

Move your best photographs onto specific pages, rename the files, describe them plainly, and check the image tab.

What to do

1. Pick your forty best photographs.
2. Move them onto subject pages.
3. Rename the files plainly.
4. Describe what is in frame.
5. Add a caption and surrounding text.
6. Check the size and format.
7. Look at the image tab quarterly.

Step two is the one that changes the outcome, since a photograph in a general gallery has no subject and the same photograph on a specific page has one.

The naming and describing detail is covered in naming image files before you upload.

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.