WordPress Image SEO Optimization

Optimize photos and graphics on a WordPress site to make them more viral on search results

Reasons to Optimize WordPress Images

Make content more readable

  • Break up text on a webpage
  • Summarize the content via infographics

Increase brand awareness

  • Strengthen your brand recognition via consistent image styles
  • Remind users about your business anytime seeing these images

Boost organic traffic

  • Visual content proves a new SEO hack to improve site rankings and capture more traffic
  • Images submitted to image sitemap make it easier for crawlers to crawl and index

Juiciest Image SEO Statistics

The following stunning statistics emphasize the importance of image SEO in your WordPress site.

20%

of the total Google traffic comes from Google image search.

3%

of all clicks on Google are on images.

62%

of Gen Z members prefer visual search capability.

111.3%

New fresh images will bring 111.3% more traffic to your existing posts.

50%

Over 50% of searchers will include voice or image in their search by 2021.

WordPress Image SEO Best Practices

Quantity

  • Have at least one image in the content
  • Provide one photo for each section if possible
  • Photos of products or screenshots of how-to guides are acceptable

Quality

  • Design custom graphics
  • Take one from free stock photos.
  • Avoid copyright infringement

Alt Text

  • Prove the key image ranking factors
  • Enable bots to understand what your picture is about
  • Describe the image to readers when it hasn’t been loaded yet
  • Should be short, unique, and include your target keyword

File Sizes

  • Impact on web page loading times
  • Compress the image size to the lowest
  • Avoid changing the file type to uncommon ones
  • Test different file formats for the best quality delivered

File Types

  • Affect image quality, load, and appearance
  • Recommend using JPEG or JPG files in most cases

Target Keyword

  • Allow search engines to rank your pictures for relevant keywords
  • Include target keywords in the image title, name, alt text, and description

Sharing

  • Gain backlinks from authority websites
  • Should be shared on different social platforms

Image SEO Mistakes

Irrelevant images

  • Your site will receive penalty from Google due to irrelevant images
  • You should choose images that are connected to the content to reduce this issue

Keyword spam

  • Including too many keywords in the file name or alt text will harm the image ranking
  • Search crawlers might think that you're doing keyword trick on your images

Missing image sitemap

  • Your site doesn't have an image sitemap or you forget to submit images there
  • You can use the Yoast SEO plugin to add images to your sitemap automatically

Unresponsive images

  • Your images might look good on desktop but don’t fit mobile screens
  • You should test to make sure they are responsive on multiple devices