Understanding SEO for Your Images

In digital marketing, SEO is king, and it is no different in California markets such as Los Angeles and San Francisco. The nuts and bolts of SEO are thoroughly researched keywords and fine-tuned metadata. With such a laser-like focus on text-based content, SEO for your images tends to be an afterthought, but it plays a vital role in engaging with a website’s visitors.

In the highly competitive California SEO landscape, your business needs every advantage it can get over your competition, and image optimization for SEO gives you the edge you need. Image SEO makes it easier for search engines to find your images when they crawl your website, which improves both search engine return page (SERP) rankings and traffic to your website. So, let’s get started with this guide to SEO and images.

Choosing the Right Keywords for California SEO

The foundation of any successful digital marketing campaign is keywords; this also stands true for SEO for images. Your keywords should be meticulously researched to align with your target demographic and accurately depict your pictures. You likely have the keywords you need if your business has been researching text-based content. Here are the things that will require keywords:

• Image file names.
• Text for alt-images.
• The text surrounding an image, such as a caption.

More on SEO for Images and Keyword Research

How does keyword research for SEO for images work? It is a mix of research tools and benchmarking your competition to see why their SERP rankings are higher than your company’s. There are two types of keywords you will be researching:

Long-Tail Keywords

Long-tail keywords are phrases rather than single keywords and are to the point. They are invaluable because they can reflect common phrases entered into a search engine. Long-tail keywords combine the keywords you researched to create a phrase such as “Healthy dog food for older German shepherds in California.” You can see the specificity of the keywords, and the phrase is aimed at your target demographic.

You can also use long tail keywords to target a geographic area, such as “Encino German shepherd pet store” or “Healthy dog food in San Jose.”

Short-tail Keywords

As you have probably deduced, short-term keywords consist of only one or two keywords designed to get the attention of a search engine looking for specific keywords, such as “dog food.”

You can use either short- or long-tail keywords in your images. Remember that long-tail keywords will target a niche customer but won’t receive as many searches, so you have to balance both types of keywords.

Keyword Optimized Alt-Text for California

You may be asking- “what is alt-text?” If you are like most people, you are unaware of alt-text and its function. Simply put, alt-text (alternative text) is a short description of an image for those with visual impairments and helps search engines interpret an image. It is best to keep alt-text short, descriptive, and relevant to the overall content of the web page. Because it gives search engines contextual information and helps the disabled, they will reward the site with higher rankings. Another advantage alt-text will provide your business is that only a fraction of websites in California use it.

When describing an image, it is vital to use the right keywords. It is important to describe an image accurately, but you should use keywords that target your niche audience as often as possible.

Image Compression and SEO

How long it takes for a web page to load can hinder your SEO efforts. Not only will search engines penalize your website, but users will only wait for three seconds or less before bouncing. One of the major causes of slow load times is images. So, how do you deal with images that slow your load times? There are a number of tools on the internet that will compress your images and reduce your load times.

Get Social with Your SEO for Your Images

As of January 2023, twenty-five million people in California were using social media, and that number has undoubtedly grown. With such a vast audience to tap into, it behooves your business to research what social media platforms your target audience frequents and what kind of hashtags they use. Posting images on social media is a great way to engage potential customers. When you post a URL on social media, you should use tools like Open Graph and Twitter Card tags to customize how your website’s meta description appears. Another benefit to posting links to your website on social media is that search engines reward websites with multiple links on social media with higher SERP rankings.

SEO California Creative Can Boost Your Company’s Visibility

We are the clear choice if you want SEO experts who can improve your digital marketing in the Golden State. Our experience and highly talented staff will help you reach your target demographic. Don’t fall behind your competitors; get in touch today.