How to Optimize your Images for Local SEO

In this video we explore some more advanced techniques to optimize the images that you may have for your business. There are many different optimizations that can be made, and most agencies will stop after only taking care of a few. When you have a large amount of pictures that you want to display, it can be tedious to do all of these steps, but we have seen the difference that it can make when being combined with your off-page efforts.

Renaming your image files is not the only way to send Google signals using your pics. You would usually want to start with resizing your pictures so that mobile users are not struggling to load your page. Then you can start to rename your images to something that makes more sense than the random characters that were assigned to it originally. Get creative with your keywords usage, and you too can send Google some important signals out there with all of the great pictures you took of your services.

To start off, we recommend using the .jpg format for your image. This is simply because it allows you to be able to edit the properties of the picture, which is what we need to do here. Then you need to pick a good name for your image. Here you can always do some analytical work to pull up popular ways that people are searching for the object in the image. Once you are comfortable with the main key term that you want to use for the image, then you can name it using “-“ to separate each word. For example: “fence-contractor-in-dallas.jpg”

That should do a big difference as far as ranking for that image. The next steps are basically for extra SEO points. Again, not every marketing firm will go the full length to make sure everything is done right. While not everyone goes in these next steps, it can be the difference between the top rank and the second just because other people are also doing the same optimizations. Next you should right click on your image file on your computer, and then click on properties. Once you navigate over to the details tab, you can find a whole lot of additional things that you can add to the META data of your image. In this section you will want to fill out everything, including a 5 star rating too. Take the name that you used for your file, and set that same line of text in the Title, Subject, and Comments of the META data. Then, go into the tags section, and add additional key terms that you want to associate.

Now youre ready to match all of that META data with the settings on your website. Make sure to compress your image if needed, but if you are ready, go ahead and upload the image onto your site. In the description for the image you will find three sections you need to edit: Title, Alt Text, and Description. Make all of these identical to that same title you chose for the file name. Now you are good to go! These steps will make sure that you are properly optimizing even the images for your site. This isn’t always done by other SEO people, so if you notice that your images don’t have any descriptions on them, you may need to start getting to work!