How much do you need to prioritize image optimization when doing SEO?
Google’s algorithm is, up to this date, still an unknown math formula we are all trying to crack. There is a very small amount of verified information coming from Google itself.
When rich snippets, FAQ and crawl budget algorithms got released, it was more than clear that this formula is even more complex than any of us thought.
Nevertheless, one constant has been relevant from the beginning up to today: PAGE SPEED!
Speed Insights
In 2020, you are left with two choices:
Be Fast or Be Last!
No one has time to wait for your website to load properly. “Damn, I could watch one Friends episode while waiting for this page to load…”, is definitely a comment you want to avoid from your visitors…
Google took this one right from psychology dictionary.
It has been proven that while waiting for a page to load, people tend to experience the same emotions and anxiety as while watching a horror movie.
Cart abandonment, bounce rate, returning visitors rate drop — these are all logical consequences of poor speed and bad user experience.
The best way to check your overall site speed from Google’s point of view is by running it through Google’s PageSpeed Insights test: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
You will get separate results for mobile and web, as well as recommendations on how to fix them.
The speed score is based on the lab data analyzed by Lighthouse.
According to them, the speed that it takes for a page to load is deemed to be the most important factor in the users’ mobile experience.
Performance is critical!
Investing in website speed can and will have a direct impact on your business’ success.
Bottom line is that websites that perform well are the ones that are profitable.
When Pinterest and Tinder improved their site loading speed, they’ve seen a drastic revenue increase in a short period of time.
Tinder even recorder more swipes on their webpage than on their app.
So, now that we’ve agreed that speed matters, where should we start?
Images can slow down the page loading speed for up to 10 or more seconds
Images are one of the main things you can optimize, that can torpedo your ability to make your website fast.
Out of the hundreds of websites, we tested on Google PageSpeed, images were the recurring issue to address first with the biggest impact on site speed.
For example, one of the sites we’ve tested took 19 seconds to fully load on mobile, and 4 on the web. The main improvement recommendations where:
Before focusing on how to fix them, you would definitely need to know why they are slowing down your page speed.
Cloudimage has developed a unique performance audit you can use for free and learn what images to compress and how: https://performance.cloudimage.com
Furthermore, the Cloudimage image optimization experts offer a 30-minute live surgery of your website:
The 2 main reasons why images slow down your website are:
- Images are not optimized for web delivery
- Too many images are loaded simultaneously, thus increasing the overall page loading time
The digital experience you want your visitors to have requires heavy visuals, but without proper optimization, they can break your business.
On the other hand, having fully optimized media assets will rocket your website's traffic and increase your revenue.
Make sure to check out our blog post with the 20 point checklist for boosting your images:
- Incorporate CDN delivery
- Optimize the TTFB
- Use 360-degree product view
- Make sure your images are responsive
- Correctly resize images
- Use the right image format
- Compress images
- Optimize alt attributes
- Caption the pictures clearly
- Take care of your product angles
- Know how to mix colors
- Create emotion fused visuals
- Use product corresponding backgrounds
- Optimize your thumbnails
- Use image sitemap
- Apply chroma subsampling
- Lazy-load non-critical images
- Deploy image spriting
- Start caching image assets
- Preload critical image assets
Image recognition and new image search features
Image search has, recently, become a focus priority topic for a lot of industries. Google released “shoppable ads on image search”, and it seems that more changes around Image Search are still coming.
The E-Commerce industry is the one that is benefiting from this the most, but it is requiring specialized optimization such as:
- adding product schema markups including carefully chosen images
- adding product markup page where schema “product” labels include price, availability, and reviews right within Image Search, etc.
This is another proof that prioritizing image optimization should be a focus priority for visual-based industries when it comes to web performance.
Google, like marketers, understands image search’s potential as an inspirational and visual discovery tool that can be further monetized and leveraged for traffic.
To sum up, visuals matter.
Optimization of visuals brings performance results.
Performance brings traffic and traffic brings revenue.
We will leave you up with the quote from a famous SEO magazine Search Engine Journal:
“With Google’s reverse image search capabilities, Google Lens, and newer AI and machine learning products like Vision AI, it is clear that Google is making strides at understanding what’s within images, both in terms of objects and text, and it would make sense for images to play a larger role for SEO shortly.”
