Google Image Ranking Factors To Be Aware Of

What is the value of ranking on Google Images?

When it comes to optimizing content, people often end up focusing almost exclusively on their text-based content. In reality, ranking highly for images that you use throughout your site can also help to increase your traffic rates and the popularity of your brand.

When people click through from the Google Images, they are spreading your brand reach and reputation. They help to enhance the performance metrics of your site, which in turn can boost your rankings in the regular SERPs.

Leverage Data Cube To Find How You Rank For Images

How are Google Images selected?

Google wants to show the user unique images that align with their query. This means that Google Images will not be displaying stock photos and will want to avoid showing the same picture more than once, even if it appears on different sites.

For the same reason that duplicate content hurts the user experience on the standard SERPs, having multiple copies of the same picture will similarly be negative for Google.

Google will look at the content of the page where the picture appears as well as the picture itself in an effort to understand what the picture contains and how well it relates to different queries.

Remember that Google’s spiders cannot actually ‘see’ images themselves, so they rely on tags and markups to understand the image and know where it belongs in the Google Images.

How do I get my picture on top of Google Images?

To ensure optimal performance in Google Images, you will want to keep the following guidelines in mind:

1. Find a balance between maximizing the aesthetic quality of the image and maintaining a fast load time to optimize for Google. Google wants to focus on high-quality images, but those that load slowly will also be ranked poorly because of the poor user experience.
2. Make sure the images you want to rank for are completely unique. As previously mentioned, Google does not want to display duplicates. Images of your products at work, your customers, your services, or any other photo taken by the brand itself are the optimal images to choose.
3. Use a comprehensive labels on the image for it to appear in images. Google spiders will be crawling as many details as they can to learn about your image. This means using alt tags, title tags, and image names. When possible use your targeted keyword and explain how the image ties into the topic.
4. Use schema markups to draw attention to the image. This will make you eligible for any rich snippet options while also helping the search engine understand the image so it can be displayed at the proper times.
5. Track your progress using the BrightEdge Page Reporter and Google Webmaster Tools. With the webmaster tools, you can look at search analytics and filter by image searches to see your success within this exact category.

Ranking highly for images on image search can be a valuable means of drawing traffic to your page and giving your page a boost. Keep these guidelines in mind as you add your images as see how visuals can work for you.