Before you invest in image SEO
The gap between knowing this and actually doing it is where most teams lose ground. Before you spend anything on image SEO, it is worth confirming a few things are already true.
Search engines are trying to answer a question, so the pages that answer questions clearly tend to do well. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.
Prerequisites
- You can describe the outcome you want in one sentence
- Someone owns it after the work is done
- Descriptive filenames and alt text both help
- You have a way to tell whether it worked
Where it usually goes wrong
Compressed images rank better because pages load faster. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.
Image search sends real traffic in visual industries. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.
In practice
Technical fixes remove obstacles; content earns the position. Both are needed and they are not interchangeable. Three things worth confirming about image SEO before you move on:
- Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
- Image search sends real traffic in visual industries — and you know whether that is true here
- There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped
Worth checking on your own setup before it becomes someone else's problem to fix.