Image SEO: the questions we get asked most

We end up explaining this on discovery calls often enough that it deserved writing down. The questions about image SEO that come up most often on our calls.

Search engines are trying to answer a question, so the pages that answer questions clearly tend to do well. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.

Do we need to care about this?

Descriptive filenames and alt text both help. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

Can it wait until after launch?

Occasionally. More often the post-launch version costs several times the pre-launch one. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions.

How do we know it is working?

Image search sends real traffic in visual industries. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

The short version

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
• Compressed images rank better because pages load faster — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.