Image SEO: what to get right first

It comes up on almost every project, usually later than it should. If you only fix one thing about image SEO this quarter, make it the first item below.

Search engines are trying to answer a question, so the pages that answer questions clearly tend to do well. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

Start here

Descriptive filenames and alt text both help. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

Then this

Compressed images rank better because pages load faster. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

Eventually

Image search sends real traffic in visual industries. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

What this looks like day to day

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

Most of the value here comes from doing the first two things, not all of them.