Five mistakes teams make with image SEO
This is one of those topics that looks small until it costs you something. These are the ones we run into repeatedly when we audit image SEO.
Search work compounds slowly, which is why it gets abandoned about two months before it would have paid off. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.
What to watch for
- Treating it as a launch task rather than an ongoing one
- Assuming someone else already owns it
- Descriptive filenames and alt text both help
- Compressed images rank better because pages load faster
- Never checking whether the fix actually worked
Image search sends real traffic in visual industries. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.
A reasonable first step
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
- Descriptive filenames and alt text both help — 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.