Three myths about image SEO
The gap between knowing this and actually doing it is where most teams lose ground. A few things about image SEO that get repeated more often than they get checked.
Search engines are trying to answer a question, so the pages that answer questions clearly tend to do well. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.
“It only matters for big sites”
Descriptive filenames and alt text both help. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.
“We can deal with it after launch”
Sometimes true, usually expensive. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly.
“Our platform handles it”
Image search sends real traffic in visual industries. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.
What this looks like day to day
Search work compounds slowly, which is why it gets abandoned about two months before it would have paid off. 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
Worth checking on your own setup before it becomes someone else's problem to fix.