What to ask your agency about image SEO

It comes up on almost every project, usually later than it should. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on image SEO, these questions are worth asking early.

Search engines are trying to answer a question, so the pages that answer questions clearly tend to do well. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

Questions worth asking

• Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
• How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
• What happens if it needs changing in a year?
• What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?

What a good answer sounds like

Descriptive filenames and alt text both help. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

Image search sends real traffic in visual industries. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.

In practice

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
• 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

None of this needs a rewrite. Most of it is a morning's work once someone decides to do it.