Image SEO for small teams

Teams tend to reach for this after something has already gone wrong. Most advice about image SEO assumes a team that does not exist at your size. Here is the version that does not.

Technical fixes remove obstacles; content earns the position. Both are needed and they are not interchangeable. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.

What to keep

Descriptive filenames and alt text both help. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

What to drop

Process that exists to coordinate ten people is overhead when there are two of you. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens.

How to approach it

Image search sends real traffic in visual industries. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

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
• 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 want a second opinion on how yours is set up, ask.