Image SEO Tips to Appear in Google Search

Published on 28.10.2025 by Chizoba T

Instagram is a visual platform where people share images and videos. With Google now ranking Instagram content on SERPs, optimizing your Instagram posts for search engines is essential. However, when it comes to SEO, most website owners focus on text while ignoring images, even though optimizing images on your site or Instagram is necessary. This article will guide you on how to do that.

What is Image SEO?

Image SEO involves optimizing your Instagram images to enhance their ranking and visibility in search engines. This is achieved by adjusting their sizes, alt texts, and file names to improve their discoverability and increase their visibility on Google Images and the SERPs. With proper planning and leveraging social media competitor analysis, your images can contribute to your SEO goals.

Benefits of Image SEO

Image SEO is essential for several reasons, such as:

  • Higher dwell time. If you have engaging images on your pages, they will capture visitors' attention on your site. They will spend more time consuming your content, thereby improving your dwell time and overall SEO.
  • Higher accessibility. The aim of elements such as alt text (alternative text) is to provide search engines with more information to better understand the content of the images. If the search images cannot render, they will display the alt text. For small screen reader users, alt text helps improve accessibility, which is beneficial for both readers and SEO.
  • Better user experience. Well-optimized images that render seamlessly can significantly enhance the user experience. This is because the likelihood of large images occupying the entire screen and obscuring other elements is minimized. If you have poorly optimized, badly formatted, or bulky photos, these can impact your page’s loading time. They will not only result in a poor user experience but can also negatively affect your ranking. When you optimize your image, you will achieve a higher loading time and enhanced user experience.

Tips for Optimizing Images for SEO

Now that you understand why image SEO is essential, here are the top tips for well-optimized images:

Use the Right Image Formats

Unless your image files are displayed clearly, they will appear blurry and may not be visible to the user. Therefore, use the correct image file type that can be well indexed by Google. Some popular image formats to consider are PNG, JPEG, WebP, BMP, GIF, and SVG. These formats are a good choice for different options: 

  • JPEGs are suitable for images such as blog posts, screenshots, and blogs, where speed is needed.
  • PNG is a good choice for ensuring higher resolution and quality. However, the files are often larger, which can slow down your site. If you can trade in speed for quality, PNG can be a great format.
  • WebP has one of the best compression capabilities compared to the previous two. It's great for optimizing loading speed and reducing bandwidth usage. 
  • SVG is great for elements such as logos and icons, enabling you to scale down the files without losing the resolution.

Ultimately, your chosen format will depend on what you prefer, the image type you use on your site, and the quality and speed you like.

Resize Images 

Bear in mind that the file and image sizes aren't the same. While the image size refers to its width and height in pixels, the file size refers to the amount of space occupied by the file, such as 350 KB. When you choose an image with higher dimensions, this can slow down your page’s loading speed. That means you must also resize the image to the desired display size.

Compress the Images

When you compress your images, they reduce in size, ensuring that they load faster and are more efficient for storing in different formats. The big photos consume more bandwidth, representing the data transfer between your site and the user.

However, image compression can affect the image quality. WebP has an advantage over the other formats, as it can be compressed more than PNG and JPEG without losing quality. A good rule of thumb is to compress files to less than 100KB, unless you are compressing a large file, which can result in a loss of quality.

Make Your Alt Text Descriptive

As noted earlier, the alt text helps Google and other search engines better comprehend the image context, as it's impossible to interpret them visually. That means you must have some descriptive alt text containing all the relevant keywords. By doing so, you can provide context for search engines and ensure that your image is well-aligned with the user's search query. This ensures that the relevance of Google images and SERPs is improved.

Add Relevant File Names and Text

Search engines use image file names to understand the relevance and content of an image to the user's search query. This is why you must ensure that your images have descriptive names rather than default names. 

Bear in mind that you should use short file names for images. Use a hyphen to separate words in your titles, to enable Google to understand them more effectively, then add keywords to the image descriptions and titles to ensure the images appear in the search results. Also, add long-tail keywords to the image descriptions.

Ensure that Your Images are Responsive

Google crawls and indexes images from a mobile browser’s perspective, and ranks them based on their mobile responsiveness, a process known as mobile-first indexing. This is because a significant portion of Google traffic originates from mobile devices. This shows that you cannot ignore the need to optimize your site for mobile devices.

Since mobile devices are usually smaller than desktop screens, ensure that your image has a mobile-responsive design. The browser can display the image in the right size for the devices on which it is being viewed. The good news is that most CMSs now offer responsive templates and themes, so you don't have to struggle with the mobile responsiveness of your site. However, you will need to choose an image file size and compress it as you would for a desktop site. On a CMS like WordPress, you will find many plugins to help you compress and resize images.

In Conclusion

Humans are undoubtedly visual creatures, which explains why images are one of the most popular content formats. An OptiMonster study revealed that content containing images had 94% more views than content without them. That means if you want to engage users and improve your ranking, you should include pictures. This can also be a powerful way of growing your page, especially when combined with engaging Instagram stories.

If your website's images aren't optimized for search engines, this will negatively impact your ranking. Image SEO is essential for a better SEO ranking. If you are just getting started with image SEO, the above tips will prove helpful.