Image SEO’s Holistic Impact on Website Ranking

Let’s talk about images. Even people in the SEO game for a while don’t do image SEO properly, and it affects all aspects of SEO, not just having your images show up on Google images or get recommended by AI. I’m talking about this because I just recently saw an e-com person who’s been doing SEO for the past 5 plus years, and he’s been having a lot of trouble, and he was not doing these things, the thing, these very basic things that I’m going to share with you.

I couldn’t believe it that this person was and it was e-commerce where it’s so important where you have pictures of the products on your site. You want to optimize those images. You want to help Google and AI figure out when to show your images. That’s what image SEO is. But it also contributes to all of your pages ranking better, doing better. So here’s some examples. Think about it in e-commerce. People search for an item. Maybe images are showing up right there in normal search or maybe people are looking at Google images. They see an image from your site, they click it, they get more images from your site. Maybe you have your brand name on the images or people are just going down the rabbit hole of your site. They’re discovering your brand that way. It helps with top of- mind awareness if people are using images and presentations, which is very common with Google images. So now they’re showing your images and presentations.

I’ll give another example of that in a moment. Or just it’s the formational stage. People are trying to learn about an item before buying it. And if it’s low cost and the text on your page is good, they might buy it right there from your site. They’re looking at images or like, “Okay, let me learn more. Here’s an image of it.” Then go into your site. They see multiple images. They read about it. You know what? This isn’t that much and I’m already interested in it. Yeah. And add to cart by now.

The Growing Role of AI in Image Discovery

Another example: I was getting an image to represent something in SEO. It was an image to represent some phenomenon in SEO. I don’t remember what it was, but I do remember I used it. And I do remember that the image that I used was from Hey Tony, friend of the pod, Matt Diamonte, making SEO viral. Matt Diamonte, who has the agency, Hey Tony, very big on social media, and he had an image representing this thing in search engine optimization. I’m like, ah, it’s Matt Diamonte. Yeah, I’ll use it. And I used it in the podcast. And so what does that do? People see, “Hey, Tony.” A lot of people know Matt Diamonte. That enforces his top of- mind awareness or just with AI.

You see images in ChatGPT, especially with search. And you get images all the time. I get images with chat GPT all the time. In fact, I’ve gotten so many images for my social media videos, for Instagram videos, for Tik Tok videos, for YouTube videos just from Chat GPT. It’s very common. You want to optimize for AI, do these things. This is one of the things. Use images and optimize your images. And then actually just optimize your images in the ways that I’m going to describe it adds to the overall quality of your site. It shows that you put thought into your site, effort into your site, that your website is cared about. It indicates that your website is more likely to provide value. And this is similar to the shared hosting experiment.

Image Optimization as a Quality Signal to Search Engines

The shocking truth about shared hosting and SEO rankings. But I’ll just tell you right now because it’s very similar. There was an experiment to see two identical sites using identical pages trying to rank for a madeup keyword. One is on shared hosting. The other has dedicated IPs IP addresses. This is from seoserpa.com/seo-experiments.2 21 SEO experiments. It’s amazing article that I share all the time. The conclusion is in fact by the end of the experiment, the top 10 results for the madeup keyword contained 80% to 90% websites on dedicated IP addresses. The dedicated IP addresses outperformed shared hosting 90% of the time. And then the the post, the SEO experiments post extrapolates and says, “Are you more likely to find a throwaway PBN site on a cheap $10 a month shared hosting account or a premium $200 per month dedicated server? You don’t need to spend $200 a month on a dedicated server, but you get the point. And actually, there was another line that I really like. It’s likely that Google’s algorithms look for patterns amongst low quality sites and free/cheap shared hosting is potentially one of them.

Effective Naming Conventions Enhance SEO and Site Management

Not using alt text or using nonsensical file names, that’s another one of them. A lot of the low quality sites that I see, they don’t use alt text, they don’t use file names, they’re low quality sites, they’re spammy. The high-quality sites that I see, a lot of them are using alt text, they are using good file names. And personally, it’s something that I do. I get great rankings. I believe it’s very, very important. Since I get results, I’m going to continue to do it. All right. So, that’s why it’s important. Here is how to optimize your images. Very easy. Again, so easy, but people aren’t doing this. Drives me crazy. The basics that people don’t do. First, this thing is more minor, but it’s still important. Give a description in your file name and have a naming convention with your file name.

So again, if you’re using your blog, if you’re doing a blog and you call it blog instead of articles, yours would be blog underscore and then the name of the article. So the example is the biggest SEO opportunity may still be ahead of us and that was the name of one of my articles. then another underscore and then the description for the image. So this particular image was SER example under targeted keywords transactional keyword and that was the description that I put in to describe the image that I uploaded.

It was a WEBP those are super lightweight. They’re amazing. You should totally be using WEBP. So the naming convention is the overarching subfolder in this case it’s articles yours might be blog or if you’re doing bottom of funnel SEO you might be doing uses then the name of the page or the post then another underscore and then the description of the image that you are uploading and that is the naming convention and that also covers putting extra detail into the file name do that and then alt text this is what all text is I have a description SEO alt Text is a brief descriptive phrase added to an image’s HTML to improve accessibility and help search engines understand the image content. All the big site builders and page builders and plugins, they all have a field to enter in alt text for an image. Write in some very descriptive alt text for the images that you upload. And actually with the top image, something that sometimes you should do, it’s not always applicable. It can be too spammy if you do it too much, but I will do it. I do it quite often is I will use my target keyword in the first images alt text only if that image is really related to the keyword that I am targeting. But when it comes to your images being recommended with AI and with Google images or Bing images or whatever it also depends on the context of the page. And that’s why it’s really important to have your target keywords, especially purchase intent ones in your page title, URL slug, meta description, H1, and beginning of the first sentence because the context of the page that an images in helps search engines and helps AI understand when to recommend those images. And that’s it. It adds to the overall quality of a site and it creates opportunities for your brand to get discovered. And it’s easy and it’s fast.

I wanted to write this blog too because it took me years to learn naming conventions and to learn how important alt text is. And again, because it’s a very small amount of extra work. I hope all of you will do it next time you put up a page or a post. Use that alt text. Use file names. Super easy. Use naming conventions.

### Highlights 

– 📸 Image SEO significantly impacts overall site rankings, not just image search visibility. 

– 🛒 E-commerce sites especially benefit from optimized product images to boost sales and brand awareness. 

– 🖼️ Using descriptive, keyword-rich file names and alt text improves search engine and AI understanding of images. 

– 🤖 AI tools like ChatGPT increasingly use images, making image SEO essential for AI-driven content discovery. 

– 🌐 High-quality image SEO signals overall site quality, impacting search engine trust and rankings. 

– 🧩 Consistent naming conventions for image files enhance organization and SEO effectiveness. 

– 🚀 Implementing image SEO is quick and easy but often neglected, representing a major SEO opportunity.