The Ultimate Guide to Image SEO: Optimizing Your Visuals for Search

Written by Miriam Ellis, 21 Dec, 2023.

Image search and visual search are two distinct search methodologies which, in the business context, share the goal of helping organizations be discovered and chosen by potential customers. Image search begins with a searcher typing a text-based query, while visual search begins with a customer uploading or selecting a photo. You can optimize your images and site for both scenarios, improving conversion and transaction rates.

This article will familiarize you with the vital context and technical details surrounding image SEO in both the image and visual search mediums. We will detail the many ways your images show up in search results and provide tips on how to appear in the results of visual search apps like Google Lens, as well as in all of Google’s image-based results.

Investing in image SEO has become central to online marketing. Humans are visually influenced and the machines that control search results know this. As search engines improve their understanding of visual materials available on the web, they become better at showing relevant images to searchers. And, as a result, can provide more opportunities for your target audience to find your assets, and therefore your products and services, by displaying images in the search results.

These statistics tell the major and multi-faceted story of why image SEO is a key part of a fully robust SEO content marketing strategy:

• Images can impact organic rankings.

• A Google survey found that 90% of people are more likely to purchase from businesses that have photos included in their organic or local results.

• 85% of consumers place more importance on visuals than text when shopping for commodities like furniture and clothing.

• Images can occupy up to 36% of screen space in mobile-local Google results.

• Google Images launched in 2001, and within a decade, they revealed they had indexed 10 billion images. Google is very committed to visuals in search.

While about 10% of Google SERPs currently contain elements specifically labeled “images”, the truth is that countless SERP features now include photos and graphics, including website thumbnails, product blocks, featured snippets, carousels and more. Do almost any search and you’ll see images everywhere!

While Search Engine Results Page (SERP) layouts and components are constantly changing, images are increasingly becoming more present in search in a variety of ways that can increase brand awareness, drive traffic to your site and encourage people to visit your business location.

Image search, favicons, SERP thumbnails and image packs are some of the many ways Google is serving images to searchers which can help people select your site from the results. Below we’ll explore 15 key places your images can show up in the Google search results.

Image Search

Google’s incredibly popular image search can be reached via the “Images” tab that appears beneath the Google search box for most searches. Because visibility in these results can bring people to your website and introduce them to your brand, inclusion in image search is fundamental to many SEO and content marketing strategies.

Favicon

The word favicon has a few different meanings. In this case it refers to the tiny icon that displays to the right of some Google results. Google typically pulls these from your homepage if you follow these guidelines, and favicons can help with brand recognition.

SERP thumbnails

Google will attempt to automatically pull a thumbnail image (shown at right of SERPs) from many pages, but you can also take these steps to try to influence the image that appears in this space. These images can really help your entry stand out from the crowd.

Image packs

Image packs are a type of SERP feature that shows up in search results, and often what marketers will think of when exploring image SEO. If someone searches “types of bird feeders” or “semi-aquatic rodents,” they may encounter a “pack” of images that they can click on to interact with. These results tend to match the order of results in Google’s image index, and proper optimization can help your image assets appear here, drawing clicks and traffic.

Multiple images from the same page in a single SERP entry

Looking visually similar to an image pack, these images are pulled from a single page on a site. When looking at a result from Tiffany Lamps, all these images click to the same page that the SERP entry is pointing to. This shows Google’s ability to pull multiple photos from a single page on your site if considered relevant to the searcher.

From sources across the web

Another SERP Feature "From sources," answers a query with a grid list of sites accompanied by thumbnail images. This result seems to be Google providing a way for searchers to hone their query supported by the context of visual cues.

Clicking to expand shows recent stories and a slightly enlarged image.

Similarly, this type of result can have a specific label. For example, a query for “dogs with red fur” gets a featured snippet labeled “red dog breeds.” Inclusion in such results could help searchers discover your site or brand without first knowing it by name.

Image carousels

While non-commercial image carousels no longer seem as prevalent as they once were, these side-scrolling results are still common when they stem from paid advertising. Though this falls outside the scope of organic search optimization, it’s good to know this opportunity exists in some verticals as it may impact on your marketing strategy. Carousels can often be a mix of both static images and videos.

Product blocks

Product blocks stem from Google Shopping results and your inclusion in them depends on creating a Google Merchant Center account so that you can upload your product data feed. This is worthy of attention if you run an ecommerce store.

When clicked on, product block results generate a popup to the right of the screen. This popup contains one or more links to the website that has listed the product and can include both nearby and virtual businesses.

Google Shopping

Reached via the “Shopping” button, Google Shopping results are shown in the navigation below the search box or via a variety of SERP features like product blocks. Inclusion in these image-rich results depends on creating a Google Merchant Center account so that Google knows about your inventory. Both virtual and local brands can participate and, of course, images play a major role in the appeal of your product listings. In fact, if your images don’t meet Google’s quality standards, your product feed may not be accepted until you improve them.. Google’s shopping results also contain paid advertising, which bears the label “sponsored.”

Social photos in SERPs

Google can pull your latest social postings from sites like X (formerly Twitter) and if you’re doing a good job with using images in these, they can create a vivid visual presence in the SERPs.

Top Stories

If your website is journalistic, the Top Stories feature will include both images and videos from your publication. Regarding inclusion in this feature, Google says:

“Publishers are automatically considered for "Top stories" or the News tab of Search. They just need to produce high-quality content and comply with Google News content policies.”

Knowledge panels

Knowledge panels appear on the right of the search results and information comes from Google’s Knowledge Graph.

Knowledge panels can be displayed for large brands, and this includes a logo image, helping with brand recognition. Knowledge panel results can also appear for major places of interest, and a large mixed result of both knowledge panel and Google Business Profile (GBP) features may appear.

Google generates knowledge panels from information around the web, and if an image they’ve pulled for an entity you’re marketing is wrong or your knowledge panel lacks an image, you can go through these steps to suggest edits.

Google Business Profiles

If you’re marketing a brick-and-mortar or service area business that serves customers face-to-face and meets Google’s eligibility guidelines, you can create a Google Business Profile to be featured in Google’s local pack, local finder and Maps results. Uploading images to your profile is one of the most important tasks surrounding these listings. Google will show all your photos (as well as photos uploaded by the public.)

Google can alter the image shown to searchers based on the search intent. For example, look at Yadav Diamonds and Jewelry’s photo in this local pack search for “diamond jewelery san francisco.”

Now, look how the photo changes when we change our query to “engagement rings san francisco.”

It’s considered SEO best practice to upload photos of your store interior, exterior, shelves, staff, and major product lines to fulfil the search intent of many customers, and you can also hire a Google Trusted Photographer for a professional photo shoot. Adhere to the Google Business Profile photo guidelines for images you upload yourself. Don’t forget to upload a business logo and to explore the use of imagery in your Google Updates (formerly known at Google Posts).

A variety of other SERP features

There are many more features in Google’s results that may contain imagery drawn from your content. For example, recipe results almost always include images.

The “Related Searches” snippet may also contain images, as in this query for “what does a monarch butterfly look like?”

Shopping-related features like the “Explore Brands” segment commonly include images.

And "how-to" feature snippet types frequently include images, like this tutorial pulled from an auto mechanic’s website that demonstrates how to inflate tires.

Google Discover

This platform, launched in 2018, falls somewhat outside the SEO conversation because the content users see in their Discover feeds doesn’t result from their queries, but rather, from personalization. Nevertheless, you can learn to drive traffic to website via Google Discover and images play a major role in this. Get to know Google’s Discover image guidelines.

Any effort to document conclusively every single place your images might appear in Google’s ever-changing results and platforms, is a never ending project. Even this introductory look demonstrates how prevalent visuals have become. Desktop and mobile SERPs may differ in appearance, but both experiences are significantly enriched with imagery. Learning to optimize your images for search is the key to being visually present to as many searches as possible across multiple features and displays. But before we move on to image SEO, we need to take a brief look at the related but completely distinct visual SERP scenario.

While image search begins with someone typing in words, visual search begins with an image or photo. Visual search is powered by the capacity of artificial intelligence (AI) to recognize entities within images. Entities, in the context of the search industry, can be loosely defined the same way you define a noun: a person, place, or thing.

You can search by uploading a photo to Google Lens, which also support adding more text to multi-search for further refining your query. You can also search by uploading a photo to Pinterest and explore functions like "shop the look" on Pinterest Lens.

This technology is still in an experimental phase, but two major early adopters have been Google, with Google Lens, and Pinterest, with Pinterest Lens. As the above screenshot shows, both platforms help potential customers discover products that meet their criteria, based on their desired imagery. Joelle Irvine’s MozCon presentation will introduce you to both platforms and help you consider whether inclusion might be the right move for your organization:

As Joelle Irvine mentions in her talk, research during the rise of visual search indicated that younger audiences were quite interested in this technology. Because of this, some major brands have moved beyond hoping to appear as visual research results on a third party platform and have invested in developing or acquiring the tech used to pair visual search with augmented reality (AR) on their own websites. This TechCrunch article from 2018, showcases just such an investment made some years ago by the multi-national home furnishings brand, Ikea, in technology from GrokStyle that lets users upload an image of a household item and plan the decor of a room around it from Ikea’s inventory.

Many large brands in the fashion and decor industries have made similar experiments to help customers visualize styles and designs, but it’s important to make such moves with care. Even Google has had failures with AR products like Google Glass, and unless such applications meet a real consumer need, they may not be worth the investment for brands in many verticals or on finite budgets.

Optimizing for Pinterest Lens

As for third-party visual search, Google stated in early 2023 that Google Lens is now being used 10 billion times per month and the company expresses excitement about its multi-search approach which combines being able to search with both images and text. Meanwhile, Pinterest reported a 140% increase in visual searches being done via Pinterest Lens between February 2017 and February 2018, but no further usage statistics have been widely publicized by the platform since, making actual usage statistics speculative.

Pinterest has its own algorithms and policies and if pursuing visibility via this platform and app is a good match for your organization, sign up for a Pinterest account to make use of these tips to improve your chances of being shown as result to Pinterest Lens users:

• Upload a high-quality logo on your About page that meets Pinterest’s image guideline standards for brands. Note that Canva can be a big help in getting formatting right for different Pinterest visual assets.

• Create your first Pinterest Board, keeping your desired search terms in mind in naming it.

• Follow Pinterest’s tutorial for embedding their Tag code on your site for tracking purposes.

• Choose an extension that allows visitors to pin your images to their accounts. The Save To Pinterest Chrome extensions is a popular choice.

• In creating content for Pinterest, do some of your keyword research directly in their product, as demonstrated by this tutorial from Search Engine Journal and use your keyword findings in optimizing your titles and descriptions.

• Be sure you’re promoting your Pinterest profile on your website and other social accounts to increase engagement and chances of your being featured as a Pinterest Lens result.

Optimizing for Google Lens

Google’s visual search scenario is quite different. When asked how organizations can work towards inclusion in Google Lens/multi-search results, Google’s John Mueller stated:

“From an SEO point of view (there’s) not really something that you would do …manually to make that work…If your images are indexed then we can find your images and we can highlight them to people when they’re searching in this way…If you’re doing everything right, if your content is findable in search, if you have images on your content and those images are relevant, then we can guide people to those images or to your content using multiple ways.”

In other words, the image optimization tips you’ll encounter next in this guide will all be relevant to any goals you have surrounding appearing in the results of Google Lens users, as well as in all of Google’s image-based results.

Now that you’ve seen your wide array of opportunities, it’s time to make the most of the many ways in which you can optimize your image content. Take these 10 steps for image SEO success.

Step 1: Begin with an original image

While there may be some cases in which you are obliged to use an image provided by the manufacturer of a product, in nearly every other instance, you should begin with an original image. Stock photography simply isn’t a good option, and copyright laws mean you can’t use images created by others unless expressly permitted to do so. Be sure your original image looks nice and clear to human eyes…not unfocused, uncentered, or confusing.

Step 2: Compress your image

Uploading large images files to your site will slow down website page load times and that may lessen your ability to rank well for your desired search terms. There are many ways to compress your visuals to decrease loading including:

• Using the “save for web” option in Photoshop

• Using a plugin like Smush if your site is WordPress-based

• Using compression tools like Optimizilla or ImageOptim for Mac or Windows alternatives

• If you are using Canva Pro, adjust the quality settings of your images to reduce their size.

Step 3: Choose the right image file format

Your image and page loading times can also be reduced by using the right file type. Sometimes, it’s necessary for your images to be of the highest possible quality/resolution, but there are other times when a lower resolution is fine and can lighten the heaviness of your pages. Choose from these options:

• If you’re working with an animated image, save it as a GIF.

• If preserving high resolution of your image isn’t a necessity, save it as a JPEG/.jpg, testing it at different compression settings to see what’s an acceptable quality.

• If preserving high image resolution is a must, save it as a PNG.

Learn more about choosing image formats in Google's image optimization guide.

Step 4: Optimize your image file name

Do keyword research to discover how searchers are searching for the subject of your image and use those terms in naming your image file. For example, if you’re illustrating an article about different kinds of bird feeders and you have a section on comparing different types of these products, don’t just name your image that shows five kinds of bird feeders something like “image300.jpg”. Instead, name it “bestbirdfeedercomparison.jpg” or whatever your keyword research has surfaced as popular wording. Your image file names are one of the biggest clues you can give to Google as to the subjects being featured.

Step 5: Learn to use Google’s Cloud Vision API to see how search engines see

Before you make your image live on your site or other assets, check to see if search engines can identify and understand what it contains. Google is getting better every year at being able to parse the contents of images, and you can use the Cloud Vision API to see if Google comprehends your image content. For example, if you run a recipe website and want to showcase a recipe for pancakes, you could upload your image through the API.

Google does recognize this as food, according to their “Objects tab”, so that’s a good start.

And there’s a good chance that they recognize that this image might be illustrating a recipe, according to their “labels” tab. But there’s a concern here that they are 76% convinced this may be an image that is trying to sell cookware. They’re not seeing it as an image of pancakes, per se.

Meanwhile, the safe search tab gives you peace of mind that this image wouldn’t have a hard time ranking because Google believes it might contain unacceptable elements. That’s good, but if you want Google to see this as an image of pancakes, you might need to upload a different image, that clearly displays pancakes.

Now Google is seeing that these are pancakes! So this might be a better image for your article, but the confidence level is still only at 50%. For a really critical image, you might want to keep experimenting with your photo shoot until you reach the 80th or 90th percentile. Your best hack is simply to go to Google’s image search and evaluate what is ranking at the top for your desired term, giving you big clues as to how to style your own images. Here’s what Google thinks really makes the grade as an image of “pancakes”. If you look at this, it’s clear that there’s something about pancakes being stacked that helps Google recognize them, so you might choose to stack up your pancakes instead of overlapping rows of them on a plate.

Sure enough, if we run that top-ranking image through the API, Google is 80% convinced it’s a photo of pancakes.

There are many instances in which the subject of an image can seem perfectly obvious to you, but is less evident to bots. Even slight differences in how an image is shot can make a world of difference to how it's understood, as in this much cited case of whether or not Google was convinced an image was of a dentist. Get familiar with the API to be sure you’re being crystal clear to both people and bots.

Step 6: Optimize the page on which the image will sit

Your page title, meta description, and the text content of the page on which your image lives all help give context to what the image is about. Google states:

“Google extracts information about the subject matter of the image from the content of the page, including captions and image titles. Wherever possible, make sure images are placed near relevant text and on pages that are relevant to the image subject matter.”

If you’re just learning SEO, read the chapter about on-page SEO in Moz’s Beginner’s Guide to SEO to discover all the ways in which you can optimize a web page.

Step 7: Pay maximum attention to optimizing your alt text for accessibility

Alt text not only provides vital clues to Google about the content of your image, but it is also essential to the many visitors to your site with visual impairments and low vision and who will be using screen readers to understand your website pages. Google provides these examples of bad, better, and best alt text.

If you are working directly with the code of your website, your HTML will look like the above example, but if you are using a low-code or codeless CMS system, your solution should have a field for adding alt text every time you upload a new image to your site. Focus both on the language searchers use when searching for images like yours, and on the clarity with which you are describing an image for readers with differing visual abilities. In the US, website accessibility is a legal requirement under the Amercians with Disabilities Act. Know your country’s regulations. For a complete tutorial on best accessibility practices surrounding alt text, read this thorough resource from Moz.

Step 8: Use structured data for images

Get to know Google’s Structured Data Guidelines for adding special markup to your images to make their contents clearer. Google states:

“If you include structured data, Google can display your images in certain rich results, including a prominent badge in Google Images, which give users relevant information about your page and can drive better targeted traffic to your site.”

There are multiple forms of structured data, and you can use Google’s Rich Results tool to see if your data is supporting what Google needs to display your content as a rich result.

Step 9: Create an image sitemap

A sitemap is like the index of a book, referencing (and linking to) all the most important elements and pages of a website. Google says,

“Image sitemaps are a good way of telling Google about other images on your site, especially those that we might not otherwise find (such as images your site reaches with JavaScript code). You can create a separate image sitemap or add image sitemap tags to your existing sitemap; either approach is equally fine for Google.”

To ensure the fullest possible indexing of your image and improve their chances of being returned as a result for searchers, follow Google’s instructions for creating sitemaps.

Step 10: Be willing to experiment with imagery, but know results won’t be quick

If you determine that an image you currently have on a page isn’t doing enough to support the goals you have for that asset (like clicks, sales, time on page, etc.), you can try testing a different image and tracking whether performance improves. However there is one proviso to this scenario of which you should be aware.

In 2022, Search Engine Journal reported on a conversation with Google’s John Mueller in which he stated,

“ …if you change all of the (image) filenames across the website, then it’s going to take a lot of time for Google’s systems to see, “Oh, well, this is a new image, and we have to kind of look at it at some point. And to understand kind of that connection between the old image and the new one, that’s something that’s just going to take a very long time. So if you changed all of them at once, my guess is… I don’t know, over a period of a couple of months at least, it’ll be kind of annoying in image search in that we kind of drop the old ones first because they’re no longer mentioned on the page and pick up the new ones in a really slow way.”

Given this statement, it’s important to realize that you should not expect Google to automatically notice and act on your replacement images. As John says, it could take a couple of months for them to be processed.

Now that you’ve learned the basics of image SEO, take note of a couple pro tips to get you to the next level with your visual assets.

Because Google and other platforms have become increasingly skilled at recognizing entities (people, places and things) within images, this means that the images both you and your audience publish can help your brand increase recognition, trust, and authority. Take these steps to make the most of entity recognition.

1. Develop consistent branding

Choose your branding colors, fonts, and iconography and then stick with it. In the above screenshot from Crystal Carter’s MozCon presentation, Google is not confident that all these images represent the same brand. Don’t be tempted to be “creative” by changing these elements up. Use the same branding across your website, social profiles, Google Merchant Center, structured data, knowledge panel, Google Business Profiles, and on real world signage.

2. Put your branding on everything

Every block of legos bears the Lego logo. Be sure all your physical products and assets display your brand, whether that’s merchandise, swag, menus, plates in restaurants, bathrobes in hotel rooms, company vehicles, uniforms, or reusable bags.The more the public photographs these things, the more knowledge search engines and others platforms will have about your brand and be able to return it with confidence as a result for image and visual search.

3. Be sure your logos aren’t reversed in published images

In the above example, the logo for the website CMS brand, Wix, is reversed, and cannot be understood by Google or other platforms. Don’t upload photos like this to any of your online platforms until you’ve corrected the image to ensure all branding reads left-to-right, either by reversing the image or using software to edit parts of the image.

4. Be strategic with sponsorships

It’s a major missed opportunity if your organization sponsors an event, only to find that the host has placed your branding in such a way that it is obscured, like the above images of speakers blocking the view of the sponsors. Be sure you’re investing in placement like this, that is clear and unobstructed.

5. Identify your selfie hotspot, or create one

If you have a physical business, you may already know what the spot is in which the majority of your customers take photos of themselves for sites like Instagram. If you’re not sure, look at the images being tagged with your business name on Instagram or uploaded by customers to your Google Business Profiles and Yelp listings, or that come up when you search for your brand via Google image search.

Ideally, try to be sure your logo is included in this spot, and upload a photo of the setting to your homepage to aid the recognition of both search engines and people. Avoid logos that read from top to bottom as they are harder for bots to parse. If you don’t yet have a spot like this, consider creating one to encourage the public to photograph your business.

Image search is a practice that has become deeply ingrained in the habits of searchers. Google places a high value on its Images index and is constantly experimenting with different methods of displaying visuals across its organic, local, Discover, Lens, and paid results.

Visual search is still relatively new, and it is too early to determine whether searching via photos will become a routine task in the same way that searching with text has. Multi-search, which combines searching via both photos and text, is also still in an experimental phase.

Organizations like Google and Pinterest’s investment in visual search, showing how important it is to them and their users Many companies in particular industries like fashion and home furnishings are also investing in this technology in hopes of driving sales. Your organization must carefully weigh what role visual search may play in the lives of your audience to determine if or when such an investment makes sense for your brand’s own website, but the good news is that Google representatives like John Mueller have stated that basic image SEO is the only real requirement for your image content being shown in their Google Lens environment.

What is not controversial or undecided is the profound impact images can have in any online scenario. More than 50% of the human brain’s cortex is devoted to processing visual information and, according to 3M research, visual aids improve learning by 400% and humans process visual media 60,000 times faster than text. Images can evoke a wide array of human emotions and help your organization make lasting connections with your audience. By learning image SEO and applying what you’ve learned today, you’ll increase your chances of your most impactful image content being discovered, displayed, and shared across the web.