You have professionals working for you, cracking Google’s search algorithms; you have the best in the market SEO optimizer and you are also spending bucks on content marketing, always choosing the right keywords for your WooCommerce website but still you are not able to increase your Google ranking.

The thing you are missing is optimizing your images. Image optimization can be a boon for your website, if your WooCommerce development company has enough knowledge to implement at the first time. It could be the most complex piece of the puzzle that you were not looking at till now. This article would give insights into how you can improve your Google ranking with the help of image optimization.

What is image optimization?

Image optimization is a technique which renders images in perfect size, proper file format, aptly captioned to display on a website. It is an amalgamation of technology as well as art. An artistic mind is needed to judge the right proportion and size and technical knowledge is needed to apply file extension and to choose the quality of the image to attract maximum traffic to your website.

There are many tools available for image optimization and can be really helpful in the process. Our favorite for shrinking file sizes, increasing PageSpeed scores and speeding up your website is WP Compress. The image is optimized according to the website quality and the bandwidth it will consume. While coming to basic SEO for a website, image optimization will be one among them. Image search are still popular among people to search and shop a product from online.

Why is it important?

In today’s digital world, visual content is more of an attention seeker than the written content. Images are handy, easy to look at and can be more informative at times. For those who are running an WooCommerce website, images are of utmost importance and can be a deciding factor while looking for profits. Customers want to buy the right product and product images available on the website are the closest they can get to see if they are choosing the desired product. Some of the benefits of image optimization are:

Reduce the load time

Heavy images can be a reason website taking more time to load. According to Amazon.com, every 100ms of page load time results in 1% decrease in sales. Faster loading time can actively affect the number of clicks on the website and thus, can be a crucial factor to keep in mind while working towards the conversions. Users don’t wait for an image to load, they move over to the next link.

Under what is considered Google ranks, ‘page speed’ is a parameter and Google provides features like Page speed insights to check your speed score. If your website scores 60, you have everything going above the mark and if your speed score is below 60 then you need to divert your attention towards the size of images used on your website.

Image Searches

For an WooCommerce business, it becomes extremely important to optimize the images of your products. Google image search results into generating huge traffic on the website. The thing, here, is that Google’s search algorithms don’t see images as they are but in the digital world out there, there is a number for everything. It is important that Google indexes your images correctly so that when a user searches for a product it lands on your image and your website.

Better Ranking

It is noticed that websites doing basic or simple SEO rank good, but the websites where content and images are optimized along with basic SEO will boost up the SEO score. It is advisable to use square shaped images for your products or image shapes, which have length and width in proportion.

Tips & Techniques

Image optimization hacks, if done professionally, can considerably increase traffic inflow. There are some tips and techniques that are helpful in optimizing the images:

Choosing the correct filename

Correctly naming the image file is the foremost crucial step in image optimization. Whenever someone searches for a product online, he types the product name first. So, if you have product’s image file name as the product name then your image will be indexed by the Google and will be ranked better. Always use relevant keywords for the file name. Image file name should be similar to the product and should be keyword centric. Avoid phrases like ‘An’, ‘The’ and ‘And’. Try to use the hyphen (-) or underscores (_) between different words in the filename. Filenames should not be lengthy and words used should be significant.

Image file type

It is equally important to choose the right type of file while saving images. The quality of the image depends upon the file type. Use common image types like “.jpg”, “.png” for images or “.gif” for clips. For simple images or logos, use “.png” because this format is best suited for images having fewer colors and a transparent background. “.JPEG” can also be used for images to keep the file size lesser and to maintain the image quality. A file type can also be converted into another file type by using ample of SEO tools for image optimization available online, including the Converter for Media plugin.

Alt tag text

In case an image does not load due to the poor connection, some text within a broken link is displayed in the place where is image is used. The text placed in image html tag is alt tag for images and is placed during the website designing. It is important to use relevant text in the alt tag because Google’s crawlers use this text to index the image. Even if the image is not displayed, the user can still look at the alt text and is able to see what the image was about.

A customer on any WooCommerce website relies on the given image of the product and he or she takes a decision, whether to buy the product or not, after seeing relevant images. Hence, it is easy to say that a larger portion of the sale depends upon the images of the products featured on the website. In order to display the image properly, image optimization is a necessity for WooCommerce website owners. One can observe that effective techniques can change the number of hits on the website and the amount of profits garnered through it.