If you want to boost your eCommerce store's visibility, optimising your product images is a must.Without proper image SEO, your visuals won’t get the recognition they deserve from search engines, and your store’s performance will suffer.
If you’re selling items on an eCommerce store, then images are going to likely close the deal for you, apart from the price (of course).
Image SEO for eCommerce, however, isn’t only about pretty images. This is why we’ve put together a 10-step checklist for you.
- Make Great Images
- Convert To The Right Size & Format
- Compress Each Image
- Give Each Product a Descriptive File Name
- Add Descriptive Alt Tags & Title Tags
- Make Each Image Lazy Load
- Install Browser Caching
- Make An Image Sitemap Generator
- Add Open Graph Meta Tags
- Don't Forget Captions!
Why Is Image Optimisation Important For eCommerce?
Not only will customers be doubtful about buying something they can’t see, but if they can’t find what they’re looking for, they’ll never buy it.
Because of this, you need to ensure proper image SEO. This will help your website rank on Google’s SERPs, Google Image, Knowledge Panels, and more.
Another reason why images have suddenly become so much more important is a feature called Google Lens. This is when you take a picture with the Google app on your phone, and it instantly searches for it in search engine results.
So, for these reasons alone, you need to make sure your product image optimisation is up to scratch. Images are becoming much too important to neglect.
10 eCommerce Image Optimisation Strategies
Let’s now put your eCommerce SEO strategy into overdrive with these 10 image optimisation tips to improve online visibility via imagery.
1. Make Great Images
It seems so obvious, doesn’t it? But if you don’t have a good image, then the rest doesn’t really matter. The image sells the product. Bad image = no sale.
First, you need to decide what kind of image you need. If it’s a product, then you’ll need a photograph. If it’s a blog post, maybe an illustration? Or an infographic? You should ideally stay away from clip art, though.
Images are one area where AI is actually useful. Platforms such as ChatGPT, Midjourney, and Canva make really good images, and you don’t have to worry about copyright problems.
You may still get some with three legs and four noses, though. Just persevere. Plus, you shouldn’t make it too obvious that it’s AI-generated.
For photos, your smartphone camera is likely more than sufficient. The quality of the cameras these days is improving by leaps and bounds.
Needless to say, you should not swipe images from Google Images.
2. Convert To The Right Size & Format
This is extremely important for optimising your eCommerce images.
The right image size and format can make all the difference between a page loading in two seconds and one loading in three seconds. You’d be shocked how many people won’t even wait that extra second.
If you’re selling a product, then you’ll need a large image for close-up examination. But you should have a much smaller version on the product page, preferably no more than 750px in width.
But the file format is all-important here. PNG is a total no-no (unless you need a transparent background). JPG will do in most cases.
But if you want to be really top-drawer with your product image optimisation, make them WebP or AVIF.
3. Compress Each Image
Every image, regardless of size, needs to be compressed. Images these days can be as much as 10MB, which would kill your store in a single swoop.
Image sizes can be dramatically shrunk without any negative effect on the overall quality. But your web server will thank you if it only has to load a 10KB image instead of a 10MB one.
Use TinyPNG (Smush is also a good one) to compress them right down. Select WebP for the best results. AVIF is even better. In the screenshot above, the image was reduced by 98%.
Do this for all images, as it’s considered a category page SEO best practice as well.
4. Give Each Product a Descriptive File Name
SEO is all about finding things. Finding your site. Finding your images. But to find them, Google needs you to describe everything.
If you take a photo with a camera, the file name may come out as IMG001.jpg. Well, that doesn’t tell a search engine that it’s a photo of a trendy leather jacket. It says that the image is IMG001.
So that image is going to disappear into the black hole of the Internet never to be seen again.
But if you renamed it “trendy-black-leather-jacket.jpg”? That’s a whole different ball game.
5. Add Descriptive Alt Tags & Title tags
The next step in adding keywords to your images is to optimise the alt tags and title tags. This is something often overlooked by many site owners.
The alt text for product images is technically for sight-impaired people to hear what the image is about. But it’s also become known as the tag that Google reads to properly rank an image.
An alt tag is supposed to describe the image. But you should also try to sneak a keyword or two in there. For example, “Example of alt text”.
Reference: Example of alt text
A title tag is very similar, except this is what people see on Google Images when they click on your image. Therefore, it is a very important task you shouldn’t overlook.
Reference: Title tag on Google Image Search
6. Make Each Image Lazy Load
Here’s the thing about web pages. They won’t fully load until everything on the page has loaded first. The page may even slightly freeze while this is happening, ruining the customer experience.
This chokes your page speed and your search engine ranking for eCommerce, as well as makes customers run for the exits, increasing your bounce rate.
The solution to this is to enable a feature called Lazy Load. Simply put, an image won’t load until you scroll down the page to its location. Then it will load. By turning on Lazy Load, your page speed will noticeably jump.
If you use WordPress, there are countless free Lazy Load plugins available. Or your site theme may offer it by default.
7. Install Browser Caching
When a website loads, it has to load a lot of stuff. The images for a start. Then, all the rest.
Again, this slows things right down. But what if a lot of stuff on the page hasn’t really changed in weeks or even months?
A browser cache takes a snapshot of your page and stores all the images and other information in the customer’s browser. So if they come back to your store later, everything is already preloaded.
Unless they clear their cache, of course…
A browser cache, though, can be a bit annoying if you make a change and it doesn’t immediately show. In this instance, you would have to flush the cache out to see the changes.
8. Make An Image Sitemap Generator
Since you ideally want to get your images into Google Images, the most efficient way of getting them there is by making an image sitemap generator.
This is the same concept as a sitemap for web pages and blog articles. A sitemap lists all of the images, their links, and their title tags.
Using Yoast SEO will automatically generate one for you. But there are plenty of other sitemap generators out there. Just input your website URL to begin the process.
Reference: Image Sitemap
Once it’s been generated, put it into the root folder of your website, and add it to Google Search Console. This is a major step in the SEO optimisation for your online store.
9. Add Open Graph Meta Tags
Even though social media links won’t rank your images on Google, you obviously can’t overlook the power of Facebook and Instagram to drive traffic your way.
However, having a bad-looking image preview on Facebook, for example, can give your store a bad impression.
The answer is open graph meta tags. If you use WordPress, you can automate this with Yoast SEO. Otherwise, you’ll likely need a developer to help you with it.
The code breaks down to the following:
The ‘og’ is Open Graph, and this code specifies the link to the image you want to show, as well as its measurements and description.
10. Don’t Forget Captions!
As well as title tags and alt tags, another important descriptive piece of information is the caption. This is the line of text underneath an image on a webpage.
Not only does it describe your product to a customer, but it’s yet another piece of metadata that can help Google correctly categorise your images.
Final Word
The 10 steps described here can’t be described as advanced SEO for eCommerce. This is really basic stuff which you need to do on a regular basis.
Yes, it can be very tedious writing 200 alt tags, title tags, and captions. But keep both eyes on the prize – those tags could propel you to the number one search spot for your niche. Need help? We've done this a few thousand times through our ecommerce SEO services.
