7 Key Benefits for eCommerce Websites to Optimise Product Images for Search
Search engines give a lot of different entry points to websites online for buyers and consumers. Visitors can reach your site through web search, Google Shopping, as well as video search, local maps, image search, results within search engines, also known as the Google Hummingbird update, and more.
So, the method used to reach your website will depend on the searcher. You want to make sure you cover off all the possible entry points available to your website, and optimising your images is one of them.
Key Benefits
Ranking within image results has been known to help online shops achieve the following:
- Drive more sales and conversions through your website
- Increase the click through rate to your website
- Increase the amount of visitors to your website
- Increase brand reach
- Get your images found easily and shared via social media platforms such as Pinterest
- Get more people using your images and providing a link back to your website or a citation
- Get more people to sign up to a blog RRS feed
Optimise Your Product Images
When search engine spiders read your webpages, they crawl down the code and read as much of it as they can understand. Unfortunately Google has no way of knowing what your images are about until you tell them. This is known as image optimisation.
How Does Optimising Images Help?
Optimising all of the content on a website is really important. Especially with the Google Panda, Hummingbird and Penguin updates. Image search not only provides a new entry point into your website, it’s also another way consumers browse to buy.
Optimising an image for a particular keyword, such as “Red Shoes” will help your website’s product image to rank within image search results when the keyword term “Red Shoes” is searched for. This means that anyone clicking on a pair of shoes they like, could potentially reach your website and make a purchase!
Results
For a particular keyword search, Google includes different types of results within universal search results. Depending on the keyword term, Google will show a different set of search results. This means that you may see different results for another variation of your target keyword.
Taking for example “Red Shoes” again as a keyword, image results show a lot lower down than results for the keyword “Red Wedding Shoes”. Therefore optimising a relevant product image for “Red Wedding Shoes” may be a better keyword to optimise your image for as they will be seen above the fold on page one of Google’s search results.
Why not take a look at the keyword you focus on and see what results are returned? There may be opportunities and ways for you to get your website on page one quicker by using new SEO marketing methods.
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