Wondering what aspect of SEO you should focus on in 2023?
Various companies are competing to become the new king of search, using voice search, augmented reality, and artificial intelligence.
Whichever horse you bet on, it will be a while before we see the future of SEO.
We should not forget to consider online search in its current state.
I’m sure you’re all familiar with the image search function on Google.
Websites rely heavily on them, yet they are neglected far too often.
If you fix any image-related SEO issues on your website, you’ll be able to compete better with other websites in 2023.
Of course, every aspect of SEO is important. Although keywords and backlinks are important for optimizing your website, users do not pay attention to them.
People only want to see what is happening through your content, pictures are worth a thousand words.
Images will be there to help you whenever you need to learn, find, or purchase something. Images can help you confirm that you have found what you need.
Images are more important for your ranking than you might think because they are closely related to what users are looking for and their experience.
The art of turning your images into click-attracting user traps is a skill that can be learned. By using images that are clickable and attractive to users, you can increase the amount of traffic to your website.
1. Use Unique Images & Images With Context To Get More Clicks
Put yourself in the user’s shoes.
When you search for something on Google and click on the Images tab, you will see a lot of pictures related to your search. They all look the same-ish or outright identical.
Which one do you click on?
If there is little difference between two things, you can choose either one randomly. The website that is different from the others in a batch of identical search results gets lucky. The others do not. The site owner’s perspective is less than ideal in this situation.
2. Find & Fix Broken Images
What’s the worst that can happen to an image? “Image Failed to Display.”
The broken image icon can be annoying for users, even if there is nothing important being shown.
obviously, it’s even worse if you actually need people to see the image. An online store without product photos is a disaster.
3. Optimize Your Images To Speed Up Your Website’s Page Speed
Google favors websites that load quickly, and images can often slow down a website. This can be a big concern for many people.
It is beneficial to keep image sizes on your site to a minimum.
4. Make Your Images Responsive
Let’s talk about image dimensions in more detail.
The best case scenario is that your images are visible on all types of devices. The most realistic scenario is that your images are visible on all types of devices. Although screens come in different sizes, the most popular choices are PCs and phones.
The answer is “color management.” To make sure a picture looks the same everywhere, you need to use color management.
The trick is to make your picture responsive. This will ensure that the text scales to fit any screen size.
5. Optimize Image Names, Alt Text & More With Keywords
I think of keywords first when I hear the term SEO. Perhaps it is just me?
There are a number of ways that keywords can improve the SEO of your images.
You just need to know where to use them.
6. Geotag Your Images For Local SEO Benefits
If you want your store to appear in local search results, make sure you have a Google My Business profile and that your NAP information is correct. If you want search engines to be able to find your images more easily, add geographical metadata to them.
The search engine can identify the location of a place if it is accompanied by coordinates. The relevance of a particular picture to a user’s search request may depend on the user’s interest in the location of the picture.
How To Geotag Your Photos
Most modern smartphones and cameras have a geotagging feature. If you cannot do this task yourself, you may want to use a software or online service. For example, GeoImgr is free and user-friendly.
7. Create An Image Sitemap
Sitemaps help search engines find your site pages quickly. But a separate sitemap just for your images?
Google recommends that you do this, even though it may sound excessive at first. Here’s a quote from Google’s blog:
Unlike regular sitemaps, image sitemaps can contain URLs from other domains.
Image hosting is not a requirement for using this service. Sounds like a dream, right?
8. Use Image Caching To Speed Up Your Site
If you teach someone how to fish, they will be able to feed themselves for their entire life. You can improve your browser’s performance by teaching it to cache images. Cached images will be stored by the browser for as long as needed.
You don’t need to teach browsers anything, but you understand the concept.
Saving images in the cache allows the browser to retrieve them more quickly the next time you visit the website. It’s a real time saver.
9. Mark Up Images With Structured Data To Help Google Understand Your Content
Structured data helps search engines understand the content on a page.
All websites, and especially ecommerce sites, can benefit from this technology. While search results can generally become rich snippets, image search results may get even more additional detail.
10. Make Your Images Shareable
Get an extra publicity boost from social media. You can never have too many of those.
This means that if you want your pages to rank higher in search engine results, you should try to get as many shares as possible.
How To Make Your Images Shareable On Social Media
The most important thing to remember is that users are more likely to share a unique image. If you make a honest effort to create your own visuals, that is a good start.
Now for the technical part.
You usually don’t have to put in a lot of effort to be able to share your images. WordPress already makes hero images shareable. To post the page on social media, just copy and paste its URL.
11. Use Keywords in Headers
When you place keywords in headers, it lets search engines and users know that your content is relevant to the search terms. By including keywords in headers, you can give search engine bots more context about what your page is about.
SEO experts believe that headlines are important, however, they should not be forced to fit if the keywords do not make sense.
Google recommends that you consider the user experience before deciding where to place your target keywords. Keyword stuffing should be avoided at all costs.
12. Focus on Great UX (User Experience)
You have to consider more than just keywords and content to create a good user experience from start to finish.
Google considers many factors when ranking your website, one of which is the amount of time spent on the page (dwell time). If users leave your page quickly after arriving, it tells Google that it is not the content that their users are looking for.
One factor that affects both dwell time and bounce rates is page load time. The average time it takes for a web page to load is 10.3 seconds on desktop and 27.3 seconds on mobile, according to an analysis of over 5 million pages.
The first 5 seconds of a page loading has the biggest impact on user experience and how likely they are to continue using the site. For each second that a page takes to load, conversion rates drop an average of 4.42 percent.
13. Include Multiple Media Types
While there are many things you can do to improve your SERP rankings, some methods are more effective than others. One thing you can do to make your blog stand out is to use multiple media types.
Media encompasses more than just images and can include audio files, videos, ebooks, and GIFs. Media types that are meant to be interacted with will increase the amount of time someone spends on your website, as well as improve their overall experience.
Videos are now the most popular form of content, surpassing blogs, according to Hubspot. More and more businesses are turning to video marketing to help them grow, and it seems to be working. 84 percent of consumers say that watching a brand’s video is what convinced them to buy a product or service.
People are also spending more time listening to audio, on average. Most businesses are increasing their digital audio advertising budget by 61%.
14. Use Internal Links
Google uses the amount of time a person spends on your website as a factor in its ranking algorithms. This metric can give you an idea of how much time people are spending on your site, in total. This metric tells you how long people spend on your website overall. This is another key ranking factor for Google’s algorithm.
The more time a user spends on your website, the more likely they are to advance further into the sales funnel. This text is saying that having high-quality and relevant content on your website is a good way to show search engines that your site is a good one to show up in search results.
The majority of SEO experts agree that every blog post should feature 2-5 internal links, with many spending just as much time on internal linking as they do external linking.
The two key steps to increasing time spent on your site are:
- write engaging, in-depth content
- link to relevant internal content
When you provide links to other content on your website, you encourage users to explore more of your site. The likelihood of them having interactions that are beneficial to SERP rankings is increased when they have meaningful interactions with your content.
Tips for incorporating and leveraging internal links:
- Choose pages with additional content that is relevant to the topic the user found you from.
- Use anchor text that sounds natural and encourages users to click on to the next page.
- Avoid using generic anchor texts such as “click here” or “read more”. More descriptive anchor text helps Google understand how to index your page.
- As a rule of thumb, make sure the most important pages on your website are always three clicks or less away from the first page seen.
Technical/Offpage SEO Tips for 2022
Technical SEO is an important but often overlooked part of creating a successful SEO strategy. There is no indication that Google will be changing this policy in the near future.
Here are some key technical SEO tips to help improve your website’s ranking in 2022.
1. Eliminate Spammy Backlinks
Backlinks were once the hidden treasure of SEO. Backlinks are still an important ranking factor for Google, but the quality of the backlinks is more important than ever.
In 2021, Google updated their algorithm to devalue bad backlinks. The Penguin algorithm update changed the way Google assesses backlinks, resulting in a decrease in rank for many sites.
2. Build Your Brand
Google has been paying more attention to brands since the late 2000s. They are looking for ways to improve the results of each search by weeding out misinformation and providing more trustworthy results. One way they do this is by looking for signals from brands. This makes it a critical ranking factor.
I saw a huge jump in traffic in 2016 thanks to the growth of my brand.
3. Create Thought-Leadership and Strategic Content
After you have high-quality content on your website that is relevant to the keywords you are targeting, it is time to start thinking more carefully about your content strategy. You want to be a site that is not just a source of information, but a site that is considered to be an authoritative source of information. You can do so with thought-leadership and strategic content.
More than half of business decision-makers spend at least one hour per week reading thought leadership content that is relevant to their business. or information. Although 71 percent of people say that less than half of what they read give them valuable insights or information, they continue to read.
4. Diversify Your Backlink Profile
What does it mean to diversify your backlink profile? The more links you have from other websites, the better.
The study found that the majority of web pages (66.31 percent) have no referring domains, while 26.29 percent have only one to three referring domains. This means that less than one in a thousand sites had more than one hundred referring domains. This is quite surprising when you take the time to think about it.
