How to Optimise Your Website’s Images for Local SEO

Optimising your website for local search gives you a huge advantage over companies who don’t. Optimising website images in particular is extremely important because of changes to search engine algorithms and the huge rise in popularity of mobile technology. It may sound complicated, but optimising your images is a relatively easy process. These are some straightforward ways to optimise your website’s images for local SEO.

Optimise Images File Names

Every image has a name followed by an image extension. An example of this would be an image called ‘image1.jpg’. ‘image1’ is the name of the image and ‘.jpg’ is the extension or format of the image.

However, if you want to optimise the name of the image in this example, you simply change the image’s name from‘image1’ to a name that includes the topic of your website and the location you want to target.

So, if your website sells apartments in London, you could change the name of the image to ‘buy-london-apartments.jpg’ or something similar. You can get even more specific by adding place names in the London area to your other images.

Add Appropriate Alt-Text

Alt Text or Alternative text can be added to describe an image and is understood by search engines. Like image file names, Alt Text can be modified to include words related to the topic of the image and the location you wish to target.

Change Images to Their Correct Size

Large images are often uploaded to websites and then re-scaled to a smaller size when they are displayed on a website. Unfortunately the image in its original size loads and then gets resized which wastes computing resources. It can lead to slow load times. Rather than uploading a larger image, it’s better to load the image in the actual size it will be displayed.

Popular image editing packages like Photoshop and Gimp make it easy to reduce the size of larger images like this. If you don’t have these packages there are many free image optimiser websites that will also do this job for you.

You can also use image compression tools to reduce the space an image takes up on a server. Once again this speeds up local searches. It also keeps the search engines happy. Most CMS and blogging platforms have software add-ons or plugins that compress images without losing image quality.

Add Captions

As well as adding a title and Alt Text descriptions you can also add captions to your images. These captions are snippets of text the website visitor and search engines are able to read. They can be placed above, below or beside an image. Once again you can include local place names in each caption text to get the attention of the search engines and website visitors.

If you contact any leading online marketing company such as Click Intelligence, they will immediately tell you how important images are for websites and online campaigns. However, this simple communication method is overlooked by website owners who want to attract local visitors. Making the changes above will ensure that you don’t make this mistake.