Image SEO Checklist for Ecommerce Stores

In the ecommerce world, ranking first in Google search results is like a brick-and-mortar boutique nabbing a location on a ritzy street in Manhattan with infinite foot traffic. The number one search result receives a whopping 27.6% of all clicks and is 10 times more likely to receive a click compared to the 10th spot.

But what if you appear on just the second page? It’s like running a shop in the middle of the desert: Only 0.63% of users click anything on the second page of results. 

In other words, the deck is stacked against you if you even fall out of the top 10 results for any given search term. Search engine optimization (SEO) is therefore critical for driving traffic to your ecommerce site—and one of the more straightforward ways to improve it is by optimizing your website’s images’ search engine visibility.

What is image SEO?

Image SEO is the process of optimizing images on your website so they’re easier for search engines to find. This helps your web pages rank higher in search engine results and drive up your traffic.

You can attack this goal from a host of different vantage points: Use unique and high-quality images, write descriptive and clear image file names, put SEO keywords in the alternative text for your images, and compress and resize images to improve site speed.

“If you take a step back and think about the goal of a search engine, it’s to deliver results that are relevant to a user seeking something,” says Greg Bernhardt, Senior SEO Strategist for Shopify. “To be able to do that, search engines need to understand the website content the best they can—not only text, but also image content.”

For example, shoppers looking for running shoes expect to see multiple high-quality photos that show off the shoes—housed in a cohesive web design. If they see a small, grainy thumbnail image that doesn’t fit the layout well or give them a good idea of the shoe, they’re more likely to bounce.

“A search engine like Google is essentially trying to evaluate the same way that a user would, just translated into machine understanding rather than human understanding,” Greg says. “So you want to show Google that you’re creating a good experience and deserve to be ranked highly. That’s where image SEO comes in.”

ALSO READ: Etsy Product Image Size Guide to Increase Sales

Here are a few best practices for optimized image SEO:

Place quality images on every page 

“One of the top contextual signals Google will be looking for on a product page is a product image,” Greg says. “It’s something the user expects, so if it’s not there, it’s a bad experience and they’ll probably click away. And that hurts your page in search rankings.”

Today’s shoppers expect multiple images of a product. This can include images of an item from several angles, on different backgrounds, and actively in use. Note that search engines like Google rank unique images more highly than stock photos found on multiple sites, so if possible, create something unique rather than simply uploading stock or manufacturer’s pictures. 

That doesn’t necessarily require a pro photo shoot. You might consider taking well-lit pictures on your phone and using artificial intelligence-powered software that can swap out backgrounds and place the product in new contexts.

Use straightforward file names

When saving your images with a file name, remember that a search engine is a machine that needs clear direction. And the file name your computer automatically generates, like “IMG_554509405940.jpg,” doesn’t tell that machine anything. Instead, optimize image file names by writing a simple description that tells Google Images exactly what it’s getting.

“The clearer you can be about what an image depicts, it’s all the better for a search engine—and a file name is one of the clearest, easiest signals you can provide,” Greg says. “If someone’s searching for a photo of a backyard fire pit, Google wants to be as confident as possible that they’re showing optimized images of that. An image called ‘backyard-fire-pit’ is a signal that helps boost the machine’s confidence.”

Use hyphens, not underscores, between words. Google has said underscoring can make the search engine see the text string as a single word. You should also have the extension of your file name—the part at the end, like .jpg—match the file type of your image. Google Search supports a few specific image formats: BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, WebP, SVG, or AVIF. 

Create an image sitemap and use structured data

Structured data and image sitemaps are powerful tools for enhancing image SEO. By providing search engines with clear and organized information about your image files, you can improve their visibility in search results. 

An image sitemap helps search engines discover and index your images efficiently, ensuring that they are included in relevant searches. Structured data is machine-readable code that provides search engines with specific details about your images, such as their content, context, and licensing information. 

These tools help search engines understand the relevance of your images to user queries, leading to higher rankings and increased organic traffic.

Use high-resolution photos

Ensure images are high-resolution, which refers to the clarity and crispness of the picture. The image dimension depends on the aspect ratio of its location on your site, so there’s no exact formula—but experts generally recommend an image width of about 1200 pixels. See here for further guidelines from Shopify.

“Images can appear in many different ways on the search engine result page: a little thumbnail, a larger preview, within a carousel,” Greg says. “So you want high-definition images that look good no matter how Google manipulates them.” 

If you use a too-small image that Google must blow up for a larger preview, it can become distorted and low-resolution—and a low-quality image won’t rank well in results.

Optimize load time with resizing

Since image resolution is so important, why not upload the biggest image size possible? Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. Huge photos often take a long time to load, and that’s a terrible experience for your shopper. That’s why it’s so essential to optimize images.

As a general rule of thumb, image file sizes should be less than 100 kilobytes, and many experts recommend less than 70 kilobytes. Many website-building platforms also have maximum file size limits; Shopify’s max is 20 megabytes. You can resize images using your site-building platform or one of many online image optimization tools like Squoosh or TinyPNG. Maintain image quality when you compress images by saving them in a format like JPG, PNG, or Google’s WebP image format. 

Keep different screen sizes in mind

Optimizing your images for different screen sizes and devices is crucial for a seamless user experience. Use responsive images to ensure that your images load quickly and display correctly on various devices, from smartphones to desktop computers. 

A Google study found that the bounce rate—people leaving your site—increases 32% when a page’s load time extends from one second to just three seconds. A separate month-long study of 100 million page views on business websites found that when a website’s load time is one second, it has a conversion rate about three times higher than a page that loads in five seconds. 

“I see examples of stores uploading these gigantic image sizes for use in a product thumbnail,” Greg says. “The code on the site may resize how the image looks to the user—but it still has to load the gigantic original size, so it’ll be slow.”

Utilize alt text

Alternative, or “alt,” text is a text description of an image that can be read aloud by screen readers— accessibility tools for visually impaired users to navigate the web. Although the average user doesn’t see this piece of image data, Google evaluates the alt tag like regular text—as if it were an on-page image caption.

“A lot of people make the mistake of stuffing a bunch of keywords into the image alt text, but in reality, we’re about 20 years past that,” Greg says.

Limit your image tag to descriptive alt text that’s easy for the search engine to understand, similar to the simplicity of your file names. For example, if your photo is of a funny pink hat on white background, you can just use “fuzzy pink hat on white background” as alt text.