Image SEO without the fluff

Why images matter for SEO

For many small businesses, photos are the strongest proof you have. A landscaper's finished gardens, a salon's colour work, a builder's extensions. They persuade customers far more than words alone.

They also matter for search in three ways:

• Speed. Large images are the most common reason small business pages load slowly.
• Understanding. Search engines use alt text, file names and nearby text to work out what an image shows.
• Discovery. Images can appear in Google Images and in image blocks within ordinary results.

Google's image SEO best practices cover how it finds and understands images.

Use your own photos

Stock photos are easy, but they're on thousands of other sites and prove nothing about you. Customers recognise them. Original photos of your work, premises and team are more convincing and give search engines something unique.

You don't need a professional photographer for everything. A recent phone, good daylight and a steady hand go a long way. Take before and after shots of jobs as a habit, and ask customers' permission before using photos of their homes or faces.

Get the size right

Photos straight from a phone are often several megabytes and several thousand pixels wide. Most web pages display them much smaller.

• Resize to roughly the largest size the image will appear on screen. A full-width hero might need around 1,600 to 2,000 pixels wide. A thumbnail far less.
• Compress with a tool such as Squoosh or your platform's built-in optimisation.
• Use modern formats such as WebP or AVIF where your platform supports them. They're usually much smaller than JPEG at similar quality.

Many website builders resize automatically, but check. Upload a photo, then look at its file size in your browser's developer tools or a speed test.

Write useful alt text

Alt text describes an image for people who can't see it, including screen reader users, and for search engines. Write what the image shows in a short sentence, with context that matters.

• Weak: "image1", "garden", "landscaping Bristol landscaper Bristol"
• Better: "Porcelain patio with raised oak sleeper beds in a terraced garden in Bishopston"

Skip alt text for purely decorative images, such as background patterns. Use an empty alt attribute so screen readers ignore them.

Name files sensibly

"IMG_4382.jpg" tells nobody anything. "oak-framed-garden-room-bath.jpg" gives a small extra clue. It's a minor signal, so don't worry about renaming thousands of old files. Just get into the habit for new uploads.

Put images near relevant text

Google uses the surrounding text, headings and captions to understand images. A photo of a kitchen extension sitting next to a paragraph about that project is easier to understand than the same photo in a random gallery with no text.

Captions are read more than body text on many pages. Use them to add a useful detail: where the job was, what was done, how long it took.

Lazy loading, carefully

Lazy loading delays images until they're about to scroll into view. It saves data and speeds up long pages. But don't lazy-load the main image at the top of the page, because it delays the first thing people see and can hurt your Largest Contentful Paint score. Our Core Web Vitals guide explains why.

Set dimensions

Give every image a width and height in the code, or use CSS that reserves space. This stops the page jumping as images load, which improves layout stability.

Galleries and portfolios

Portfolios are common for trades, photographers and designers, but they're often built as image-only pages with no text. Search engines see little to work with.

Better: create a short project page for your best jobs. Include a few photos, a paragraph on the brief, what you did, materials used and where it was. These pages can appear for specific searches like "loft conversion with dormer Cheltenham" and give customers a real sense of your work.

Image sitemaps and Google Images

Most small sites don't need a separate image sitemap. Google finds images through ordinary crawling if they're in the page code. If you rely on images loaded by JavaScript, check with the URL Inspection tool in Search Console that Google can see them.

If you sell products, clear product photos on a plain background, plus lifestyle shots, can help in Google Images and Shopping results.

A worked example

A kitchen fitter in Chester had a gallery page with forty photos, each around 5MB, named with camera numbers and no alt text. The page took ages to load on mobile, and none of the images appeared in search.

He picked his eight best projects and created a page for each. Photos were resized and converted to WebP. Each had alt text describing the kitchen style, worktop material and room layout. Each project page had a short write-up and a link to the relevant service page. The gallery became a set of thumbnails linking to those project pages.

The site got faster, and customers started mentioning specific projects when they called.

Mistakes to avoid

• Uploading full-size camera images.
• Text inside images instead of real text. Search engines and screen readers can't read it reliably, and it won't resize on phones.
• Stuffing keywords into alt text.
• Using the same alt text on every image.
• Publishing photos of customers' homes or faces without permission.

Quick checklist for every upload

1. Is it your own photo, or properly licensed? 2. Is it resized and compressed? 3. Does the file name describe it? 4. Does it have useful alt text, or empty alt if decorative? 5. Is it near text that explains it? 6. Is the hero image loaded straight away rather than lazily?