Images are usually the heaviest thing on a page and the least looked after. Getting them right makes pages load faster, stops the layout jumping around while someone is trying to read, and gives search engines and screen readers a description of what’s actually in the picture.
Images are the heaviest thing on most pages and the least looked after. Six files usually matter more than eight hundred alt tags.
What image SEO means
Image SEO covers two separate jobs that often get merged. The first is performance: file sizes, formats, dimensions and loading order, all of which affect how quickly a page becomes usable. The second is meaning: alt text, filenames and context, which is how search engines and screen readers understand what an image shows.
They need different fixes and they have different urgency. On most sites only one of them is actually costing you anything today.
Who it’s for
This suits any site where pictures do real work:
- online shops with large product catalogues
- beauty, jewellery, food and interiors, where the photography is the product
- sites that feel slow on a phone and nobody knows why
- anyone who has been told their Core Web Vitals are poor
The problems it usually solves
Enormous hero images. A 1.4MB photograph displayed at 720 pixels wide, served at 2400. One file, and it’s the thing every visitor waits for.
No alt text on an image-led site. On one project I reviewed a site with 128 images and not one alt attribute, where the photography was easily the strongest thing it had. Search engines got nothing from the most persuasive part of the page.
Lazy loading applied to everything. Including the hero, which makes the page feel slower rather than faster, because the first thing a visitor looks at is now loading last.
The page jumps as it loads. No width and height set, so the text moves down the screen as each image arrives. It’s measurable, it’s irritating, and it’s usually a template fix rather than an image one.
Filenames that break things. Brackets in an image filename break markdown image syntax, which matters wherever content is written or migrated in markdown. It survives a migration quietly and shows up later as missing pictures.
What’s included
- A full image audit across the site, ranked by what each file is actually costing
- Resizing and compression recommendations, with the point where quality starts to suffer identified rather than guessed
- Format advice, including where modern formats help most and where the platform limits you
- A loading plan: what should be lazy loaded, what shouldn’t, and what should be preloaded
- Layout shift fixes, usually width and height attributes at template level
- An alt text plan, with the pages that matter prioritised
- Implementation or a developer-ready brief, whichever suits
What you get
- The specific files costing you the most, with what to do to each
- Template-level fixes so new images don’t reintroduce the problem
- An alt text standard your team can apply to future uploads
- Before and after measurements on the pages worked on
The order I’d fix them in
Not by count. A site with 800 images missing alt text and six enormous heroes should fix the six first, because they’re what a visitor waits for.
Alt text still matters and on image-led sites it matters a great deal, but it’s a content job that can run steadily alongside everything else. The file size work is a one-off with an immediate effect, so it goes first.
Limitations
Compression is a judgement, not a setting. There’s a point where a smaller file looks worse, and for jewellery, fabric or food photography that point arrives early. On those sites the honest answer is a smaller saving than a generic tool would recommend.
Alt text also needs a person. It can be flagged automatically and shouldn’t be written automatically, because a confident description of the wrong thing is worse than none at all.
What this won’t solve
Faster images won’t fix a slow server, heavy scripts or a render-blocking theme, which are usually the other half of a speed problem. That’s site speed and Core Web Vitals work.
Talk to the person doing the work
There is no account manager here and no team to be handed to. If you get in touch, it is me who reads it, me who looks at your site, and me who does the work if we go ahead.
Get in touch, or start with a free assessment.
Engagement and price
There are no list prices here, and that is deliberate. What a piece of work costs depends on the state of the site, how much of it there is and what you actually need, none of which I know before looking at it.
So it starts with a free analysis. I look at your site, your Search Console and who you are really competing with, then come back with what I would do first and what it would cost to do. No obligation attached, and if the honest answer is that you do not need me yet, I will say so.
How the work gets done
The audit runs through the image audit tool, with page-level context from page analysis and field data from the technical SEO checks. This service sits under SEO, and for shops it pairs with product and category page copy.
FAQ
Does image SEO actually affect rankings?
Indirectly, and significantly. Image weight and loading behaviour affect how quickly a page becomes usable and how stable it is while loading, both of which are measured. Alt text gives search engines their only real description of what an image shows.
Should every image have alt text?
Every image carrying meaning should. Purely decorative images can have an empty alt attribute, which tells screen readers to skip them. Filling the attribute with a filename or a list of keywords is worse than leaving it empty, because it describes nothing to anyone.
What’s the single quickest image win?
Resizing and compressing the largest images on the pages people actually land on, which is usually the hero. On most sites a handful of files account for most of the page weight, so fixing those does more than working through hundreds of small ones.
Will compressing images make my products look worse?
It can if it’s overdone, and on jewellery, fabric or food photography that happens sooner than a generic tool assumes. The work involves finding where quality starts to suffer for your specific images rather than applying one compression setting across everything.
Get your images looked at
Get in touch, or start with a free assessment, which includes an image check.