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Adding visual elements to your website can make a world of difference for your visitors. Images enhance their viewing experience since they help emphasise certain points you may bring up on your website. For online casinos, adding images to your website can help gain new customers and retain your present ones. However, this can only be so if you do optimise images correctly. Without the proper optimisation techniques, your website may look cluttered with slow loading speeds.
This is where image SEO optimisation comes in. This guide will teach you everything you need to know to properly optimise your images to improve your website’s performance and maximise the use of your images. Learn more about SEO with QWERTYLABS!
Image SEO refers to the practice of optimising your images to make it easier for search engines to interpret your images and overall page. It optimises your website so that there’s a balance between visual appeal and efficiency. This involves properly adding alt texts to your images, having the appropriate file sizes, and more.
Having images on your web page benefits both your website and your visitors. When you have visual aids accompanying the text, visitors can have a better viewing experience. They won’t have to read long blocks of text as they’re broken up by appropriate images relevant to the content.
The website itself can also benefit from using images since it can also be a way to maintain the brand image’s aesthetic, keeping a uniform look across all pages. Optimising your images also affect your SERP rank since images directly affect the traffic you get on your page. Having well-optimised images means happier visitors who will keep coming back to your website.
SEO image optimisation does not require you to pack your website with tons of high-quality images. You only need to adjust your images so they don’t overcrowd and overwork your website. It’s about finding the optimal balance between making your website visually pleasing to your visitors, maintaining the efficiency of your website, and establishing your brand identity through images.
Search engines like Google use algorithms to crawl your website and properly identify all elements on a page. This process involves labelling the texts, objects or people featured in the image. Generally, these algorithms are still heavily reliant on text-based information, therefore humans need to add that element for them in the form of alt texts.
Google has different factors that go into ranking your website on the search results pages, such as off–page SEO and on-page SEO. While the explicit details are kept secret, there are three main categories that you should consider to stay above your competition:
Having visual elements in your website has several advantages, especially when proper image SEO etiquette is practised. It can improve your overall website performance thanks to the organic traffic it will generate, especially when you consider that Google Image searches account for about 22% of all searches.
According to Google’s algorithm, optimising your image can increase the chances of your website ranking higher in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Using images also benefits your visitors and improves the user experience since they enhance or add context to the surrounding text. Otherwise, they would be subjected to reading huge walls of text, which isn’t ideal.
Go in-depth on the impact of image SEO on web design and the importance of casino graphic design below:
Loading speed refers to how fast your website can bring up all of the elements present in its page, including texts and images. Website speed optimisation is an important subsection of SEO development since it’s a huge deciding factor for users to stay on your website or leave for another one. Research suggests that anything longer than a 1-second loading time is enough for your bounce rate to increase.
There are several solutions to make your website work faster, but one of the simplest solutions is to optimise your images so your website won’t have to ‘work harder’ to load it up. To ensure your images are optimised for your site, check if their file format and sizes are appropriate for the page without being low quality.
Ultimately, your efforts to optimise your website are so that your visitors can have a good experience while visiting your website. As mentioned, images can enhance user experience by giving your website some visual interest as they browse your content. It’s a good way to break up long walls of text while adding something of value to your content.
Giving your visitors a good viewing experience urges them to stay longer on your website. Their stay is converted into impressions, which reflect positively on your SERP ranking. Having good impressions tells Google that your website is an authoritative and relevant source of information for your visitors, thus boosting your visibility in the SERPs. This gives you a better chance of appearing on the first page of Google.
Conversion refers to a customer’s end journey on your website, which refers to the desired action you want a visitor on your website to complete. In the case of online casinos, the end goal is for your visitors to create an account and make a first-time deposit (FTD).
Conversion rate refers to the ratio of how many visitors on your site complete that desired action versus those who don’t. It’s a concept related to, but separate from, click-through rates (CTR) which refer to how many people click on your ad or SERP link.
You can’t directly change conversion rates as it’s a decision left to your viewers. But you can influence their choices by constructing a website that caters to their needs. SEO image optimisation is one of those conversion secrets to turning clicks into sales that ups the likelihood of conversions.
A huge amount of traffic stems solely from Google Image searches; almost a quarter of all searches online are from Google Image searches. Typically, Google pushes image results before web results as they produce separate search results. Therefore, having optimised images can help people find your content, generating organic web traffic to your website.
Optimised images also help the search engine correctly identify and categorise your web pages, strengthening its authority over the topic of your content. This will generally result in higher casino rankings in the SERPs.
Since image SEO directly affects your website’s ranking on the search results page, your potential visitors will see this as a mark of your online casino’s credibility. Trust is crucial for any online casino to have between their players if they want to build a strong foundation of loyal customers. Having a high SEO ranking will just be another reason for players to trust your brand.
The online casino industry is competitive, so business owners need to do what they can to stand out. The best image SEO practices can contribute to the stability of your online casino’s brand image. The mark of a successful brand starts with its website design, and image SEO is only one of the many steps towards becoming a top brand among its competitors.
Several tools available online can help you improve your website's performance. For instance, Google’s PageSpeed Insights encourages you to adopt the best practices on how to optimise images for SEO by analysing your website’s performance and providing you with reports on the user experience of your webpage.
SEO for images is not a simple task, as there are several things to consider. However, trust that your efforts will be worthwhile, given how big it impacts the overall success of your online casino. Below is a rudimentary checklist detailing tangible steps you can take to start optimising your images:
Keyword research helps in image optimisation the same way it does in content. Choose images that complement your content and the user experience without drawing too much attention away from your main text. Do keyword research to know which images will enhance your website instead of haphazardly choosing any photo. Then, use these keywords to get images from wherever you source them
Here’s a short guide on image keyword research:
Choosing images can be a daunting task as there can be so many different ways to go about this. The most important thing to consider is establishing a connection between your content and your target audience; make sure that the images you choose to add to your website are appealing and boost site engagement for your online casino.
High-quality images can be acquired for free online, but many are protected by copyright laws so make sure you pick ones that are allowed for public use. You should be aware the use of generic stock images can be a blow to your expertise, authority and trust (E-A-T), standards Google uphold in ranking. Given that, it’s better to create something original so you preserve this.
Different image formats can vary in quality and compatibility, affecting your loading speeds. That’s why choosing the right image formats for your website is also important for image SEO optimisation. Below are some common image formats that websites use when incorporating image files into their content.
JPEGs are the most commonly used image format for SEO optimisation since it produces the best quality photographs that are rich in detail. This is best for images that you want to have crisp quality, like ones that feature people, places or specific objects.
Though not as common because of the slightly lower image definition compared to the JPEG format, you can use PNG images for files that don’t rely too heavily on the quality of the image. This is best for screenshots of apps and websites.
GIFs are ideal if you want to feature a short looping animation on your webpage. It can produce high-quality images with solid colours and distinct line art.
SVG files are a popular vector format that remains clear because it doesn’t pixelate no matter what size you readjust it to. The downside is that SVG files are notorious for their workload on the website, so you must compress them first so they load properly.
Your image size and dimensions should be properly defined in your source code to prevent your users from experiencing the Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). This is when your layout shifts to account for your images. Defining your sizes and dimensions allows the browser to know how much space your image needs, preventing shifts.
This depends on the resolution of your user’s device, but below is a helpful guide for what is generally expected:
| Website Image Type | Image Dimensions (W x H) | Image Aspect Ratio |
| Background Image | 1920 x 1080 pixels | 16:9 |
| Hero Image | 1280 x 720 pixels | 16:9 |
| Website Banner | 250 x 250 pixels | 1:1 |
| Blog Image | 1200 x 630 pixels | 3:2 |
Having custom names which accurately describe your image files is crucial as this helps the search engine better understand what the image is within the context of your content. Default names serve no purpose to search engines as they provide no information whatsoever regarding the image. Taking into account the readability of your images helps improve your ranking in the SERPs.
Knowing how to compress images for website SEO is a vital part of ensuring you reduce loading times without having to sacrifice image quality. Images with huge file sizes will tremendously impact your loading speed, causing it to load more slowly than the rest of your content. It’s not a good look and is a blow to the user’s experience.
Several free tools available online can help you minify and compress your images, but one helpful trick you can use is a technique called ‘lazy loading’. This uses the caching system, which stores data in the browser, and only loads certain files and elements when needed. When the user scrolls down to a part of the page that contains the image, the image appears.
The alt text is metadata that gives additional data regarding the image for the benefit of the search engine. This tells the search engine exactly what the image depicts and its purpose and relevance to the overall context of your webpage. This also helps your users. In case your images fail to render properly, alt texts can describe the image to them. Visually impaired users who make use of screen readers also benefit from alt texts, ensuring accessibility for all.
Indexing is the process search engines go through to find and categorise your website. To help search engines index and find their way around your website, you can set up a sitemap. This is essentially a list of pages a website has within its domain. It also helps with providing the URLs of images that may otherwise not be discovered without adding them to the sitemap.
If you use a CDN to host your images, image sitemaps enforce cross-domain restrictions, according to Google. You can use Google’s Search Console to identify any problems search engine crawlers may find.
Ensuring that your website is responsive on mobile devices gives you a huge upper hand over your competitors, but the difference in screen sizes may pose a challenge for some. Mobile-first SEO can easily be achieved by using the ‘secret’ code to make this a quick and painless procedure.
Social media is a great tool to spread brand awareness, which makes it crucial to add social sharing buttons. You can use open graph tags in your HTML tags to ensure that all necessary elements load correctly whenever someone clicks on your social media links.
Schema markup is some additional annotations that search engines such as Google add to your link on the search results page. Adding the appropriate structure data can help drive more traffic to your page since it adds snippets of information about your website on the SERP.
When you implement these techniques to your website, you increase your site's crawlability, resulting in higher conversion rates. Want to learn more about the best tips on optimising your website? QWERTYLABS has all of the technical SEO expertise you need, from website speed optimisation to the importance of properly marketing your online casino. Check out our services to generate more traffic and help you improve your online casino site.
Image SEO can drastically improve your user experience, thus helping your online casino rank higher in search results pages.
Having a better user experience will incentivise visitors to your website to keep coming back for your casino.
The following are some recommended image optimisation tools you can find online:
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