In the world of image SEO, this may appear to be a minor detail, but it is in fact a very important detail. It’s something I find a lot of website designers/developers are guilty of.
As a website (and business) owner, it is important for you to know what small details can affect a website’s SEO adversely.
I’m currently auditing a website in which this exact practice is causing issues.
The client is in the services industry, on a National scale. The problem is that on their pages, there are no images viewable on the page in the content.
When is image SEO, not image SEO?
However, my scan does indeed detect images with the main target keyword.
What’s happened is that the designer has, for some reason, imbued incidental, otherwise useless images with important keyword alt tags.
In this case, it’s the phone icon. Why? Who knows. Laziness? Trying to automatically get an image on each page for some sort of poor SEO strategy?
Now, let’s say we manage to get a page ranking for the chosen keyword. What image do you think Google will show in Google Image Search? How will that be helpful to the client? To ANY client!
And, what image do you think may display in potential social media posts?
A useless phone icon!
So, the take away here is do not apply important keywords to incidental images. Leave them for ones which are purpose driven – eg, a company work van parked outside of a house, or office building, with branding.
As a client, this is of course not your responsibility, but you should be aware that sometimes the small details, overlooked by some website designers, can affect your ranking, and how you appear to potential customers.
