If you’re like most ecommerce store owners, you may spend a lot of time seeking out ideas for optimizing your store for SEO. After all, more visibility means more traffic – and more sales.

One easy way to optimize your website that doesn’t require a high level of SEO expertise (phew!) is to check and optimize your product photography. Chances are, you might not be using some hidden (and not-so-hidden) features that will give you an edge over competitors who aren’t following best practices.

It’s fast, it’s easy, and it ensures that your product photography is working around the clock to bring visitors to your store – you have no excuses for not doing this!

Product Photography SEO Brings Organic Traffic to Your Site

If your product photography only shows off your products in their best light, then the images are only doing half of their job – the other half being a boost to your website SEO.

This is vital, simply because of the way people embark on a typical shopping journey. According to the Pew Research Center, 91% of people use Google to find information and products they are looking for. Of that number, around 34% will be looking for products – with 51% using their smartphones, according to online marketing experts at HubSpot.

Ecommerce is a growth industry with more stores entering the fray daily; if their stores and product photography are more optimized than yours, you are missing out on traffic and profits.

Gorgeous Product Images Close Sales

The quality and professionalism of your images is the other side of this conversion coin: you need SEO optimized images to bring traffic to your site – but they must look good to convert that traffic, too!

For most ecommerce store owners, this means hiring a professional photographer who can capture every little detail of a product so you can maximize your conversion rate. After all, given the same product and a choice between a store with a blurry, dark image taken on someone’s kitchen table against a gorgeously-shot white background image, who are you going purchase from?

Quick and Easy Product Photography SEO You Can Do Right Now

Optimizing your product photos is mostly done inside your image file’s properties. There are many things you can do here:

– Use your target keyword in your file name
– Add a title text with keywords (visible when you hover over an image)
– Write a 15-word keyworded description in your alt text
– Create a keyword-rich caption

In addition to this, there are some tweaks you can make to boost your overall site’s SEO. These fixes aren’t quite as quick as the above but do help your overall site adhere to best practices – which search engines like Google reward with higher rankings.

– Try to minimize your image file size for fast loading times
– Ensure that your website is mobile responsive
– Optimize your product descriptions with keyworded sales copy
– Use the correct file type, whether that’s JPEG, GIF, or PNG

These tips come from the best image practices as laid out by Google Developers, making them smart optimizations that you can do today.

First Things First – Does Your Store Have Great Product Photos

This is not a comprehensive guide to SEO (hey, we’re photography experts!), but a quick guide that shows you how you can quickly optimize your product photography for ranking. These tweaks should take no longer than a few minutes per photo but have a great impact on your long-term sales prospects.

Don’t forget, however, that it all starts with fantastic product photos in the first place. If your current product images aren’t selling, then you should consider getting high quality, professional photos that do. As it just so happens, that’s Yellow Duck Work’s area of expertise. Contact us today to find out how we can help!

More From Us