SERP Features Course: Triggering and Optimizing Image Boxes
Script from the lesson The SERP Features Course
Jason Barnard speaking: Image Boxes. What’s the situation? Approximately 25% of Brand SERPs contain Image Boxes and they bring multiple advantages. If the image is a good quality, it brings a big visual plus to your Brand SERP. It’s a lovely opportunity for strong visual branding and a great way to communicate a solid brand message.
Jason Barnard speaking: An image is worth a thousand words. Image Boxes are one of the easiest rich elements to get for your Brand SERP. Brands with a strong video strategy will tend to have Video Boxes rather than Image Boxes. Smaller brands can trigger those Video Boxes using the techniques in the Video Boxes lesson in this course.
Jason Barnard speaking: But if you don’t yet have much video or after watching the Video Box lesson, you realize that your videos are not relevant enough, then Image Boxes are a great shorter term option. They’re easy to trigger and won’t take a long time even for smaller brands. Having images in Google already is a big help, but just to show you how easy this can be, here’s an example of a small local brand that triggered them within a few months of creating the company.
Jason Barnard speaking: So what do you need to do? The overall approach is to see images as an integral part of your content strategy and use quality visuals across all your content and communication. A good place to start is by working on the basis that every page should have an image and often multiple images.
Jason Barnard speaking: For mobile SERPs, that’s now a must as we can see here, but globally, the more visuals Google has to work with the better when you’re aiming to trigger the Image Boxes. Importantly, when looking at images for individual pages, it’s easy to lose sight of the bigger picture, how each image fits into the wider image bank that exists around your brand. Images don’t exist in isolation especially in the context of Image Boxes and on Google image search.
Jason Barnard speaking: Think about how your images look on their own but also when taken in groups and also in the context of your brand image. This is a great example. The brand message is clear and strong. The brand message is consistent. This example is less good. This was Kalicube a year ago. I was thinking image by image, page by page, social media post by social media post.
Jason Barnard speaking: Very piecemeal. I didn’t think about the images as a group and in the wider context of the brand message I wanted to communicate. And that became very obvious when I got the Image Boxes. It’s inconsistent, a bit of a mix, and it doesn’t reflect very well on my brand. And this is a little bit more difficult to correct than you might imagine. In order to get Image Boxes that look really good and reflect well on my brand, I need to start by creating a set of guidelines for me, my team and third-party sites. Those guidelines include a list of colors to use, acceptable type faces, where and when the logo should be included, a mini design bible.
Jason Barnard speaking: Now, think about incorporating your logo into images where doing so is reasonable. Do that either as a watermark or as a small, additional element on the edges. You don’t want to overdo it. You want to keep this direct branding quite subtle. Google will tend not to show images that are overwhelmed by the logo. Unless of course it is the logo. Next step is to make sure your images respect the guidelines you set out, then optimize them on your own site, and then push them out to third party sites and platforms.
Jason Barnard speaking: It’s a lot of work, but by getting this right on all the visuals you published from today onwards, those visuals will rise to the top and drown the old ones. Every time you add images to your pages or onto third-party sites and when you share them on social, always follow the SEO rules I’m going to share.
Jason Barnard speaking: When you send images to other people to add to their content, always encourage them to apply as many of these SEO rules as possible. Here are the 10 rules of image SEO. Rule number one, consistent relevant vocabulary. Make sure that you’ve got the vocabulary that represents your brand, your products, and also that appeals to your audience. Build yourself a lexicon. If you define a lexicon right at the start, then naming the files and writing Alt tags, titles, captions, and text around the images will be quicker, easier, and you’ll be more consistent and stay on focus. And being consistent and staying on focus is key if you want these images to be seen as a group and dominate your SERPs.
Jason Barnard speaking: Rule number two, the file name describes the content of the image, name entities where appropriate. Jason Barnard interviews John Mueller. Don’t make the file names too long, short, sweet, and accurate. That’s what you’re looking for. And you’ll notice I used a subject, a verb, and an object to describe the image. That’s a good thing to do since it communicates more clearly, there’s something like interview John Mueller Jason Barnard.
Jason Barnard speaking: Rule number three, the Alt tag also describes the content of the image. Take the file name as the basis. That’s logical since the file name also describes the content of the image, but here you can push it a bit further. Jason Barnard interviews John Mueller July 2019 for example.
Jason Barnard speaking: The additional information adds some context. In this case, the date is relevant. In other cases, the colors might be, or the scenery or the weather. Use Alt tags to add a little context. It’s helpful to bear in mind what purpose Alt tags actually serve. They’re for screen readers for blind people. Adding the context makes sense for them and to Google too since Google is looking primarily at the HTML and in that sense, it’s also blind. Alt tags are not for keyword stuffing. Remember that Google has the capacity to scan the image and understand what’s in that image. It doesn’t do that for every image every week or every month, but it will scan the image and see what you’re up to sooner or later.
Jason Barnard speaking: Rule number four, add a title. The title will show when the user hovers over the image with their mouse. If the image is clickable, then your title will contain a call to action. Jason Barnard interviews John Mueller, click here to see the video for example. If the image isn’t clickable, then the title will be a description that adds some additional relevant context for the user. This time you can add context that isn’t necessarily visible in the image itself. Jason Barnard interviews John Mueller at Google’s offices Zurich July 2019, that additional information can prove useful to the user and is always helpful to Google.
Jason Barnard speaking: Rule number five, add a caption if it’s appropriate to do so. This can be the same as the title or something different. Another way to add some extra context and an opportunity to be a little bit more creative. Jason Barnard and John Mueller having a laugh discussing life at Google. Not only does that make the image come alive for the user, it adds even more context for Google.
Jason Barnard speaking: Rule number six, use semantic HTML5. Looking here, you can see that the texts I just added all have a direct HTML relationship with the image, the file name and Alt tag are within the image tag, and then the figure tag encapsulates that, and the caption explicitly indicating to Google that all of this information applies to the same thing, the image. Joining all that together and tying it to the image is really neat and tidy and incredibly powerful from an SEO standpoint.
Jason Barnard speaking: Rule number seven, the accompanying text around the image is incredibly important. Google now analyzes the text that surrounds the image to get more context. The words around the image should add lots more contacts. This is where the lexicon in rule number one comes in especially handy.
Jason Barnard speaking: Rule number eight, minimize the file size. Google wants to be able to deliver the images quickly and efficiently. Have a look at tools like tiny PNG to get the file size of the original down to a minimum.
Jason Barnard speaking: Rule number nine, this is something you can’t usually apply on any third party sites, but on your site, make sure you provide as much of the image related meta information in the head section of your page as you can. This data tells browsers and some other machines which image to use from a page.
Jason Barnard speaking: If you explicitly indicate one of your hyper optimized images, that image will get shared and shown around the web, and that will help it rank and show in your Image Boxes. Using WordPress and Yoast, you can easily change the meta data like this.
Jason Barnard speaking: Rule number ten, Schema markup. This is also something you can’t really apply on any third-party sites. Schema markup helps machines understand which content they should use. If you indicate clearly to them that this is the image they should take from the page, they probably will. Here’s an example of primary image of page. You’re telling Google and other machines to use this image to represent this page and Google will tend to see the images you identify as being important, and that will increase the probability that they will appear in your Brand SERP Image Boxes. This Schema markup looks complicated and it is for a non-technical person, but some CMS platforms do this for you. For example, WordPress with Yoast does this using the featured image for a page.
Jason Barnard speaking: So, do all of this optimization on images on your site first. Start with the main images that you want to appear in your Brand SERP. You need to choose at least a dozen since Google won’t necessarily show what you want it to show. Since you have no control over which images appear in your Image Boxes, it’s a really good idea to optimize as many as you can.
Jason Barnard speaking: And that carries the bonus that you’ll appear more in Google image search, which is great for brand awareness especially if you’ve created a recognisable brand identity. Plus, good image SEO will help your pages perform slightly better in the normal SERPs. Now that you’ve optimized the images on your own site, you sent a strong signal to Google which images are important for you, and the next is to send a signal that these images are also seen as important by others. You need to distribute them. Google uses multiple sources for the Image Boxes. It won’t show images only from one site. Google much prefers to pull in images from multiple sources. So, if you don’t distribute your best images to other sites, one or two images in your Image Box will almost certainly always be what others have chosen to publish using your name.
Jason Barnard speaking: Providing quality visuals to third parties is a really good idea. Not only for the image boxes on your Brand SERP, but from a wider perspective. It gives you some level of control over what visuals people publish alongside your brand name, but more than that, if you make people’s life easier by sending well-prepared visuals and make their content look better by providing quality image, that will encourage them to use those images and perhaps cite you too.
Jason Barnard speaking: I know that the idea of pushing images out to other sites is a little strange for SEO, but if you don’t have your images on different sources, Google will almost certainly not give you the Image Boxes. To trigger those boxes and to fill them with visuals that you want to show your audience, you need to push your preferred images out to multiple relevant sites.
Jason Barnard speaking: First place to start is social media. You control your social media accounts and your audience is already there, ready to share. An image that gets social engagement from your audience is an image that Google is likely to perceive as bringing value to your users searching your brand. So, your social accounts are a great way to push images out.
Images on social that get shared, liked, commented on, and generally gain traction with your audience are great candidates for the Image Boxes. This example is YouTube and LinkedIn, but it could also be Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or any other platform that carries images. Offsite image SEO, now we’re going to look at pushing images out to third-party sites.
Jason Barnard speaking: Remember Google wants to include images from third-party sites in the Image Boxes even if those images initially came from you. Help your partners rank their copy of your images. Choose several trusted partners and provide them with the images you want to show in the Image Boxes, then help those partners optimize the visuals by giving them the SEO rules I’ve shared in this video.
Jason Barnard speaking: Provide the necessary Alt tags, titles, and captions. Those are typically things that people are lazy about. Metas and Schema markup are also typically an area where third party sites will fail. They might want to do it and appreciate any help you can
give, but it will probably be a step too far. Helping your partners out like this can also help build a better relationship with them and that could well help you in other areas of your business relationship later.
Jason Barnard speaking: Next, journalists and articles. When you get a bite from your outreach or PR efforts, provide a great visual either from your existing images or by creating one specifically for them. Provide all the necessary Alt tags, titles, and captions and optimize the file size.
Jason Barnard speaking: Next, guest blogging. If you write a guest blog, it goes without saying that you should provide quality images that reflect your brand identity. You can easily optimize the file size, the file name, the Alt tag, the title tag, and the caption. You can also make sure that the content around the image helps clarify the context. You won’t be able to influence the HTML or the Schema, but if the site is relevant, powerful, and popular, those advantages will outweigh the shortcomings.
Jason Barnard speaking: Lastly, other third party sites. You can also push your images out to informational third-party sites such as Wikidata, IMDB, Wikipedia, and Crunchbase. And also, push them out to relevant industry sites and directories. On any platforms that accept additional images, always take that opportunity and also apply as many of the 10 rules of image optimisation as you can even if you can’t apply very many. Images on powerful informational sites and relevant industry sites will tend to rise to the top very quickly. Now that’s quite a lot of on and offsite image SEO to do, but it will help you with your brand identity, improve your visibility on social, improve your image SEO, and get you the Image Boxes that make your Brand SERP really great.
Jason Barnard speaking: Thank you.
