According to Google, images are beyond critical for SEO, overall user experience, website “stickiness,” and retaining visitors in a world where the average online attention span is a mere eight seconds.

Seems obvious, but you’d be surprised how effective image optimization can be for SEO. Especially when you consider close to 90% of data the brain transmits is visual.

Don’t believe us? Here’s a thought experiment for you: try recalling the latest eCommerce site you visited. What jumps to mind? Product description and specs or the look and feel of the site as a whole (lifestyle and studio product photography, macro imagery, etcetera)? Makes sense, right?

Well, this is by no means an accident but rather purposeful. And behind all these crisp, colorful, and high-resolution images is SEO optimization—playing a pivotal role in driving qualified users—like yourself—to the site.

Why Does SEO Image Optimization Matter?

While you may already know the answer to this question, it’s important to understand why and how image optimization affects not only SEO, but also overall site health. Large and unruly images served across all devices without the help of a CDN (Content Delivery Network) can severely impede user experience, time on site, conversions, and ultimately site rankings in the SERPS.

Pro tip: With Google Pagespeed Insights, you can see which opportunities are available to improve your site’s speed, with image optimization being a major component.

All that said, we found it prudent to outline some best practices for SEO image optimization across your site to help mitigate any unforeseen challenges due to slow loading times, the inability of crawlers to index site content appropriately, and poor UX for your visitors.

Image Optimization Best Practices for SEO

Choose the best format

By now it’s safe to assume we’re all somewhat familiar with basic image formats across the web. We’re talking your standard GIF, PNG, and JPEG images found ubiquitously upon sites of all sizes and denominations (For the sake of space and clarity we’ll keep things as simple as possible with these three formats. However, we are aware of the versatility and applicability surrounding JPEG XR and WebP image formats as well).

That said, the selection of a format should be determined by the image’s intended function.

Is animation needed to boost engagement and convey a specific message? Go with the GIF.

Is the highest image quality necessary? PNG might be the best bet.

JPEGs, then, are typically the preferred format for preserving most of the image detail while simultaneously reducing file size—ideal for site speed and load times.

No matter what format you decide upon, it’s important to optimize the size of each image to reduce site lagging. There’s a handful of third-party tools available to accomplish this such as exgif, optipng, and pngquant.

Resize your images appropriately

When developing the front-end of your site, ensuring a maximum width for each image load is key to preventing an oversized image from slowing down the site load time.

Put simply, imagine a hero image that’s 5000px wide, yet your site width doesn’t exceed 1200px.

The image will still be served within the constraints of the site. However, loading all 5000px will significantly slow the site down.

The solution? Resize and upload the images within the maximum width you need. And if you aren’t sure what that is, have your designer dig into the CSS to find out.

The only caveat here is to take extra care in resizing these images if you’re using a responsive design. So be sure to check with your front-end designer to ensure whatever max width you’re resizing to falls in line with the responsive nature of the site.

Name your images appropriately

Ask any web designer or content manager and they’ll relay the importance of naming conventions for images across the site. Not only does this keep everything organized on the backend but—more importantly—Google uses filenames to index the image subject matter.

For example, space-gray-macbook-pro.jpg is much easier to crawl and index than img000456.jpg.

What’s also pertinent here are descriptive alt texts for each image.

As a refresher, alt text (i.e. alternative text) serves as an image descriptor (what the browser displays to users with screen readers, and when the image cannot load properly).

Additionally, captions provide useful information to Google for indexing purposes, so it only makes sense to include as much straightforward information as possible to help enhance visibility.

Manage the file size of each image

As previously stated, JPG, PNG, and GIFs make up the “big three” image formats outlined on the web. They all feature a different compression method.

Why does this matter?

It matters because the compressed file size of each image can differ greatly from one another—which can have a direct impact on site speed and load times. In fact, Google has confirmed that site speed plays a crucial role in SERP rankings for both desktop and mobile.

So, it behooves you as an SEO, site owner, or content manager to opt for the smallest image file size possible while maintaining the greatest quality (the JPEG format often works best).

 For Mac users, imageoptim is a fantastic free tool for optimizing image sizes.

Create an image sitemap

Unless you’re using WordPress and Yoast SEO, odds are your images aren’t automatically added to your sitemap—a crucial step in providing Google additional details about your images they might not have otherwise captured by crawling the site.

More importantly, image sitemaps, unlike standard sitemaps, can contain URLs from other domains. This allows webmasters to use CDNs to host images, which allows for quicker image load time. It also enables Google Search Console to report any crawl errors found on the site once the CDN’s domain name is verified.

Make your images responsive for mobile

With a sizable, if not majority, of web traffic stemming from mobile, a slow site can be detrimental to respective rankings.

The key to mitigating any pains stemming from a slow site speed comes in the form of responsive image loading for mobile. Meaning, if you have a 1000px-wide image on your site but the mobile display is only 350px-wide, loading that extra 650px will waste bandwidth and prevent the page from loading quickly—which is not good for SEO.

Luckily, there’s one snippet of HTML code that solves the issue: srcset. Here, this piece of code prompts the browser to load different image sizes for different display resolutions. So, with that 1000px-wide image, you can include different size options in the syntax so the rightfully-sized image is served on the respective display based on a specific device and screen size.

Some CMS’s (e.g. WordPress) automatically generate this code for the convenience of the user and offer a plugin to optimize images for retina displays when necessary.

We’ve only begun to scratch the surface of what comprehensive SEO image optimization can entail. Google and a variety of third party websites offer additional information on schema markup for images, the merits of using a CDN to enhance site load times, leveraging browser caching to reduce load times for sites with plentiful images, and even opting for “lazy loading”, where images are served only when they’re prompted to be shown on screen.

Needless to say, there are a myriad of tips and tricks out there to help optimize your image SEO and therefore your site experience, relevancy, and overall content, so research wisely.

Even great relationships experience growing pains or occasional miscommunication. What makes a relationship perfect is when both parties work together to move past it.

Like any other relationship, it almost seems cliché for digital marketing agencies and clients to get frustrated with each other.

“[An agency-client partnership] is actually the hardest relationship… It’s like a real marriage. Not every day is great, but every day you make a conscious choice to stay together in the name of great work.” -Anselmo Ramos

Moving past this frustration isn’t always easy. Between an agency and client, a roadblock can happen because of a very specific type of communication breakdown: is this a service relationship, or a partnership?

What is a “service relationship”?

Like a gardener, janitor, or call center representative, an agency in a service relationship is expecting to do the job and be done. The agency performs better once they understand the client’s business, but following a rigid set of guidelines leaves them without room to leverage individual expertise.

These relationships are a hallmark of fundamentally replaceable contractors.

• If you get a different person every time you call your agency, or if your POC has to read up on your file during the call, you’re probably in a service relationship whether you like it or not.

• If you expect your agency to perform starting Month 1, and if you aren’t comfortable showing them key documents or discussing future initiatives, you’re asking for a service relationship.

What is a “partnership”?

Partners work together for mutual continuous growth and benefits. By working together with open communication, partnerships foster personal relationships and understanding to develop better solutions.

Partnerships aren’t fast or cheap, which makes them more valuable. They take time to form and require patience during the process.

• If your agency contacts pay attention to your industry knowledge and incorporate the best insights into their strategy, or if they’ve taken the time to study and understand how your business works, you might be in a partnership.

• If you walk your agency contacts through your key selling points, and recognize that even low-performing experiments give useful data, then you may be in a partnership.

Why would anybody want a service relationship?

Some agencies are built around having many service relationships. They can be well-suited to companies with small budgets and niche products that don’t face high levels of competition.

At first, a service relationship may sound ideal to a prospective client. After all, if an agency doesn’t perform quickly, it’s easy to move to another.

The problem is that these only work for a narrow subset of agency-client relationships. In most cases, hopping between agencies quickly just means you aren’t giving any of them a chance to perform.

More realistically, most companies looking to hire an agency have a large bottom line, a complex funnel, or plans for future growth. Taking advantage of any of these takes more than a few hours per month of an agency’s time, and more than a month to be fully realized.

Planning a successful SEO or paid media strategy takes not only time, but a clear understanding of competitors, current opportunities, and the offering itself.

When a client looks for a service, or settles for an agency that wants to provide a service, they won’t get the partnership that enables both to succeed.

The only way to make sure proper expectations are set early is for both sides to be on the same page about forming a partnership.

How to tell the difference during a pitch

Clients care about track record, and agencies know it. That’s why good pitches point out if an agency is in the top 1% of performance, has Google All-Star status, or has unique competitive advantages such as TitanBOT.

However, pitches rarely include detailed information on what kind of relationship the agency expects. Instead, prospective clients need to read through the lines and pay attention to what the agency highlights.

Low costs? Likely a service.

Excessive focus on secondary metrics like CPC & CPM over ROI, CPA or profit? Likely a service.

Cookie-cutter pitch? Look forward to the same with your accounts.

Long-term relationships with clients? Partnership.

Transparency on average client growth, with pack-leading improvement? Partnership.

People-focused culture? Good agencies see both their people and their clients as valued partners.

Building a partnership with your digital marketing agency

All working, mutually beneficial relationships are two-way streets. They rely on trust, good will, and cooperation from both sides.

For every experiment that fails, another succeeds—and the benefits outweigh the costs. The best agencies stay on top of new features on every platform, and actively pursue finding the next best practices.

Remember that your agency has every incentive to make your accounts perform, but they have never worked with your accounts before. Even if they have clients in the same industry, every company is different.

Since you are the expert on your own company, any agency you work with will need time to get up to speed and understand your products as well as you do. This isn’t a failing—it’s a sign of an agency understanding that every account and campaign is different.

By providing as much information as possible, your agency can take full advantage of your knowledge to create the best campaigns possible. Wouldn’t that make both of you happy?

At Titan Growth, building a partnership is our ultimate goal for every client we work with. Great campaigns are born out of collaboration. Contact us today to see if a partnership would be right for you.

Within Google Ads, every keyword is subject to Google’s “Quality Score” metric, from 1/10 to 10/10. This metric affects how much a click actually costs and whether or not an ad will actually show for a given keyword.

Quality scores are presented as a factor of three different parts: ad relevance, expected CTR, and landing page experience. Having a higher score in two of the three metrics can make up for a low score in the third metric, especially if that metric is difficult to raise.

If your quality scores are low, there will always be something to tweak.

Here are 5 simple steps you can take to improve under-performing quality scores.

1. Address ad relevance by checking if your keywords are prominently featured in ad copy.

Every ad in the ad group should contain the group’s keyword(s) in either the first headline, second headline or first description. Without this, there’s a higher chance of a low quality score.

This is why recent best practices for campaign structure recommend grouping a few very similar keywords into each ad group: the copy can be directly tailored to the keywords and intent behind them.

This means that advertisers may need to further segment existing ad groups, then include keywords in each ad.

Pro tips:

• Don’t use each keyword more than twice per ad.
• Using natural-sounding language is more important than keyword density.
• Minor variations of the keyword are acceptable.
• Try using keyword insertion in headlines.

If your target keyword is a copyrighted term which the advertiser does not own, then it can’t be used in your ad, but you can still bid on it (if you are not sure, check with your attorney!). For example, bidding on the names of competitors typically means the exact search keywords can’t be featured. In this case, focus on the other two components of quality score.

2. Review negative keyword sculpting.

Ad relevance is low when the query does not directly relate to the ad copy – but this is often a result of insufficiently targeted keywords or a negative keyword list that isn’t robust enough.

Because many keywords can be used in multiple contexts, make sure to continually review your search terms report and add new negative keywords to ensure that ads only appear for the correct search intent.

Be discriminating with negative keywords; don’t add them without checking if the term has converted in the past.

3. Address expected CTR by improving ad text and CTAs.

Provide a message that entices your audience to explore further.

Part of Google’s quality score calculation involves “expected CTR”. For advertisers, just focusing on improving actual CTR can make a big impact on quality score.

What makes people click on ads? Try adding enticing benefits, calls to action, or disclaimers.

Our clients have seen success through promising free evaluations, product promotions, or reassuring the customer that there is “no download required”.

If CTAs already exist, try making them more evocative and actionable. For example, if you’re a travel company, instead of having an ad that says “see our locations”, you could test “plan your getaway today” or “find your dream vacation spot”. A/B testing is a great way to discover what will actually get more people to click on your ads.

You can also ask yourself which selling point will best resonate with each ad group’s audience. Use the search terms report and demographic information to understand who is searching for which keywords, and match that group’s priorities to your highlighted information.

4. Address landing page experience by matching ad promise to landing page content.

“Didn’t the sign outside say ‘Steakhouse’?”

Ads should always lead the user to expect exactly what the landing page contains. CTAs should match the page contents; if the ad suggests that a user “download the free ebook” but the landing page is the website’s homepage instead of a gated download, the user will leave.

Think of the ad and landing page as statements in a conversation. The first needs to logically lead to the second in order to keep the audience’s attention.

High bounce rates can also decrease quality score. When you pay to bring someone to your site and they immediately leave, you end up wasting money that could be used for someone actually interested in your brand.

5. Ensure a quality landing page user experience regardless of ad promise.

“Okay, but I’m just looking for a bathroom…”

Preventing bounces is also a function of user experience (UX). Since this is often within the control of someone other than the individual advertiser, it can be difficult to improve on.

However, UX makes a huge difference in both conversion rates and preventing quality score loss.

UX is its own complex field, but the basics are straightforward.

Include only relevant information (e.g. page title, images of the product, or a lead generation form) on the top of the page, so the user doesn’t have to scroll down to find what’s important.

Clearly label all navigation options, but don’t overload the user – keep it simple.

Avoid unusual page structure; stick with a straightforward single- or double-column page that doesn’t distract from your message.

Use an evocative CTA to keep users engaged and usher them to take the desired action.

Quality score is one piece of the great puzzle that is a well-structured paid media campaign. Taking full advantage of the interplay between each piece requires an experienced team. Contact us for a free competitive evaluation to see if a partnership would be right for you.