Hello hello!

This is edition 3! If you haven’t already, go back and read through ed. 1 and ed. 2 because there are some serious SEO tools over there!

I’m very excited about this week’s tool because it’s something that every site can benefit from. Everyone uses images and being able to optimize those for SEO is freaking so important.

Dad Joke:

When does a joke become a dad joke?

Well, during the delivery it becomes apparent.

This is honestly my favorite part of these newsletters 🤣

SEO Tip #3

We’re back this week with edition #3 and this week’s tool is good. I’ve posted a few TikToks about this topic but I think it would be great to highlight it here with a more in-depth explanation. Today we’re chatting about image optimization!

Now optimizing your images for SEO can be tedious, especially if you have to go back through a bunch of pages. ← I don’t envy you…

But, if you’re creating a new page it’s super simple. Do it right from the start, less work in the long run.

Either way, the same premise will be used for both new and old images.

Let’s dig in.

Step 1: Figure out what your target SEO keyword is

If the page is already created, you are going to hop on over to Google Search Console and look under webpages for this particular page and find what keywords you are ranking for.

If it’s a new page, then you are going to have a set keyword, or keyword phrase that the page is being created to optimize for.

In this example let’s say you are a t-shirt company trying to create a new product so you go to Google Trends and select trending now. ← free tip to all your custom product peeps

You see that Lana Del Rey is trending, I don’t keep up with this so I have no idea why she is trending. But you do.

So your keyword phrase is going to be: Lana Del Rey Shirt

Now this is going to be your target keyword for your Title, URL, Content, and Images.

Step 2: Make your images the correct size

You should know what the actual image size for your site is. If it’s e-commerce, the best way to check is use the inspection tool in Google Chrome to see the image size of other products.

You can right click the image and hit inspect.

You are going to click the light arrow button (highlighted in green in the above image). This brings up the mouse hover inspection. So now you are going to hover over your image to see what size it shows.

You’ll see img in bold with a string of numbers, in this example, it is 642 × 366.71, this is your image size. You will resize your image to fit the exact dimensions. You can do this in Photoshop or other image tools, here’s a free online version called Image Resizer.

You are going to save your image with the keyword or keyword phrase, so in my example it’s going to be lana-del-rey-shirt.png

Step 3: Image Compression

After you resize your image and save the name with your keywords, you will then go to an image compression tool. I prefer TinyPNG but there are a ton of free ones out there.

Once you drop your image in, you’ll see it start to compress. At the end you’ll see how much file space you saved by compressing. So here I saved 64% with my PNG file.

NOTE: png files are usually bigger, so unless there is a transparent background I would recommend using JPG.

Now we have the correct size, an image name with the keywords, and it’s compressed.

Step 4: Alt tags baby

Now every website designer has an alt tag method. It will be different for every designer and if it’s a product page vs a content page and/or blog post.

If you have questions here feel free to respond and I can provide you with specific examples for your website builder.

Anyway, in the alt text, we are going to use our keyword. Again in our example, our keyword phrase is Lana Del Rey Shirt so we have to use that here. Since I am leaning toward a product page for e-commerce let’s use: Buy Lana Del Rey Shirts from XYZ Company.

I use the word Buy so I can target people who are looking to purchase.
I use the keyword phrase, again because this is our main target.
I use “from XYZ company” because I want our brand to pull up for searches.

Alt text is critical for people with disabilities (namely people with vision impairments and blindness) who use screen reader technology and braille displays to access websites and web-based applications.

Now your image has everything you need to help rank it in Google search, as well as, help your product page rank.

The goal for optimizing images is to help your main page rank, of course, but the added benefit is that it could pull up when someone is doing an image search.

Step 5: Monitor site traffic and keyword movement

Now comes the hard part…waiting.

This is the worst part of any SEO project. Waiting for the results to come in.

If it’s a trending topic, you may see results fly in, but most likely you’re our 45-60 days or more for harder-to-rank keywords.

Note: don’t forget to submit a sitemap to Google so they can inspect the page and get it ranking (I showed how to do this in a previous post).

I would start a spreadsheet, or use an SEO tool, to track the keywords. Put the keyword phrase, what page you’re trying to rank, and then the position (if it isn’t ranked put N/A).

Then every month I would check where it is. This will help you see if it is getting traffic.

You’ll see faster results if you get backlinks to this page. Maybe I’ll make that my next edition?

Before we say goodbye, I want to say thanks again for the support. My goal with starting my TikTok and then this newsletter was to help small business owners do SEO for themselves. But for those business owners who are too busy to worry about SEO, that’s where my other side comes in. I offer SEO services on my website: theseomarketingdad.com so don’t hesitate to reach out if you need help growing your business!