Marketing

How Visuals Improve SEO and User Experience

Author - Immy Williamson
28.07.2025

You have approximately 7 seconds to impress a prospective client with your website before they make a decision that could make, or break, a conversion.

To capture the attention of online prospects, your website can’t rely on information alone (no matter how helpful) – how your brand looks and presents itself via the matrix of 0’s and 1’s and html coding is equally as important as the words you’ve crafted.

Your organisation is constantly competing for the coveted first page – and top rank – on search engines; relying too heavily on copy to attract customers or clients not only decreases the user’s overall experience of your site but impacts your SEO efforts too. Google has around 200 ranking factors that experts in SEO have painstakingly studied and implemented to improve a website’s position or “rank”.

We’ve talked before about how photography helps tell your B2B brand story, but did you know images can have a significant impact on your website’s SEO rank? Sub-factors such as format, file name, alt-text, structured data and lazy-load protocols feed into Google’s ranking algorithm – ignoring them may just cost you your next client.

How Images Can Affect Your Site’s Crawlability

According to Google:

The technical requirements for getting your content in Google’s search results applies to images too. Since images are a substantially different format compared to HTML, it means there are additional requirements for getting images indexed; for example, finding the images on your site is different, and the presentation of the images also influences whether an image is indexed at all, and for the right keywords.

It is important to note that Google does not index CSS images, and that you should use standard HTML image elements to help crawlers find and process images.

Image Format

There’s a debate around which image format that’s best to use, while WebP and AVIF are the best formats for speed/compression, many users prefer JPEG or PNG for compatibility – older browsers may not support WebP and/or AVIF formats. However, as search engines evolve, they will adapt to become compatible with the file formats necessary for optimal user experience.

Google can index the following media types:

• BMP

The bitmap file format is designed to display high-quality images on Windows and store printable photos – it is an uncompressed raster file.

• GIF

A Graphics Interchange File (GIF) is a raster file designed for more basic images that appear online. These file types are often a combination of images or frames to create basic animations.

• JPEG

JPEG is a commonly used lossy raster image designed for use in digital photography; widely known for its ability to significantly compress images, making them smaller and therefore easier to store/share. They still maintain a high enough quality for most uses.

• PNG

Portable Network Graphics is a raster-graphics file format that supports lossless data compression. PNG images are generally considered “better” than JPEGs when it comes to a choice for illustrators between the two – this is due to their ability to handle transparent images.

• WebP

Created in 2010 by Google, WebP is a modern image format designed to provide superior lossless and lossy compression for images on the web. It aims to provide faster website loading times and improved user experience by reducing image file sizes compared to older formats such as JPEG and PNG.

• SVG

Ideal for web-based logos, icons and illustrations, a Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file uses vector-based formatting – meaning it stores images as mathematical formular, defining points and lines rather than pixels.

• AVIF

The AVIF (AV 1 Image File Format) was first used in March 2018, and is a format designed for high-quality, efficient image compression. It offers superior results when compared to older formats such as JPEG and WebP.

Add Structured Data

By adding structured data Google can display your images in certain rich results, including a prominent badge in Google Images – this gives users relevant information about your page and can drive better targeted traffic to your site.

Make sure that the image is relevant to the page that it’s on. For example, if you define the image property of <NewsArticle>, the image must be relevant to that news article.

File Name and Image Descriptions

When Google conducts a crawl on a site it extracts information about the subject matter from the content of that page, including any captions and image titles. When possible, ensure that images are placed close to relevant text and are on pages that reflect the image subject matter.

The filename can give Google an inkling about the subject matter of the image – therefore you should use filenames that are short but descriptive. Avoid – where possible – using generic filenames.

Possibly the most important attribute regarding providing more metadata for an image is alt-text. This is text that describes an image, it also improves accessibility who can’t see images on webpages, including those who use screen readers. Google uses alt-text along with contextual signals (i.e. the contents of the page) to better understand the subject matter of the image.

Final Thoughts

A well-optimised image can improve website engagement, increase organic traffic, decrease bounce rate and push for higher search results rankings.