How to Get Better Results from Google Images

Google images offer an opportunity for websites to benefit from the company’s image database.

Google has made a change to the Google Search Console that will help site publishers get better results from its image database.

Anyone who searches for images at images.google.com will see a display of five images per row. The maximum display size of those images is about 320 pixels wide and 200 deep.

Google attempts to display the entire image. That means a deep image such as 300 x 600 will shrink to only 200 pixels deep. The width of the image will shrink to 100 wide.

The result is an image much harder to read than a horizontal one. It doesn’t mean a site publisher should only do images that are horizontal for the sake of Google images. It does mean some thought should go into how the images are created for the maximum benefit from such a large, heavily used database.

How Search Console Has Changed

Go to Search Console, click on the property and then on the Performance report. Near the top left, change the “search type” to image.

The default presentation is “queries”, which is the search term that people used to click on the image and reach the landing page. Another good report is “pages”, which shows the name of the landing page.

What makes the change so useful is that it allows a site publisher to focus on how much traffic a site gets from the images database. It also allows for greater insights from experimentation.

What to Do With the Numbers

Go to those pages to view the images on them and from there go to images.google.com to search for those images using relevant keywords. Focus on the best-performing images.

The search results will show how an image appears compared to other images relevant to those keywords. It’s helpful to consider a few questions:

• What is the rank of the site’s image?
• How does it look compared to other images?
• Can any changes to the image attract more clicks?
• Can any changes on the site itself improve its rank in Google’s image database?

Changing a photo to improve its click value on Google is hard to do. It may benefit from better cropping or some enhancement to the clarity.

But changing a graphic is much easier. For example, a graphic may have a heading in small type that is hard to read. Increasing that heading will make it pop out more in the images search results and may attract more clicks.

Otherwise, increasing the rank of the image depends on the competition and the search engine optimization of the image. Unique images getting better rankings. Image SEO improves with attention in particular to the alt tag and caption.