1. A Photo is
Worth a
Thousand Links
How Google
Treats & Ranks
Images
SMX East 2013

2. About This Presentation
• How Well Do Images
Perform in Search
Engines?
• How Has That Changed?
• How Do You Make Your
Images Rank?
• What’s Changed?
• What’s Changing?

3. About Me
• Eli Feldblum
• CTO & Founder of
RankAbove
• eli@rankabove.com
• @FeldBum
• 201-815-9467

4. How Did Images Once Perform
In August 2010, RankAbove
and comScore conducted a
large study on how universal
results—including images—
performed in search
engines, compared with
regular text results.

5. How Did Images Once Perform
In that study, images kicked ass.

6. How Did Images Once Perform
Well, most of the time.

7. How Did Images Once Perform
In August 2013, we re-ran the study.

8. How Do Images Perform Today?
All universal
results dropped
since our 2010
study, but only
images lost to
non-universal
results—except
for celebrity
images.

9. Why?
CTR from all universal results dropped as users either got
more accustomed to seeing those results or because
Google offered searchers more information on universal
searches without having to click. But images suffered more
than most.

10. Why?
Mostly because of UI changes made by Google.

11. Why?
Unless the users clicks “Visit Page” or on the image,
he or she does not continue on to the site.

12. What Happened?
That UI change occurred in January 2013, and hit sites hard.

13. What Happened?
That UI change occurred in January 2013, and hit sites hard.

14. What Happened?
That UI change occurred in January 2013, and hit sites hard.

15. What Else Did Google Change?
Google makes changes to search all the time.

16. What Else Did Google Change?
All of these things are not like the other

17. What Else Did Google Change?
It didn’t used to be like that. Uniqueness now counts.

18. How Do Images Rank?
• Good SEO (on-page and
off-)
• Unique Image
• Surrounding Text
• Image Name (not Alt Tag)

19. Which Sites Rank
•
•
•
•
Lots of text with one or two images.
Lots of images with a bit of text.
Lots of images and lots of text.
What doesn’t rank: one image with no text.
Sound familiar? I just described the average
slideshow

20. Text Sites Rank
Sites with lots of relevant
content, well-named images and
good overall SEO often rank highly
for image searches—as long as
they have unique images.

21. Multiple Image Sites Rank
Sites with many
images on a
single page often
rank as well, as
they are almost
always assured
of at least one
unique image—
as long as they
have some
relevant text and
good SEO.

22. Multiple Image Sites Rank
And they don’t
even have to be
ugly. Take a look
at Boston.com’s
Big Picture for a
beautiful
employment of
this technique.

23. Combo Sites Rank Best
Sites with good text and
lots of images not
surprisingly do the best.

24. How To Get The Click
Give people a reason to click:
more pictures, or a higher quality
or non-censored version. But
ensure that the same
functionality exists on your site
as well.

25. How To Get The Click
Or use scripts, like WP-PicShield, that add a watermark on the
fly.

26. How To Get The Click
Or use scripts, like WP-PicShield, that add a watermark on the
fly.

27. And Get Your Traffic Back
1. Google Image Search
update hits site
2. Watermarks implemented
and traffic returns

28. More Information?
Just contact me:
Eli Feldblum
eli@rankabove.com
201-815-9467
@FeldBum