Hi guys, welcome to another video in the training series for Shopify SEO. In this video, we're going to talk about images and image optimization. Now, we see it day in day out when we look at Shopify stores that certainly image optimization is overlooked. So most of the information we see out there is essentially looking at how images actually look and convert, which is obviously really important for your customers. And you want an image that really high quality sort of explains what the, what the product is when someone looks at an image. And then also, look images is that load fast, so it doesn't slow the page load speed down of the site itself.

But there's aspects of images that can really help with SEO. And not only can you when you optimize the images correctly, can you actually start to rank in the image search results We might just go and have a look at that right now. So when I, when I talk about image search, essentially, when someone types in a certain product or a topic in Google, you obviously, a lot of the time you'll it'll pull back and image search, which is this section here. And a lot of these images here are actually from stores. So if you go to more images, you can see a lot of and these images can really help with your click through rate. And people can actually come through search by these images.

So not only that, but images play a part in your organic search results as well. So it's just another part of each product page or category page that provides information for Google to actually value where that page ranks. So certainly, what we strongly recommend is that you take the time to look at your images and optimize them correctly. So the objective of this lesson is to obviously optimize images So how images valued by Google. So if you remember in a previous lesson, we looked at the keyword density of a particular page. And images actually play a part in that they're actually counted in terms of content.

So when you when a visitor comes to your page or when, and obviously, when Google comes to your page, Google will look at the image not by viewing it as a user would. Obviously Google cannot read an image just by a single image itself on a page. with artificial intelligence, certainly improving in technology that may be something that can be done in the future. But currently, Google needs something else that actually tells will tell us a Google bot what the image is about, and that is done by what's called an alt tag, which most web owners will know what an alt tag is, but you need to understand how to use it properly. The tag was originally created for vision impairment used. So essentially the same as what how Braille would be used off site.

The alt tag helps vision impaired users to understand what an image is actually bad on a page. But it's also used for Google to really understand and provide relevance for that particular image and that page. Because the alt tag in the fall, I'm actually taken into account in terms of the optimization of a page. It's another factor that needs to be considered carefully not to over optimize the terms for the filename, and also the, the alt tags on a particular page. And when you have ecommerce stores and Shopify stores when you've got more than one image, and especially the way Shopify actually sets up, the images and the product pages, if you're not careful, it's quite easy to be over optimized for the image URL tags and file names and we'll talk about that as we work through it. So there's quite a few apps out there in the market by free and paid that will, by their definition, will actually optimize your alt tags of your images.

The issue is, with most of them, and the ones we've worked with is that they will essentially take the product title of a product page and then add that as an alt tag. Well, and this is, you know, this is okay if you're, if you've got one image and but even that will be a little over optimized, because essentially, you'll have the same old tag on the image as you would have your product title. And then, when you have more than one images, it presents a problem where, say if you've got five images on the page, and they will all have the same alt tag, and if you're not careful, also the same file name if they've been uploaded with the same file name, which can happen more often than not. Many of these apps will allow you to append certain topics or keyword phrases to the You know, in the front end or the back end of the of the alt tag, for example, you can append your shop or store name, the back of the image.

But that still doesn't mitigate the issue of having the same old tag through multiple images. Okay, so let's look at an example here of the images on our poorly optimized site as we're using as an example, throughout this training. We can see the seven images here on this page. And he's a section here we can add your alt tag, and this one image has had the alt tag edit. And then if we look at the other images, there's no alltech. And this, this is what we see a lot with stores that are built on Shopify, where people will put the effort into add the tag even if I know there is an alt tag with the first image, but then miss the other alt tags on the further images.

So how to Shopify deal with this? Well, the way I deal with it is most of the time on most They will just by default, use the product title as the alt tag in the code. So once the product is actually live, this first image will have the alt tag. But then you'll have these other six images with identical alt tags. And we'll we'll go through how we actually can audit product pages to find out what the alt tags are in a second. But that's essentially how I do it.

Okay, so what do you find the the image file name. So if you just go to an any image on your store, you right click Copy the image. And then you open the image in the browser bar. Lucky with a website, and then you can see the the image name. He's added up here in the browser bar. So this image name is elephant plush, plush pillow.

Then what Shopify does, it'll append the size of the image to the back end of the year. But this URL plays a part in the overall optimization of the image and then also of the page that images on. Okay, before we go and actually look at how to set up the alt tag, file name, and the images, that if you've got more than one image on the site, we'll just go and do some checks. And we'll first of all, use the manual check. And then we'll also use Screaming Frog to check the alt tags. Okay to check manually, we just use the source code method.

So we click on anywhere in the page and click on view page source. And then what we're going to do is use our Ctrl F feature, and we're going to type in alt equals. And what this will do is bring all the alt tags onto the page and highlight them to the first one, he's just a logo so we don't need to worry about that. And then on the right hand side here, You can use your yellow bars if you're using Chrome and scroll down and we'll come to the next letter yellow bars. and here we can see the alt equals health and stuff, boy. So that is the first image, scroll down.

And then we have the second image. And then the all the rest of the images. And you can see here how it shows I've got identical alt tags pulled from the title. So we've got multiple identical alt tags, which is not optimum. So essentially, this is just a bit of a check to check that the alt tags are actually showing in your source code after you've added them on the site itself. And the next check we're going to do is using Screaming Frog, which we'll go to now.

Okay, so on Screaming Frog, you run the URL through the crawler like you would normally and then once the crawl is finished, you click on images and then brings up all the images now, be aware that it'll bring back every single image on the site. So, for example, he will get a MasterCard image, which is on the payment is a payment logo. So you just need to define those when you're working through this. And then in the bottom section here, we can see we've got image info. So let's click on new, we have products, and you can filter these any way you want. And then you can click on image info, and it will show you here, product title and the alt text for that particular image.

So again, these are just checks that we can use to quickly check the file name or the image name and the alt text. You can you can export this data into an Excel spreadsheet and filter it as deep as you want to work out where your where the issues are. If we click on it in his right hand corner up here, we click on missing alt text. We'll see here that it brings back all the terms that do not have old text. But there's no products in here because as mentioned before, by default, Shopify will add the product title for the for the alt tag for that particular product. Okay, so before you upload your images to Shopify, if you don't know how to simply rename your image, so if you want to create the file name, we going to you come to your Control Panel, and you Wherever your folders and your machine and you right click, then rename and just in here, you can rename the file, rename the file windows hit enter.

So for example, we could call it that and it will change the file name and when we upload it, it'll keep that file name in Shopify. So when naming your image file, it can become a Little bit tricky when you've got multiple images, but you just want to try and make sure that the file name is different for each image. But it can be, you can use the same naming convention. So for example, this one is a gray elephant plush pillow and then we've got another one that's a pink elephant plush pillow and then a blue elephant plush pillow. So we could call the first image, gray elephant plush pillow. So we'll change that now.

And the next one would be oops, this will smith spelt that and then the next one could be blue elephant plush pillow and then pink elephant plush pillow. And just depending whim with the different colors, the breaks up the density of the keyword on the page. And then once we go through and do the alt tag, we will we can delete it even further. Okay, so now we need to go through and Edit the old tags. So keeping in line with trying to make sure that each element of the page is optimized a little bit differently, so we don't lose any over optimization keywords. This what we're going to do with the images, so let's say the, as mentioned in the filename, the file name is gray elephant plush pillow, then we would make the alt tag something a little bit different.

And we might call it gray stuffed elephant with baby sleeping. So it's actually what the image is, and is what Google wants to see. And obviously what a user would expect to see. Then, so then the next one could be if the file name is blue elephant plush pillow. The alt tag could be a variation again, blue stuffed animal cushion, and then you would continue on so this one here would be the alt tag could possibly be multiple stuffed animal toys are multiple stuffed animal cushions, for example. So you need to get a little bit creative.

But it's, it's I highly recommend it's well worth the effort putting the work into actually ensure your alt tags are correctly optimized. And, and the variations are there to ensure that you get the most out of your page because then not only will you start to when it's optimized quickly will you start to rank for that particular product more consistently, that you'll pick up a lot more search from longtail keywords and other keywords within the market. And when you think about then doing it for every image on every page with everything else we've spoken about, you start to really accumulate traffic from these long tail tunes just by optimizing correctly. So that's what we're going to do for for images. Again, pretty simple concepts, not rocket science, but certainly there's a bit of work involved and it it it will improve The rankings and performance of each product and saw overall if you go to the effort of editing and thinking about your alt tags and your file names for your images, we see time and time again, stores that are having trouble starting to move up the rankings simply by adjusting old tags and file names and images can have a quite a large effect quite quickly.

So certainly something you should recommend. Okay, I'm sure that'll make sense. Go ahead and start editing and adjusting your images and we'll see you in the next video.