When it comes to real estate, seo or search engine optimization has gone mainstream. There are over 7,000 posts dealing with the topic on this site alone. Reading them chronologically, one notices a progression from general best practices like blogging, title tags, and url structure to more recent articles asking if seo is dead or moving on to more advanced ideas like preparing for algorithm updates or integrating social media.
Most blog posts about seo basics neglect to mention image optimization. In doing so they ignore the most important part of a listing, the actual pictures of the house. It's cliché to say a picture is worth a thousand words, so instead let's just say images are really important. Not only do images usually take up the majority of a listing, they more often than not are the part of an ad that catches people's attention, acting as the transition point between random person and potential customer. In terms of influencing a purchase, the emotional argument from an image is equally if not more powerful than the more logical points communicated through text. From a technical standpoint, images are separate files from the rest of a site and therefore have to be paid special attention when it comes to seo. Every major search engine has a separate results page for images which is significantly less competitive than the general one for full websites. This is a massive opportunity for any real estate site to raise its traffic.
A little digression, seo is not dead. As more and more agents adopt techniques those methods gradually become less effective at differentiating the site being optimized from its competition. There are still plenty of ways to improve a real estate website's appearance in search engines, though it's naive to think doing what everyone else has already done will make a site stand out. Thankfully many webmasters or agents neglect to optimize the photos on their website creating a huge opportunity for those willing to put in the work. Knowing how to optimize photos can draw more users from a higher ranking on the general results page, attract visitors from image specific searches, and create greater potential for social media shares from Pinterest and Instagram. Here are 6 musts for image optimization in 2016:
1. Have Lots Of Pictures
Multiple images of the same property allows you to show off everything the house has to offer and target more keywords with the same listing. In fairness most agents already know to include lots of photos.
2. Make Unique Title Tags For Each One
No more files name DSC28467207 or whatever your camera spits out. Each image file should target a specific keyword to maximize the potential reach of its corresponding page. Try to find a picture that represents every one of a property's strongest selling points. For example if a bungalow is listed at 123 Fake Street in Toronto name a picture of the front view of the home "Bungalow For Sale Toronto - 123 Fake Street". A shot of the large backyard could be "Spacious Backyard For Sale Toronto 123 Fake Street" and a 2 car garage would be "2 car garage for sale Toronto 123 Fake Street". Sounds easy? That's because it is. This is a fantastic way to rank attract customers already interested in some aspect of your property. With many sites neglecting to optimize images doing so can still differentiate yours from the pack, much like how adding proper title tags would have helped an entire site before seo "died" last year.
Be sure to include the listing address in your title tag, especially if you are listing multiple properties on your site. This will make sure the correct images appear in searches for a specific property and help you keep photos organized in your cms.
3. Do Not Forget The Alt Text
Alt text describes an image for the visually impaired. It is also used in any situation where the image cannot be properly displayed. Search engines will penalize any photo where it is not included. The alt text has nothing to do with keywords so this is your change to create an evocative description of what's in the photo. Again since many sites neglect to complete this step, doing a thorough job can separate you from the crowd.
4. Scale Images To Reduce Page Load Time
User experience has a huge impact on search engine rankings. In most cases "user experience" translates to page load speed. Image files are often the slowest component of a page to load. One way to speed them up is to scale the image file to whatever size it appear as on the website. Many times original photos which can be something like 2500x2500 pixels are uploaded to a template where the image space is much smaller, say 500x500 pixels. In these cases the image is compressed each time the page loads. Avoid this by manually scaling down images before uploading them to your site.
5. Open Graph and Twitter Cards
This helps with social media integration and can be easily accomplished by installing a free plugin. Open graph ensures images are automatically included in Facebook and Pinterest shares while Twitter cards do the same for Twitter. Anyone uneasy about adding plugins can manually install the Facebook and Pinterest feature by adding the following code to their section near the image data:
6. Structured Data
Schema markup or structured data can actually be applied throughout your site. It's a system of code that can be read by all major search engines designed to help sort through different types of data so the right information is displayed in the right context. Marking up images with schema can improve your photos' rankings in general image searches and also cause them to appear as knowledge graph results for certain queries. It may seem complicated at first but there are plenty of plugins to help you out plus Google's free structured data testing tool which you can find in your Search Console (formerly webmaster tools)
When somebody is proud of the home they bought they show off the picture not the description. These best practices maximize every image on your site's potential as an online lead generation tool . This will be more important than ever going forward as photos are integrated into general results pages while Pinterest, Instagram, and other image sharing networks grow more popular every day.
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