Your images have names, and Google reads them
IMG_84759.jpg tells nobody anything. Descriptive file names, alt text, images placed next to the text that discusses them: three habits documented by Google. A quick win from the SEO series.
Image search is a real entrance to a website: people use it to look for a product, a finished job, a before-and-after of a worksite. And there is an official page, the image SEO best practices, whose essentials take a few minutes per image to put into practice.
The file name
IMG_84759.jpg is the name the camera gives; it informs nobody. bathroom-renovation-fribourg.jpg says what the image shows. Google explicitly recommends short, descriptive file names, in the language of the page. One honest nuance, because you often read the opposite: Google no longer relies on the file name alone, it also analyses the image itself and above all what surrounds it. So the name is no magic wand; it is one clue among several, the easiest to give, and the most pointlessly wasted.
The quick win: rename photos before uploading them, at the moment you still know what they show. Renaming afterwards, on a site already live, changes the images’ addresses and calls for more care; hence the value of making it a habit at the door rather than a catch-up project.
The alt text
Every image can carry a description, the alternative text or alt, which Google lists among its main criteria and which serves something other than search first: it is what visually impaired visitors hear and what shows when the image fails to load. You write it the way you would describe the photo over the phone: “oak parquet being laid in a living room”, neither empty nor stuffed with keywords. An honest description serves both audiences at once, the reader and the engine, and that is precisely why it works.
The image’s place
Third official recommendation, the least known: place the image near the text that discusses it, and give important information as text rather than baked into the image. A photo of a price list is not a price list: the engine will not read it, and neither will the reader in a hurry. The image illustrates; the text carries.
Three habits, none needing a tool: a name that describes, an alt that describes, an image in its place on the page. On a site that regularly publishes photos of its work, this is one of the most favourable effort-to-effect ratios there is. It is also, on the sites we look after, one of the dated tasks of site maintenance: photos arrive all year round, and the discipline has to keep the same rhythm.
Who writes these notes
This journal is kept by the workshop that designs and maintains the house’s websites. Everything described here, the Search Console, internal links, the business profile, is part of the work delivered with a site: if you would rather someone took care of it, that is precisely the trade.