Transcript
Hi guys, and welcome to another edition of Zupo's SEO Talk & Tea.
Today's conversation is what is Image SEO, and is it worth it? I think this is an important conversation because Image SEO is been talked a lot of in the last five years. I've seen countless podcasts, and videos, and blog posts about it, so I want to go into that conversation today. But before we begin, I want to introduce the tea, because this is Zupo's SEO Talk & Tea. Today, we have a very special guest, if not my most favorite tea brand, Mei Leaf. We have a Baked Goods Oolong from Mei Leaf, and it is a Oolong tea that they wrote has cherry syrup drizzled butter flapjacks, vanilla, antique wood, and mangosteen kind of flavors. Once my girlfriend heard that she bought it at the drop of a hat.
I've it had a couple of times, haven't come to really understand it just yet. I sort of enjoy it. I feel like what I've really enjoyed this tea is when I've had it with a saltier breakfast. I think the sweetness of it really comes out because when my girlfriend and I were having this by itself, we couldn't really get the sweetness of it, but then it's funny that they put flapjacks and cherry syrup, because once we had a salty breakfast one day, and we drank this, we could taste the sweetness. So it was a great experience once we had it with the saltier breakfast.
But let's go ahead and get brewing and talking about Image SEO. So, Image SEO is the idea that you're going to link-build and do all these SEO tactics when trying to rank your images. So, images are a great way to link-build because of the rules on the internet. If you're going to use an image, you need to source the image. So you can provide images to people on different websites, and then they're going to have to source that image. Source essentially means they have to provide the exact URL where they found the image. So in the sense, Image SEO is trying to optimize your images to acquire links and then twofold it's to start ranking for Google Images. Now, this is an interesting concept because a lot of people understand Google Images, but I don't think a lot of people have thought about trying to rank for Google Images.
So the conversation I'm having today is Image SEO worth it? I have dabbled in it in the sense that I have used images in a sense to acquire links occasionally here and there, especially when we're providing a different website our own images. Now, my thoughts on this are Image SEO is a very interesting and innovative style of link-building, but I would question its importance for most businesses' bottom line. In my own experience using Google Images, I have never truly done a commercial or transactional query or experience on Google Images. Most of the time when I'm on Google Images, I'm just trying to find a picture of something you would copy and paste for a Google slides presentation, or just to reference something. I don't think I've truly ever really gone into an image, clicked it, opened the website and engaged with it. So in that sense, I would question the importance of Image SEO for most companies. And even if you're saying maybe for a link-building purposes, if you find a way to link-build on a mass scale images, then yes, go ahead and do so.
But my only concern with that too, is that if let's say you did acquire links to images, images on your site don't pay. There's no ability to really add internal links to an image because it would just be an image on the page. And therefore there's no way to pass that link equity to a section of the site that you want to. So my 2 cents is I don't think Image SEO truly is worth it. It's been talked about heavily, but I don't think it caught on. I don't think user engagements and users with Google really use images in the way that people wanted them to. And when I say people, I mean businesses wanting them to look at an image and buy something. I just don't think it has happened like that. And so I don't really think Image SEO is worth it.
Now, I'm not going to say don't ever consider it. It's stupid. Some businesses it might make sense, especially if you can find the link-building method through it. But more often than not, I just don't think it is something that you'll really need for your SEO. But for those of you who are Image SEO fans, and you really can speak to its effectiveness, please prove me wrong, or not prove me wrong. It's a little adversarial. Please enlighten me or add your perspective just so I can see a little bit of maybe why it'd be worth it, because I've been working in this industry for a very long time and I still have yet to find a strong reason why. So I'm encouraging people who are watching this, if you do have differing opinions, please leave in the comments. And so that way we can have a healthy discussion about opening perspectives of why it might actually work.
But let's go ahead and enjoy my Baked Goods Tea. I don't have a salty breakfast it's time to enjoy it with, but hate to use tea I don't want to drink it, right? I forgot to start off guys. I want to drink it so fast I forgot to sign off. If you guys found this video enjoyable, please like and subscribe, and I hope to see you guys again soon.
Thanks, everybody.