A picture is worth a thousand words. But when it comes to a "Visually Sold Product" like jewellery & diamonds it's worth a million words.
In a recent research on buyer's journey for online jewellery purchase, it is found that as high as 25% jewellery buyers use Google images search. This is due to Google's "product Image snippet" which appears in the text search results.
For example for a search string "diamond engagement rings in 18K rose gold" the search results along with the text results displays an array of ring images titled "Images for diamond engagement rings in 18K rose gold”. Clicking more images will take you to google image search. And this is how many users end up picking up the ring jewellery; starting from Image search.
So How do you make your website image search friendly?
To start with there are some basic on-site techniques like
If you Google; there is lots of info available; so I will not elaborate further on these. Below are some additional tips from TransPacific’s Team specialising in Jewelry SEO
Creating so many Alt tags/ file names manually will require cumbersome work that too from an expert SEO person. Talk to your developers if they can achieve it through automated scripts or of the shelf extensions. Still doing it manually one by one is the best way to go about it.
During our research, we realised that page URL hosting the images play important part. For example
If you have a "Solitaire Yellow Gold ring"
Adding schema tags helps a search engine understand the context. It’s metadata about an Image. For e-commerce platforms like Magento, OpenCart adding schema info through ready extension is easy to add
Here is a typical sample of a schema tag
<script type=application/ld+json>
{ "@context": "http://schema.org",
"@type": "ImageObject",
"author": "TransPacific Software",
"contentLocation": "New York USA",
"contentUrl": "engagement-ring-diamond-yellow-gold.jpg",
"datePublished": "2018-01-25",
"description": "beautiful engagement ring from abc jewellers studded with round diamond in 18k yellow gold.",
"name": "Engagement Ring"
Post your best images with page links on visually active social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest. There seems to be some sort of correlation between activity on these social media with Google's page indexing.
There are many image formats available but not all formats are supported on all browsers. Use only universally supported formats like JPEG, PNG, GIF
For animation Use GIF.
For geometric forms Use PNG.
For product photography Use JPEG.
More info of image formats and optimization is available here
Many of the jewellery websites host the media including images on Content Delivery Network (CDN) like Cloudflare, Akamai. CDN provides faster delivery of images and better user experience.
However, there is an avoidable flip side to it. If not set up correctly Google may view the media on CDN as duplicate. Fortunately, all CDN networks allow to switch on Canonical headers. Check with your CDN dashboard or developer on this.
Use tools like Screaming Frog to detect broken image links. There is a possibility that you may see the image pulled from your local cache but a user may not.
Opt for squarish product images with a white background. Good quality images rank better. Be careful on image aspect ratio. If your images are resized; ensure that the original aspect ratio is maintained.
For more Information or advanced SEO needs contact Us.