How to maximize CTR from Google image search?
-
I'm getting good, solid growth in my Google SERPs and Google search traffic now, but I do notice that 70% of my high ranking search results are images and the CTR on those is only 3-4%. All my images are illustrative and highly relevant to my travel blog, but I guess that hardly matters unless they get CTR so people see them in context.
Has anyone seen or done any good research on what makes people click through on Google Image Search results? What are the key factors? How do you optimize for click-through? Is it better to watermark your images or overlay label them to increase likelihood of click-through?
Thanks, Tony
FYI the travel blog in question is www.asiantraveltips.com and a relevant Google search where I rank highly is "songkran 2016 phuket".
-
It's impossible to know - Google keeps the images cached on their server to increase performance when displaying them in the search results. It's only when people click on the "view image" that they get to your site. These views you could probably check in the server logs.
Don't try to redirect these images back to the "original" page when called from Image Search. It's something Google disapproves and again could lead to a manual action (check http://www.thesempost.com/google-manual-actions-issued-for-image-mismatch/ and https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/3394137?hl=en)
Dirk
-
Thanks Dirk, that's helpful. I'm not sure why the images are fuzzy on Google Image Search but those ones are rather small (576PX, whereas most of my images on newer posts are 800PX or even 1024PX). I don't know what size images work best for previewing on Google.
I do get into the image search strip for some search terms. Do you know how to track views of images (as distinct from click through to pages) at all? Is there a script I could be running on my VPS which would track view of images from Google Image Search?
-
3/4% is already quite a good rate for image search results. By definition image search is quite visual - and people click on the image they like most. Given that a lot more results are displayed in Image search as long as you are in the first 4/5 rows clickrates will be quite similar.
One exception - if Google includes a image strip in the normal SERP's you will get click rates of 30/40%.
Try to rank for different kind of images to cater for each kind of taste. I tried the search query and your site was ranked quite high (1st / 5th position) but compared to the images they were a bit fuzzy/not really sharp.
Certainly don't put very visible watermarks/overlayers - this will completely erase your images from the results (people don't like to click on them show Google doesn't like to show them)
Dirk
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Google Update
My rank has dropped quite a lot this past week and I can see from the Moz tools that there is an unconfirmed Google update responsible. Is there any information from Moz on this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moon-boots0 -
Google Search Console
abc.com www.com http://abc.com http://www.abc.com https://abc.com https://www.abc.com _ your question in detail. The more information you give, the better! It helps give context for a great answer._
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brianvest0 -
Google Semantic Search: Now I'm really confused
I'm struggling to understand why I rank for some terms and not for other closely related ones. For example: property in Toytown but NOT properties in toytown property for sale in Toytown but NOT property for sale Toytown NOR properties for sale Toytown. My gut instinct is that I don't have enough of the second phrasing as inbound link anchor text -- but didn't Penguin/Panda make all that obsolete?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jeepster0 -
Does Google check Whois
Hello everyone, I own quite a lot of website active in the same niche and sometimes targeting the same keywords, these sites are hosted at different IP's. But they all have the same Whois details, i was wondering if Google checks the Whois-data? And if it affects the serp's? Regards, Yannick
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iwebdevnl0 -
Google Penguin Penalty
Howdy Guys,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ScottBaxterWW
We have been battling our way the Google penguin penalty and have just received our 3 knocked back reconsideration request. I posted a find on here the other day about a simple change of page title made our site jump back up... In the meantime I've built 1 hight quality link back to our site and we have moved again from #50 to #46.Have Google ever removed a penalty without telling you?Should we ask for another reconsideration request?Thanks,
Scott0 -
Image ALT Descriptions
Due to the way our system is and the way we want to do something. We have to make the description for each image in the ALT. Now this is not just a few words but is actually a few sentences. Is there going to be any negative disadvantage to doing it this way? The positives I see is that it will help with accessibility and atleast the bots will be able to tell what the item is about. The negatives is that maybe this description could be better used elsewhere?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | websitesaleslab0 -
Do search engines only count links that have google analytics?
I am reading a thread right now and I came across this statement: Search engines can view clicks only if websites have Google analytics or some toolbar installed. Obviously that's not the case with over 50% of the websites. That's why I don't agree with your comment. True or False?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEODinosaur0 -
Google bot vs google mobile bot
Hi everyone 🙂 I seriously hope you can come up with an idea to a solution for the problem below, cause I am kinda stuck 😕 Situation: A client of mine has a webshop located on a hosted server. The shop is made in a closed CMS, meaning that I have very limited options for changing the code. Limited access to pagehead and can within the CMS only use JavaScript and HTML. The only place I have access to a server-side language is in the root where a Defualt.asp file redirects the visitor to a specific folder where the webshop is located. The webshop have 2 "languages"/store views. One for normal browsers and google-bot and one for mobile browsers and google-mobile-bot.In the default.asp (asp classic). I do a test for user agent and redirect the user to one domain or the mobile, sub-domain. All good right? unfortunately not. Now we arrive at the core of the problem. Since the mobile shop was added on a later date, Google already had most of the pages from the shop in it's index. and apparently uses them as entrance pages to crawl the site with the mobile bot. Hence it never sees the default.asp (or outright ignores it).. and this causes as you might have guessed a huge pile of "Dub-content" Normally you would just place some user-agent detection in the page head and either throw Google a 301 or a rel-canon. But since I only have access to JavaScript and html in the page head, this cannot be done. I'm kinda running out of options quickly, so if anyone has an idea as to how the BEEP! I get Google to index the right domains for the right devices, please feel free to comment. 🙂 Any and all ideas are more then welcome.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ReneReinholdt0