SEO: our tips for optimising your website's photos

In an increasingly competitive sector, real estate professionals must be inventive and invest massively to stand out and thus perpetuate their business. In terms of lead generation, natural referencing is an interesting option to make your real estate agency viable and develop. Nodalview, the ideal marketing solution for your adverts' photos, has teamed up with Steolo, the real estate referencing specialist, to share with you advice on how to optimise your website's photographs.

Natural referencing is the set of techniques aimed at improving the visibility of a website in the natural results of search engines. Google's dominance is such that we are generally only interested in the optimisations necessary for this search engine. In fact, more than 92% of the world's traffic comes from Google and its solutions such as Google Maps and Google Images.

Image optimization is a key element of real estate SEO. Photographs are a very important communication tool for businesses, and even more so for real estate professionals. By optimising photos, you will help improve the pages on which they are present, which will affect your performance in the Google index. In addition, a good referencing in Google Images will also contribute to the increase of your organic traffic.

Beyond the purely SEO aspect, photographs allow you to present your properties in an attractive way, which is essential to reassure and seduce Internet users. This will not only help you stand out in the eyes of your contacts and sell more quickly, but it will also encourage other owners to entrust you with their property for sale.

Finally, image optimisation is important in anticipation of a possible market downturn. While today's estate agents are mainly looking for sellers, tighter lending conditions or inflation could make buyers scarce in the market. With well-referenced photos, you will increase the number of contacts.

There are several aspects to work on in order to optimise the photographs on your website, and thus improve the referencing of your real estate site.

• The name of the image must be well chosen. It is preferable to use a descriptive name that contains relevant keywords related to the property.
• The Alt attribute must be filled in. The Alt attribute is an alternative text that is displayed when the image cannot be loaded. It is important to use relevant keywords in this area to improve the SEO of the image.
• The format of the image is also important. Preferably use the new generation Webp format. It was created by Google to replace the various standard image formats.
• Images should be of good quality and suitable for different devices (computers, smartphones, tablets).
• Images should also be compressed to reduce their weight and improve page loading times.
• The creation of a sitemap dedicated to images is a good idea. As a reminder, the sitemap is a file that shows Google all the pages of the website. It is important to include images to improve their referencing.
• The title of the image (Title attribute), the content and context around the image, the caption and the description of the image are also areas to work on.
• Finally, it is important to avoid duplicate content. Images should not be copied on several pages of the real estate site, as this could create problems of cannibalisation in particular.