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How and why should you optimise your photographs for natural referencing of your website?
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 (SEO): What is it?
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.
Natural referencing can be divided into several categories. These include local referencing and image referencing. For information purposes, local referencing concerns local searches on Google and aims to optimise the presence of a site for Internet users who carry out searches in a given geographical area. Results are measured by visibility in the Local Pack or directly on the "Maps" tab of the search engine. Image referencing refers to visuals that appear in the Google Images search results or directly on the SERP (Google's results page).
Why is it important to optimise your images for SEO?
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.
The click-through rate (CTR) of a website can increase significantly with a better position in Google search results. For example, the first position may have an average CTR of 31.7%, while the second position has an average CTR of 24.7%, and the third position has an average CTR of 18.6%. This shows the importance of being in the first position for a searched keyword to maximise visits and conversions on a website.
How to optimize your images for real estate referencing?
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.
Conclusion
To optimise the effects of your SEO work and to maximise conversions, the quality of your images is an important factor. Images should be taken with a quality camera to ensure good resolution and attractive rendering. Additional solutions will allow you to optimise the rendering and make a difference. Create stunning visuals with our solution!
To sum up
NATURAL REFERENCING (SEO): WHAT IS IT?
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) aims to improve the visibility of a site in search engine results.
WHY IS IT IMPORTANT TO OPTIMISE YOUR IMAGES FOR SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION?
Image optimisation is an important factor in real estate search engine optimisation and can help to attract more organic traffic, and therefore leads, while improving the presentation of real estate.
HOW DO YOU OPTIMISE YOUR IMAGES FOR SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION?
There are several characteristics that define a quality real estate listing :
- Descriptive image name with relevant keywords.
- Fill in the Alt attribute with relevant keywords.
- Use the Webp format for images.
- Good quality images, adapted to different devices.
- Compress images to improve loading times.
- Create a sitemap dedicated to images.
- Work on the title, content, caption and description of the image.
- Avoid duplicate content of images on several pages of the site.