If you have a dropshipping store, optimizing images should be at the top of your list of things to do for SEO. Why? Because image optimization can speed up the time it takes for your site to load and bring in customers who are looking at Google Images.
Best of all, it’s a cheap way to improve both the user experience and your SEO, which will bring more organic traffic to your website.
In this article, we’ll quickly explain what image optimization is and how to do it (hint: it’s really easy). Then we’ll look at how optimizing your images will help your dropshipping business in the most important ways.
By optimizing images, file sizes can be made smaller. When things are done right, the quality doesn’t change. Can you tell which of these two images has been optimized and which hasn’t? (Source of image: TinyIMG)
What does optimizing an image mean?
You might think that image optimization is just about making image files smaller, but there is a lot more to it than that:
Image optimization is mostly about making images smaller, but it’s also important to keep the quality of the images. Images are the only way for online shoppers to know what a product will look like and how it will feel, and they expect to be able to zoom in to see small details.
The name of the image file is also important because it has a lot to do with how high your image will rank in search results.
Last but not least, search engines also look at an image’s alt tags, which are words in an HTML code that describe how an image looks and what it does, to decide how it should be ranked for a certain search term. So it’s also important to make sure your images’ alt tags are search-friendly.
There are a lot of different parts to optimizing an image, but there are also tools that can help you do it. You should choose one that was made just for Shopify to make sure it works well and follows Shopify’s best practices for image quality and file type.
TinyIMG is a cheap tool that not only reduces the size of your images, but also improves their quality and makes Alt tags for them. Once you have it set up, any new images you add will be automatically optimized.
There are a few other things to think about when optimizing an image, and this detailed guide to image optimization goes over them.
But in the end, it’s all pretty easy. Just add the TinyIMG app to your Shopify store, then sit back and let it work on your images.
What can you expect to see once you have optimized your images? Let’s take a look.
Your page will load faster if you optimize the images on it.
Images are the most important part of any website that sells things. Having beautiful, high-quality photos of your products can do a lot to attract customers and get them to part with their money.
But if you add images to your store in the wrong way, they can slow down page load times. This could make the user experience worse and hurt your sales.
Even a few extra seconds could make a big difference in how interested people are in what you have to say. According to data about page speed, your page views will drop by 11% for every second it takes to load.
People spend less time on your site looking at your products if they don’t look at as many pages. And less sales are a result. And more than a third of people will leave your page if it takes longer than 5 seconds to load. You don’t want people who might buy from you to leave your website before it even loads.
It has also been shown that longer load times hurt conversions. Akamai says that a 100-millisecond delay in the time it takes for a website to load can cut conversion rates by 7%.
This means that if your website brings in $1,000 in sales every day, you could lose $25,000 in lost conversions every year.
If you make your customers wait every time they click a link, they are more likely to stop looking around your store before they buy something.
On the other hand, conversion rates go up a lot when your pages load faster.
If your store takes too long to load, customers will be less happy, which will hurt sales. Unbounce’s 2022 Page Speed Report shows that a shocking 70% of people say the speed at which a website’s pages load affects their decision to buy something from that site. Almost half of online visitors say they are less likely to buy something if it takes longer than expected to load, and a third say they are less likely to come back.
If it’s hard and slow to get around your store, people are less likely to come back for more. They are also less likely to tell other people about your store. A study by Akamai found that 46% of website visitors who had a bad experience with how the site worked were more likely to have a bad opinion of the company. 44% would tell their friends and family about the bad thing that happened to them. This is especially bad because sales from repeat customers and people who come to your store because they heard about it from someone else are much more profitable because you don’t have to spend any money on marketing or SEO.
Optimising your images can help you speed up your page because smaller image files load faster. In the case of one Shopify store, it took 19 seconds for customers to be able to use the site because it had a lot of images. This time was cut down to just 4 seconds by making the site’s images work better.
If you optimize your images, your SEO ranking will go up.
So, we know that optimizing your images will give you an immediate boost in terms of more page views and more sales.
But it will also be good for your store in the long run because it will help your SEO.
Why loading speed is important for SEO
One way that optimizing images affects SEO is that smaller image files load faster, which improves performance in search as a whole. To figure out why, you need to think about how Google works as a search engine.
Google uses an algorithm with more than 200 factors to choose which site to send a user to. There are more than just keywords among these factors. And Google has said that the speed of a site is one of the things its algorithm looks at to decide how to rank pages. So, it made a special tool to measure how fast pages load.
Google’s page speed tool makes it easy to track page speed and shows you where to make changes (Image source: TinyIMG)
Getting rid of the bounce rate to improve rankings
Bounce rate is another thing to think about. This is the number of people who visit your site, click on something, and then quickly click back. It is the number of people who leave a website without doing anything, like clicking on a link, filling out a form, or buying something.
Google keeps track of how long a person stays on a page when they click on a search engine result. Most likely, the number of times a user goes back to the search results page quickly affects the page’s rank. If a lot of people go back to the search results page quickly, it’s likely that the page doesn’t have much valuable content to begin with. So when people search for this term, Google will rank your site lower.
Load speed and bounce rate were found to be directly related: the longer it takes for your page to load, the higher the bounce rate. We’ve seen that optimizing your images is a great way to make your page load faster. In turn, this will help to lower your bounce rate and raise your SEO ranking.
Getting your images ready for Google image searches will help.
As we’ve already seen, optimizing your images means a lot more than just making the file size smaller. Adding Alt tags to your images is one of the most important things you can do to make them work better. This is why.
Moz says that 33% of all Google searches are for images. But when Google crawls your store, it can’t tell what’s in a picture on one of your pages. By using Alt tags, you can tell Google what is in the image.
Alt tags are short pieces of text that are shown in place of images if they don’t load. They are written in the HTML code of your page.
Here’s how to write an Alt tag for a picture of a product: (and how not to). Make sure the Alt tag clearly describes what the image shows and includes any product numbers.
(Source of image: TinyIMG)
Google uses these words to search for images. If someone searches for an image of “White Nike Air Force 1 Sneakers,” the image from an online store with the Alt tag “Product photo of Nike Air Force 1 07 Sneakers in White 315122-111” might come up.
The easiest way to fix your Alt tags is to download a Shopify app like TinyIMG that optimizes images and makes Alt tags for you automatically.
Why dropSFree traffic is organic traffic. Traffic from organic search doesn’t cost anything, unlike ads on Facebook or Google. So you keep more of the money from each sale and have more control over your marketing costs if the price of paid ads goes up.hippers should be happy about free traffic
So, it’s clear that optimizing images will help your SEO. But why does this matter for your dropshipping store?
As a dropshipper, your goal is to get great products to people who want them at the best price possible. Because your profit margins will be small, it’s important to find the least expensive way to get people to come to your store.
Organic traffic: which is customers who find your store by searching on a search engine or clicking a link from another site, is one of the best ways to deal with this problem. Here are three good things about organic traffic:
Paid traffic converts less well than free traffic: Both SEO and SEM (which stands for “Search Engine Marketing”) have higher conversion rates than paid ads or paid social. This means that more of the people who come to your store will buy something.
Organic traffic generates revenue: Organic traffic is not only free, but it is also the second best source of traffic in terms of making money, after direct traffic. This means that people who find your site on their own will actually buy from you.
In short, if you improve your SEO, you’ll get more traffic that converts better and brings in more money. And the best part is that it’s free! And making sure your images are optimized is a quick and cheap way to improve your SEO.
(Photo from Firepush)
Key takeaways
To sum up, optimizing your images is an important way to make your site work better. Here are the main things you will like about it.
- It will make your store load faster, which will increase the amount of time people spend on your site and the number of people who buy something. Shorter load times will also make it more likely that people will tell their friends about your store, which will help your business in the long run.
- Google likes sites that load quickly, so optimizing your images will also help your store’s SEO rankings. Adding Alt tags and making sure they are set up the best way will help you do better in Google image searches.
- The best part is that once you install an app to optimize images, it will keep running in the background and automatically optimize any new images you add. As you add new products or deals to your store, your site’s speed and SEO performance will remain strong.
- You can think of optimizing your images as the first step in making your dropshipping store better for users and sales.
These tips on how to use remarketing to make more money with Drop-Shipping will give you a lot of ideas for what to do next.