How to Improve Your Image SEO and Rank in Google Search

Images aren’t just there to make your site look good—they can drive serious traffic. Done right, image SEO can pull in thousands of visitors each month from Google Image Search and other engines. But most sites treat images as a visual afterthought, skipping the optimization steps that actually make them discoverable.

If you’re uploading images without alt text, using filenames like IMG_9283.jpg, or leaving metadata blank, you’re missing out on organic search potential.

Here’s how to fix that—and how Vyso DAM can help you stay consistent as your image library grows.

Alt Text: Your First Line of Defense (and Visibility)

Alt text serves two purposes. First, it’s critical for accessibility—screen readers use it to describe images to visually impaired users. Second, it helps search engines understand what the image is about.

But here’s the catch: vague descriptions like “photo” or “banner image” won’t help anyone. Good alt text is concise, accurate, and descriptive. Instead of writing “mountain,” try “snow-covered Tatra Mountains at sunset.”

Vyso DAM can help you enforce alt text standards by making it a required metadata field at upload time. It also allows you to add alt text in multiple languages, improving both accessibility and international SEO.

File Names That Actually Matter

Yes, filenames count. Google looks at them when trying to figure out what an image shows. Uploading final-draft-banner123.png isn’t helping. Try naming the file based on its actual content, like autumn-forest-path.jpg.

In a fast-moving workflow, it’s easy for filenames to fall apart. That’s where Vyso comes in—it can auto-generate clean, SEO-friendly filenames based on metadata like location, title, or tags. It ensures your media stays optimized, even when your team is moving fast.

Metadata: Invisible, But Powerful

Behind every image is a set of metadata that search engines and social platforms quietly read. This includes title, description, licensing info, and even geolocation. The more complete and accurate your metadata, the more useful your image becomes—for both users and crawlers.

Vyso DAM structures metadata around your content workflows, not just technical specs. You can add contextual tags, link images to products or blog posts, and even embed Open Graph data for better previews on social media. It’s all centralized and searchable, so you can keep your assets consistent and SEO-friendly across your entire site.

Page Context Still Matters

Even a perfectly optimized image won’t rank if it’s sitting on a page that lacks context. Make sure the surrounding text reinforces what the image is about. Captions can also help—Google often pulls them into search snippets.

If you're using Vyso to serve images via your CMS or frontend, it ensures that every image comes with its associated metadata, alt text, and tags—making it easier to maintain context between image and content.

Speed = Rankings

Google cares about performance. Slow-loading images can tank your rankings, especially on mobile. Vyso handles automatic resizing and conversion to modern formats like WebP and AVIF, ensuring your pages stay lightweight and fast—without sacrificing quality.

Every upload is processed and optimized behind the scenes, so your content team never needs to think about compression, format, or dimension limits.

Bonus: Structured Data and Image Sitemaps

If you really want to go all-in, you can use structured data to help Google understand how your images relate to your content. For example, on a product page, image metadata can be tied to Product schema to enhance rich results.

Vyso makes this easier by exposing metadata through APIs that can be mapped directly into structured data. And because it keeps track of every asset and its usage, it’s straightforward to generate accurate image sitemaps as well.

Optimizing your images for SEO isn’t just about ticking boxes—it’s about making your content discoverable, accessible, and fast. With the right tools, it becomes a seamless part of your publishing workflow instead of a post-launch afterthought.

Vyso DAM helps you embed SEO best practices into every step of your image lifecycle—from upload to display—so you don’t have to micromanage the details.