Are Image Captions Useful for SEO?

If you add images to your web page, you should make sure they convey the information you want them to. Here’s what you will need to do.

Automated Transcript:

All right, I’m going to jump right into questions because we had a lot.

The good news is, there’s some overlap so we can take an several birds with one stone.

And we’re going to take them in order in which they were received.

So Tim got to got them first.

Tim is the winner of the day, I was on a roll.

Oh my gosh, have you submitted some of the questions?

That’s awesome?

Yeah.

Okay.

Can you can I don’t need to know the answers to these this week either.

So if there’s, you know, not enough time to get to everybody else and, you know, we can push at least half of them off till next week.

I think I did four or five, I’m not sure.

Well, no you did for and that’s great.

It’s actually the other two questions that followed, you both from lavanya and Tricia are really, really similar.

Oh, cool.

Thinking a like, all great minds think alike.

So, okay, so I’m going to start with your first question, Tim?

Okay, so you ask do captions on images, add value to search captioning.

Terms of blog posts, not all images, just thinking of SEO content.

you want to elaborate on that a little

Yeah, I guess so.

I’ve just been doing some blog posts for a client of mine where she’s just writing providing the images and I’m just posting them on her behalf and she wanted to add captions to her photos, and, you know, to she’s starting to get more in the mindset of thinking, SEO on everything and the way she’s writing and doing, I think a decent job of writing content, providing good images.

So just wondering the value of what a caption would add to to those images throughout the article.

But my thinking is that any way that you can help Google understand what the page is about, is beneficial and can’t hurt.

So I that’s my prediction of your answer.

I think that’s a great answer, right?

It’s the only thing I’d add is

Have, are we starting with keyword research, to determine what we should write about?

And then is the caption using the phrases for which our customers are our talking about the topic about which were writing,

So it’s if let’s say we sell blue Widgets or let’s say our company sells widgets and we it doesn’t necessarily to add the cat, the word, widget, every caption, and of every photo we put on our website.

But what helps is the caption as it relates to what we’re focusing on for that page.

So each page would have a focus of a particular topic, right?

You know, I don’t like the idea of keyword it’s more topic per page and so as long as the captions relevant to the topic it helps Google understand what the picture is about and therefore what the page is about.

But if we were using the same captions over and over and over again thinking somehow that helps our SEO, because we have the word widget all over our website, we’re kind of

Missing the focus of having me Focus per page.

Can I add to that?

This isn’t what you asked.

But I also think I’ve read that captions are good user experience because captions are like, there’s like an order in which people like read things and caption stand out.

So, their eyes gravitate towards that and they’ll read them first.

It’s kind of like headlines.

You want to make sure you have headlines as well.

So as far as user experience too,

I’d add to that.

The idea that lets I actually did a website audit for a client this week, like, like before I got on this call and they had this picture of a guy doing some woodworking,

And the picture was is a very well taken very nice picture but what the company offers is retail displays.

And so the picture of a guy doing woodworking in their mind is see where handcrafting these retail displays for you, but the picture just looks like woodworking.

So if I go to the page, I say, oh there’s a woodworker.

This is a, I instantly my brain goes to this website.

His woodworking devices or this website does woodworking?

No, that’s not why they put it.

So if they had a caption underneath the image say we hand make all of our retail displays.

Now I know what the picture is about, right?

And if they’re trying to focus on retail displays they’ve now also included their keyword, right?

So that’s the, you know, this is this s

Yo, combination of good usability.

And good SEO?

Yeah.

If we can help it, and I mean, essentially really can add value if it’s done with focus is really the key there.

Yeah, exactly.

And again, we’re not trying to get a secret sauce.

You know there’s 200 ranking factors.

Yeah, maybe the caption is one of them, but it’s probably not one of the biggest, right?

So if the only mention of the keyword phrase for that, we’re focusing on the pages in The caption were probably is not enough.

Yeah, but if it helps establish that this page is about retail displays, not about woodworking, do you’ve not only done a better job with your SEO, but your usability as well.

Yeah, okay, thank you.