Imagine you spend hours creating an informative and helpful infographic for your audience. Then it hits you, all that effort is for nothing if Google never ‘sees’ the embedded content and ranks it for your audience to see. The concept that Google can’t read images still remains skeptical in SEO spaces.
We’re here to give you some clarity on whether that’s true and how Google’s algo interprets images today.
How Does Google Read Images?
With the growing concern of Google not being able to extract text from images, Webmasters are shuffling to remove them from their websites. In fact, someone asked on Google Help Centre if adding text inside images is bad for SEO. Here’s what a developer had to say:
“While Google is clearly ‘capable’ of reading text in images with OCR, there is no guarantee it going to do it systematically when reading page. And of course if in a fancy font, or done in some sort of artistic style, OCR may fail.”
OCR or optical character recognition is a model that uses Vision API to extract text from images. It supports different formats, including GIF, JPG, PNG, and TIFF images, but does not read Adobe PDF or Microsoft Word documents.
Essentially, it applies a combination of machine learning and embeddings to identify image patterns, retrieve text, and index images based on the extracted information. The technology is used by Google to check for relevance and search intent in images for the purpose of ranking them on the SERPs.
How Does It Help With SEO?
A website has a lot more than just text. It also contains images, videos, PDFs, scanned documents, and graphic elements. Since search engines initially only read text, it meant text was the only on-page element used to index pages.
Over time, they introduced OCR technology and upgraded it continually to make images readable and indexable. Yes, a series of OCRs, primarily Vision API, can now convert non-text website elements into indexable text that contributes to your website’s SEO.
So, can Google read images for SEO? Yes, the OCR technology helps Google systems analyze image structure and translate the extracted text into code that a word processing software can understand.
How To Make Your Images Google Readable?
Image optimization for SEO starts with understanding how Google’s OCR works and how you can leverage it to boost your visibility. Use these simple tricks to get your images in front of search engines, and by extension, your online audience. These work either as direct image elements or assisting factors that make your images searchable and indexable.
- Include keywords directly into the image, so Google can interpret its relevance and prioritize your image when ranking non-text formats.
- Add alt text to all existing images on your page to send strong relevance signals. This way, Google can both read the image and the text around to determine the context.
- Don’t just rely on visuals when targeting high-priority keywords. John Mueller suggests being pragmatic by adding important text not just in images, but also around it in actual text format. The idea is to make sure that text is not missing from your pages, assuming the images weren’t there.
- Define images with captions that carry context about the physical object, idea, and solutions highlighted in the photo.
- Make image filenames descriptive, practical, and relevant. Here’s more about how to optimize filenames for SEO.
The Era of AI Mode
AI Mode is essentially leading to a new search era where search is shifting to generative answers. As sites scramble to find ways to get featured in the AI Mode responses, it’s essential to also look at how AI mode behaves with images. Here’s an example of how it pulls up image search results. When we asked AI Mode to show us what a grey parrot looks like, it pulled up the OG results from the Images section of the Google search.
Seeing that AI mode is trained on the existing Google image library, it seems that image optimization for this feature isn’t separate from standard image SEO best practices.
With that, we conclude our SEO myth that has had many SEOs under the weather over the years. The idea that Google can’t read images is, in fact, a hoax. In the past, this was true, but now Google can read images. Despite that, it shouldn’t be your core feature for optimization. A combination of text, images, and visual assets, combined with appropriate optimization techniques can help boost a website’s visibility and rankings in the long run.