Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
How to maximize CTR from Google image search?
-
I'm getting good, solid growth in my Google SERPs and Google search traffic now, but I do notice that 70% of my high ranking search results are images and the CTR on those is only 3-4%. All my images are illustrative and highly relevant to my travel blog, but I guess that hardly matters unless they get CTR so people see them in context.
Has anyone seen or done any good research on what makes people click through on Google Image Search results? What are the key factors? How do you optimize for click-through? Is it better to watermark your images or overlay label them to increase likelihood of click-through?
Thanks, Tony
FYI the travel blog in question is www.asiantraveltips.com and a relevant Google search where I rank highly is "songkran 2016 phuket".
-
It's impossible to know - Google keeps the images cached on their server to increase performance when displaying them in the search results. It's only when people click on the "view image" that they get to your site. These views you could probably check in the server logs.
Don't try to redirect these images back to the "original" page when called from Image Search. It's something Google disapproves and again could lead to a manual action (check http://www.thesempost.com/google-manual-actions-issued-for-image-mismatch/ and https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/3394137?hl=en)
Dirk
-
Thanks Dirk, that's helpful. I'm not sure why the images are fuzzy on Google Image Search but those ones are rather small (576PX, whereas most of my images on newer posts are 800PX or even 1024PX). I don't know what size images work best for previewing on Google.
I do get into the image search strip for some search terms. Do you know how to track views of images (as distinct from click through to pages) at all? Is there a script I could be running on my VPS which would track view of images from Google Image Search?
-
3/4% is already quite a good rate for image search results. By definition image search is quite visual - and people click on the image they like most. Given that a lot more results are displayed in Image search as long as you are in the first 4/5 rows clickrates will be quite similar.
One exception - if Google includes a image strip in the normal SERP's you will get click rates of 30/40%.
Try to rank for different kind of images to cater for each kind of taste. I tried the search query and your site was ranked quite high (1st / 5th position) but compared to the images they were a bit fuzzy/not really sharp.
Certainly don't put very visible watermarks/overlayers - this will completely erase your images from the results (people don't like to click on them show Google doesn't like to show them)
Dirk
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
My url disappeared from Google but Search Console shows indexed. This url has been indexed for more than a year. Please help!
Super weird problem that I can't solve for last 5 hours. One of my urls: https://www.dcacar.com/lax-car-service.html Has been indexed for more than a year and also has an AMP version, few hours ago I realized that it had disappeared from serps. We were ranking on page 1 for several key terms. When I perform a search "site:dcacar.com " the url is no where to be found on all 5 pages. But when I check my Google Console it shows as indexed I requested to index again but nothing changed. All other 50 or so urls are not effected at all, this is the only url that has gone missing can someone solve this mystery for me please. Thanks a lot in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Davit19850 -
How to Get Rid of Dates Shown In Google Search Results
When I enter "Site: URL" to check what a search how Google displays search result, a date appears at the very front. This takes away several characters, really valuable real estate. How can I stop Google from displaying these dates? There are certain Wordpress plugins like "WP Date Remover" however the seem to only apply to blog posts. Dates are appearing on results on all my Wordpress pages. Is there an internal setting in Wordpress that will allow me to remove dates for these non blogpost pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan11 -
How old is 404 data from Google Search Console?
I was wondering how old the 404 data from Google Search Console actually is? Does anyone know over what kind of timespan their site 404s data is compiled over? How long do the 404s tend to take to disappear from the Google Search Console, once they are fixed?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Any tips on how tp get reddit or pinterest posts rank high on google images?
Hello I have noticed that for a keyword that has high competition it has on top image searches not that popular pinterest post & a reddit post, explorergram , youtube etc., the keywork is "24k gold iphone" and I am wondering if I could create somehow myself a pinterest or reddit post or something similar that would have images with my product rank high on that keyword, since my website does not rank well in mage search for some reason... https://www.google.fi/search?q=24k+gold+iphone+6&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0CAcQ_AUoAWoVChMI1f2LkpTxxgIVhI8sCh1SGwjy&biw=978&bih=550#tbm=isch&q=24k+gold+iphone thanks a lot
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bidilover0 -
Would changing the file name of an image (not the alt attribute) have an effect of on seo / ranking of that image and thus the site?
Would changing the file name of image, not the alt attribute nor the image itself (so it would be exactly the same but just a name change) have any effect on : a) A sites seo ranking b) the individual images seo ranking (although i guess if b) would be true it would have an effect on a) although potentially small.) This is the sort of change i would be thinking of making :  changed to 
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sam-P0 -
When i search for my domain name - google asks "did you mean" - why?
Hi all, I just noticed something quite odd - if i do a search for my domain name (see: http://goo.gl/LBc1lz) google shows my domain as first result, but it also asks "did i mean" and names another website with very similar name. the other site has far lower PA/DA according to Moz, any ideas why google is doing this? and more inportantly how i could stop it? please advise James
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | isntworkdull0 -
Best practice for removing indexed internal search pages from Google?
Hi Mozzers I know that it’s best practice to block Google from indexing internal search pages, but what’s best practice when “the damage is done”? I have a project where a substantial part of our visitors and income lands on an internal search page, because Google has indexed them (about 3 %). I would like to block Google from indexing the search pages via the meta noindex,follow tag because: Google Guidelines: “Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don't add much value for users coming from search engines.” http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769 Bad user experience The search pages are (probably) stealing rankings from our real landing pages Webmaster Notification: “Googlebot found an extremely high number of URLs on your site” with links to our internal search results I want to use the meta tag to keep the link juice flowing. Do you recommend using the robots.txt instead? If yes, why? Should we just go dark on the internal search pages, or how shall we proceed with blocking them? I’m looking forward to your answer! Edit: Google have currently indexed several million of our internal search pages.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HrThomsen0 -
Does Google crawl the pages which are generated via the site's search box queries?
For example, if I search for an 'x' item in a site's search box and if the site displays a list of results based on the query, would that page be crawled? I am asking this question because this would be a URL that is non existent on the site and hence am confused as to whether Google bots would be able to find it.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pulseseo0