How to maximize CTR from Google image search?

[Gavin.Atkinson]

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".

[DirkC]

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

[Gavin.Atkinson]

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?

[DirkC]

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