Whether you’ve caught on to link building for SEO or been in the field before, it’s time for Google to see its potential for over a decade. Creating images with links is an easy and passive way to build links over time. To get the most out of your link-building strategy, understanding what image link building is and how to get your images found can be a huge advantage.
Understanding these FAQs will help you jumpstart your link-building strategies in the future, leading to higher search rankings and referral traffic through images.
What Is Image Link Building?
Image Link Building is the process of creating shareable images that, when used, will be attributed to your business and thus earn a link.
It’s a great way to get high-quality, natural links over time – it’s passive link building at its best!
Optimizing your images with alt text can help them be found more easily and is a great tactic for building quality links to your site, but it’s not the main part of what image linking is all about.
To successfully create image links, you need to identify an image that is trending and relevant enough to use over time.
Think of it like dance follies on TikTok. If a certain song and dance are gaining a lot of traction right now and receiving high search volumes, you can optimize the chances of your content being found on the social media platform by joining the dance craze of the moment by creating something in demand. and very relevant.
How Does Image Link Building Work?
Image link building allows you to get high-quality links from images you own. If your image is being used on a high domain authority site, you’re not only getting referral traffic, but also relevant backlinks that can continue to be used over time. The more relevant your images are, the longer they can get links back to you.
What Images Get The Most Links?
The images that attract the most links are the ones that are always in high demand.
These include:
INFOGRAPHIC
Images designed to simplify data/information are always more linked.
TREND IMAGES
We do not mean that all photos are link-worthy. If you’re producing photos related to current topics (eg, news topics, seasonal), more people will search for the trending keywords you’ve embedded in the alt text, optimizing your chances of being found.
For example, if you post an image on your blog explaining how to make DIY Christmas decorations. This content will drive more high-quality links to your site around December when people search for the seasonal keywords you’ve incorporated.
GRAPHICS
Who doesn’t like a good chart? Like infographics, they are evergreen content that people will always need and use links to refer to.
MAPS
People will always need to know how to get to places, and if you have a great navigation image optimized to be found with relevant alt text, you’re guaranteed to generate links.
This fun London pub crawl, for example, takes the effort out of searching and makes it worthy of a link, as consumers will want to use and share it.
How to build high-quality links through images
You need to think about what types of images are relevant and in high demand, the best way to do this is through high-quality keyword research and trend analysis.
Optimizing your images to be found requires a great deal of research into what your consumer market is looking for and this will make it easier to create successful alt text. Sites we recommend for finding relevant and highly in-demand keywords include:
GOOGLE TRENDS
Google makes it easy to find what’s hot to develop your image link-building strategy. They allow you to see the latest information on popular topics, and current trending searches, and search for individual keywords related to your business to understand their relevance to your target audience’s searches.
Let’s say, for example, that you are a children’s party company and you want to create images to use image link building to increase your SEO performance. Here, we look at the “child” topic as it relates to the industry your business is related to, and filter for image search results rather than web search results.
We can see that Christmas craft ideas for kids have increased by +1600% and Google considers it a rising topic, ranking #6 in the UK. This shows that your target consumer is in high demand for kids’ Christmas craft images, so why not take pictures of these to share as part of your holiday business portfolio?
Not only will you benefit from your images generating more links, but the demand for your company’s services will also increase!
Google Trends also allows you to compare keywords so you can see which words are being searched for the most and therefore the best ones to use. Here, for example, you can see that the word ‘Child’ is a better keyword to use compared to ‘Child’.
SEMRUSH KEYWORD TOOL
Another great site is SEMRush’s Keyword Tool, which gives you a much deeper insight into keyword research. You can compare up to 100 keywords at a time in your keyword overview, and recommended keywords to embed in your images are offered to make it easy.
SEMRush also has link-building tools like Backlink Analytics to help you see how many backlinks other popular images in your target area have.
Shutterstock-related searches and Flickr stats can also be used to track what your audience searches for most often.
SPREAD THE WORD
In addition to typical link-building techniques like internal linking, you can increase the reach of your images through guest posting and guest blogging on other authority sites, allowing you to build high-quality links to your site.
Don’t be afraid to reach out and build relationships, if you create good work they will appreciate the free content you offer in exchange for backlinks.
However, we do not recommend buying links as this is not a reliable tactic in the eyes of Google and can negatively affect your site’s ranking in search results.
CONCLUSION
Optimizing your images to be found using SEO link building is rarely talked about, however, once you get the hang of it, it will put you one step ahead of the competition and give Google one more reason to boost your SEO. site in search rankings.