Image SEO: How to Get Your Photos Found in Google Images and Lens

On this page

1. Why image search matters for businesses
2. Use original photos wherever you can
3. File names, alt text and captions
4. Put images on the page the right way
5. Image sitemaps
6. Google Lens and product images
7. Choose the image that represents each page
8. Common mistakes, and how to check your results

Most advice about website images is about speed: resize, compress, use WebP. That matters, and it's covered in our guide to image optimisation for WordPress. This article is about the other half: helping Google understand your images so they appear in Google Images, Google Lens and image-rich results, and bring customers to your site.

Why image search matters for businesses

People search with pictures more than many business owners realise. A shopper sees a lamp in a café, photographs it with Google Lens and looks for where to buy it. Someone planning a home browses Google Images for "modular kitchen design" ideas and clicks through to the interior designer whose photos they liked. A patient checks what a clinic looks like before visiting.

Image search works best for visual businesses such as interiors, architecture, furniture, fashion, jewellery, food, products, real estate, events and travel. But any business with real photos of its work can benefit.

Use original photos wherever you can

Stock photos appear on thousands of websites, so Google has little reason to show yours over everyone else's, and a Lens search on a stock image usually leads to someone else's page. Original photos of your products, projects, team and premises are unique to you, which makes them more likely to be shown and more convincing to customers. Our guide to preparing photos for your website covers taking and editing them.

File names, alt text and captions

File names

Rename files before uploading. teak-dining-table-6-seater.webp tells Google far more than IMG_20260914.jpg. Use a few descriptive words separated by hyphens, and don't stuff your city and every keyword into each file name.

Alt text

Alt text is read aloud by screen readers, and Google uses it as an important clue to what an image shows. Describe the image in a short, natural phrase:

• Good: "Rooftop solar panels on a warehouse in Pune"
• Weak: "solar" or "image1"
• Bad: "solar panels solar company Pune best solar installer Pune"

Purely decorative images, such as background shapes and divider icons, can have empty alt text. In WordPress, alt text is set in the media library and reused wherever the image appears, so check it still makes sense on each page.

Captions and surrounding text

Google also reads the text around an image: the heading above it, the paragraph beside it and any caption. Place images next to the text they relate to, and add captions where they help readers, such as a project name, a product name or what a before-and-after comparison shows.

Put images on the page the right way

• Use real image elements. Google indexes images added with standard HTML image tags, but not images set as CSS backgrounds. Page builders often create banner sections with background images. That's fine for decoration, but photos you want found in search should be inserted as normal images.
• Use supported formats. JPEG, PNG, WebP, GIF, SVG and AVIF can all be indexed. WebP is usually the best balance of quality and file size.
• Keep lazy loading standard. WordPress's built-in lazy loading is search-friendly. Some script-heavy sliders and galleries only load images after a click or swipe, and search engines may never see them.
• Use sharp, good-quality images. Tiny, blurry thumbnails rarely do well. Serve a large enough version and let responsive image sizes keep files small on phones.
• Keep image URLs stable. Changing image addresses during a migration or redesign means Google has to rediscover them, so plan redirects and keep file paths where you can.

Image sitemaps

An image sitemap lists the images on each page, helping Google discover images it might otherwise miss, such as those loaded by scripts.

• WordPress's built-in sitemap doesn't list images, but popular SEO plugins can include them in your page and post sitemaps. Check your plugin's settings.
• Google now only uses the image location from image sitemaps. Older tags for captions, titles and licences were deprecated, so there's no benefit in filling them in.
• Submit your sitemap in Search Console and check it for errors. See XML sitemaps explained.

Google Lens and product images

Lens identifies objects in a photo and shows matching products, places and web pages. To give your images a chance of appearing:

• Show products clearly: one main product per image, good light and an uncluttered background, plus a few in-use shots
• Photograph products from several angles, because people will photograph them from any angle
• Add Product schema with price and availability to product pages; most WooCommerce SEO setups can generate this
• For online stores, submit your products to Google Merchant Center so they can appear in Google's shopping results. See Google Merchant Center for WooCommerce.

Choose the image that represents each page

Search results, Google Discover and WhatsApp link previews often show a thumbnail next to your page. Help them pick a good one:

• Set a relevant featured image and social sharing (Open Graph) image on every important page, ideally at least 1200 pixels wide, and not just your logo
• Allow large image previews. WordPress does this by default, but check your SEO plugin hasn't changed the setting
• Avoid text-heavy graphics as the main image, as they look poor when shrunk to a thumbnail

Common mistakes, and how to check your results

These are the problems I see most often on WordPress sites:

• Thin attachment pages: older WordPress sites can have a separate, nearly empty page for every uploaded image. Newer installs disable these, and SEO plugins can redirect them
• Blocking image folders in robots.txt, which stops Google indexing your images
• Blank or copied alt text across whole galleries
• Important text inside images, such as prices or service lists, which search engines may not read reliably and screen readers can't read at all
• Large watermarks across the product. A small corner logo is fine

To see whether your work is paying off, open Google Search Console's Performance report and switch the search type to Image to see which searches show your images and how many clicks they bring. Look for pages with plenty of impressions but few clicks, and improve their images, alt text and surrounding content.

Want your images, and the rest of your SEO, set up properly? See WordPress SEO services, and pair it with speed optimisation so your images are fast as well as findable.