Images can make your website’s content more appealing, and they also help your site rank better and engage your readers, if implemented properly, says Lilo Web Design. Many website owners have found that adding images increases their page views, but how does the quality of the images factor in, especially when it comes to Google rankings?
Should You Be Careful About Using Too Many Images?
Overstuffing keywords in your content is dangerous, but what about overstuffing images? Will you be penalized for using a lot of images?
Images can slow down page load times, which hurts your rankings and can affect how long people stay on the page. Pages that load slowly tend to rank poorer than fast loading ones. Unfortunately, there is no standard for how many images are too many. You need to base your image limits on what your page can handle in order to still load quickly.
Be careful about taking large image files and embedding them on your page. They can hurt your page load speeds and rankings. Page speed is a ranking factor, though it isn’t one of the big ones, and you need to be aware of the ways that images, especially multiple images, affect your overall ranking.
You may have some workarounds that make the images load quickly, though, and if you can employ these, then you can have lots of images on the page and not worry about page speed. Use methods like file compression and lazy loading techniques to make your pages load faster with multiple images on them.
Do You Need Images to Rank Higher on Google’s Search Engine Results?
There is no evidence to show that, since many sites use no images or few images and manage to rank very well (source).
Check out any SERP’s first page, and you will see that there are often no images present. Wikipedia has no images on many of the pages on the site, and yet it ranks very well without any issue, say SEJ. This destroys the false claim that images are necessary for high page rankings. Our assessment is that having multiple images on a page is not necessary for decent rankings. We have found no proof that you need lots of images or any image for your page to rank well. Google’s algorithm does not seem to take that into account as a ranking factor.
What this means for you is that you don’t need to set a limit on images in order for your site to do well. Adding a specific number of images doesn’t make Google pay more attention to your site, just as having a certain word count isn’t necessary to rank well.