Most business owners we meet in Chelmsford, Colchester and Southend have spent real money on photography. A van with a clean livery, a finished kitchen, a team shot outside the office. Then the photos get dragged onto the website straight from a phone or a designer's folder, and nobody thinks about them again. That is a missed opportunity, and it is usually one of the quickest wins on a site.
Why Images Matter More Than You Think
Images affect rankings in two ways. First, they can bring traffic directly, through Google Images and the image carousels that appear in regular results. Second, and more commonly, they change how fast and how usable your page feels. A page that takes six seconds to show its main photo on a mobile connection in Braintree will lose visitors before they read a word, and Google measures that behaviour.
We are not claiming that renaming a file will vault you to position one. It will not. But image work is cheap, it is within your control, and it compounds across every page on the site.
Start With File Size and Format
This is where we begin on almost every audit. Photos straight from a modern phone are often three to six megabytes. A web page rarely needs more than a few hundred kilobytes for a hero image, and far less for thumbnails.
- Resize images to the largest size they will actually display at, rather than uploading the original and letting the browser shrink it.
- Use WebP or AVIF where your platform supports it. They are noticeably smaller than JPEG at similar quality.
- Compress before upload, or use a plugin that does it automatically.
- Keep logos and simple graphics as SVG where possible.
Write Alt Text for People First
Alt text exists so that someone using a screen reader knows what an image shows. Search engines read it too, which is why it matters, but the right approach is to describe the image honestly and let relevance follow.
A good example is "Electrician fitting a consumer unit in a Brentwood kitchen". A poor one is "electrician Essex cheap electrician best electrician". The second is spam, and it reads as spam. If an image is purely decorative, leave the alt text empty so assistive software skips it.
Filenames, Captions and Surrounding Text
Rename files before you upload them. IMG_4471.jpg tells nobody anything. loft-conversion-billericay.webp tells search engines and humans what to expect. Use lowercase and hyphens, and keep it short.
Captions are underrated. People read them more than body text, and they give you a natural place to add context. The text surrounding an image also helps Google understand it, so place photos near the paragraph that discusses them, not in a gallery at the bottom that nobody scrolls to.
Lazy Loading, Dimensions and Layout Shift
Set explicit width and height on your images. Without them, the page jumps around as pictures load, which frustrates visitors and counts against you in Core Web Vitals. Add lazy loading to images below the fold, but never to the main image at the top of the page, because that delays the very thing the visitor came to see.
It is also worth checking that your images are not blocked from crawling by an old robots.txt rule, and that they appear in your sitemap if you have a large library. We find blocked image folders more often than you would expect after a website rebuild.
A Simple Order of Work
If you only have an afternoon, do this. Compress your ten most visited pages first. Fix missing alt text on those same pages. Rename any key images that still carry camera filenames. Then check your speed scores again and see what moved. If you would rather have someone do the audit properly across the whole site, our SEO service in Essex covers this kind of technical housekeeping as standard.
Work through it in that order and you will have covered most of what matters without touching a line of code.
The Bottom Line
Image SEO is not exciting, which is exactly why so many competitors neglect it. Smaller files, honest alt text and sensible filenames take a few hours and keep paying back. Do the basics well before chasing anything cleverer.