3 Ways Images Boost Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in Mortgage Marketing

When most mortgage marketing professionals think of SEO, they think of some magical code that can only be cracked by paying someone large amounts of money for help.

We’ve got good news for you – this is simply not true!

A highly effective (and free) way to boost the search engine rankings for your mortgage website is to optimize (or SEO) your images. There are 3 easy ways to do this:

1) The often-overlooked ALT tags and Title text.
ALT tags and Title text are HTML tags that are associated with an individual image. Now don’t let the “HTML” wording intimidate you. Most content editing platforms like WordPress are set up so that you don’t have to be an HTML programmer to add ALT or Title tags (feel free to comment on this post if you’d like to learn more about where to add these).

When you see a picture of a house on a mortgage website, your mind automatically knows it’s a house. The search engines don’t have this mental ability. ALT and Title tags literally tell the search engine what the picture is. That’s why it’s important to include your target keywords (ex. “Mortgage Marketing”), so that search engines can see that it reinforces your site content and can factor it into their “mysterious” algorithms.

2) Size matters.
One of the many things search engines look for when they index your site is the amount of time it takes for your site to load. A main reason some pages take longer to load than others is because they contain massive images. Compressing these images and making them smaller will eliminate negative impacts to your page loading speed.

A simple Google search of “image optimizer” will yield some great free tools you can use to scale down the size of your images without sacrificing image quality.

3) Pay attention to the file name.
It is very common that people upload pictures directly onto their mortgage website without paying attention to the actual file name itself. How many images do you have on your computer that are saved as something like “image09999.jpg”?

Just like with ALT tags or Title text, rename your images directly on your computer to reflect one of your main keywords so that search engines can “read” what it’s about. Using our above example, the file name would instead look something like “denver-mortgage-marketing.jpg” (without the quotation marks of course).

As with any search engine optimization (SEO) strategy, the above tips are only one component of an overall mortgage marketing plan. It is however an often-overlooked and under-utilized component, which you can easily do without breaking the bank by paying someone else.

Click here for more tips on effective mortgage marketing strategies.