Image SEO: alt text, filenames, and compression for local business sites

Why images matter for SEO beyond just looking good

Images on your website serve two purposes: they communicate to visitors, and they communicate to search engines. The way you handle them affects both page speed (a direct ranking factor) and how well Google understands what each page is about.

Most small business websites I look at have image problems: files named "IMG_4832.jpg" with no alt text, 4MB photos loaded on mobile that kill page speed, or decorative images cluttering Google's attention away from content. All of these are fixable, and most of the fixes are free.

Alt text: what it is and how to write it well

Alt text (alternative text) is the written description attached to an image. It serves two purposes: it's read aloud by screen readers for people who can't see images, and it's read by Google's crawlers to understand what an image contains (since Google can't truly "see" images the way a human does).

Good alt text is descriptive and natural. It describes the image the way you would to someone who couldn't see it. For a local business, this is also an opportunity to naturally include your service and location where it's honest to do so.

Examples:

• Bad: alt="" (empty — wastes the opportunity)
• Bad: alt="photo" (generic — tells Google nothing)
• Bad: alt="plumber plumbing Duncan BC plumbing services plumber Duncan" (keyword stuffing — actively harmful)
• Good: alt="Plumber installing a hot water tank in a Duncan BC home"
• Good: alt="Freshly landscaped front garden in Cowichan Bay with native BC plants"

Write alt text for every meaningful image on your site. Decorative images — patterns, dividers, abstract backgrounds — can have empty alt text (alt="") so screen readers skip over them.

Filenames: name images before you upload them

The filename of your image is another small SEO signal that many businesses ignore. A file named IMG_4832.jpg tells Google nothing. A file named deck-building-nanaimo-bc.jpg reinforces the topic of the page it appears on.

Rename your images before uploading them to your website. Use lowercase letters, hyphens between words (not underscores or spaces), and include the relevant service and location where it makes sense. Keep it honest and descriptive — the same principle as alt text.

You don't need to rename old images already on your site unless you're doing a broader update — renaming live images changes their URLs and can break links. But going forward, building good naming into your workflow costs nothing.

Compression: the biggest image SEO issue for most sites

This is where most local business websites lose the most ground. A modern smartphone takes photos at 3-5MB per image. Loading five of those on a single webpage means 15-25MB of image data before the page even has text on it. On a slow rural connection — common in parts of Vancouver Island like the Cowichan Valley or northern communities — that page may take 20-30 seconds to load. Google knows this, and it affects your ranking.

The fix is to compress and resize images before uploading them. Target sizes:

• Hero / banner images: 800-1200px wide, compressed to under 200KB
• Gallery or portfolio images: 600-900px wide, under 100KB each
• Thumbnail / card images: 400-600px wide, under 60KB each

Free tools for compression: Squoosh (squoosh.app) is excellent and runs in your browser — no installation needed. TinyPNG (tinypng.com) works well for PNG and JPG files. Both will typically reduce image size by 60-80% with no visible quality loss.

WebP format: a meaningful improvement

WebP is a modern image format developed by Google that produces smaller file sizes than JPEG or PNG at equivalent quality. All modern browsers support it. If you're building a new site or have the ability to re-export images, WebP is worth using — it can reduce image sizes by an additional 25-35% over well-compressed JPEG.

Squoosh lets you convert to WebP in the browser. WordPress converts images to WebP automatically if you're using a modern caching plugin. On a static site built by someone like Design Menu, images are typically served in WebP format as part of the build process.

Geolocation in image EXIF data

There's a persistent myth that embedding GPS coordinates in image EXIF data helps local SEO. The evidence for this is thin. Google has stated that EXIF data is one of many minor signals at most. Don't spend time on this — the compressed, properly-named, properly-alt-texted image will do far more for your rankings than fiddling with metadata.

A practical image checklist for your site

• Every meaningful image has descriptive, natural alt text
• No image files are named "IMG_XXXX" or "photo1"
• No image on the site is larger than 300KB (ideally under 150KB)
• Images are sized to their display dimensions — not a 2000px image displayed at 400px
• Hero images load quickly on a mobile connection (test with Google PageSpeed Insights)

If you're not sure how your images are performing, run your site through PageSpeed Insights. It will flag oversized images and suggest specific improvements, with estimated savings in load time.