Introduction

No one likes to spend more time on websites that lack visual elements. In fact, most website designers these days use images and other visual elements to keep visitors hooked and stay on their websites longer. However, Google cannot always crawl all those images for indexing, which impacts the pages’ SEO. The good news is that you can resolve that problem with an image sitemap.

What Is an Image Sitemap?

An image sitemap is a specialized sitemap that search engines use to improve the indexing of images on a website. It plays a crucial role in ensuring that Google and other search engines can easily discover, crawl, and index images on a website. This is particularly important for websites with significant visual elements, such as service platforms, portfolios, and eCommerce sites. A traditional XML sitemap serves as a roadmap for search engines to discover and interpret website content. The concept of an image sitemap also extends from this traditional sitemap. With websites using more visual elements these days, the need for specialized sitemaps to help search engines efficiently index these elements has increased. An image sitemap offers additional details about the images on the website, such as the title, caption, image URL, geo-location, and license information. These details help improve image search visibility. Image sitemaps also ensure that relevant images are indexed and appear in image searchers. This can potentially drive more traffic to the website.

How Do Search Engines Use Image Sitemaps?

Since most marketers and website owners direct their SEO efforts toward Google, let's use Google as an example to explain how it uses image sitemaps. Once Google crawlers have access to your image sitemap, they start discovering and indexing the images on your site. Google image sitemaps are incredibly useful for pictures that could otherwise be challenging for Google to find through traditional crawling. Sitemaps also let Google crawl images loaded with JavaScript. This is because they offer an alternative path to locate and index the photos.

Why Do You Need an Image Sitemap?

There are several reasons why you need image sitemaps. Firstly, they boost your website’s SEO by ensuring that all images and visual elements on the site are indexed alongside the textual content. As a result, you can see an improved visibility of your site in search results, especially in image searches. Websites that rely heavily on visuals can leverage image sitemaps to boost engagement and conversion rates. Image sitemaps also significantly enhance a site's user experience. By helping search engines present relevant, high-quality images in search results, they make it easier for users to find the visual information they are looking for. It is particularly useful for SaaS and technology businesses, where visual appeal can strongly influence users’ perception and decision-making. When you use image sitemaps, your website is able to communicate more information about its images to search engines. The details typically include image type, subject, and more. The information can be crucial for websites with varied visual content or extensive image galleries. For example, if you run a photography studio, your website is likely to feature several high-quality images. Image sitemaps can be particularly useful for such sites. Lastly, image sitemaps can help global SaaS and tech companies with international SEO. As they provide geo-location information in image sitemaps, they enhance the local relevance of their images. As a result, the images are more likely to appear in region-specific image searches. While most websites with proper SEO will have images coded in a way that is easy for Google crawlers to discover, there are a few exceptions. For example, you might consider making an image sitemap if you:
  • Just launched a new web page with important photos
  • Want to index new visual content quickly
  • Have a website that uses a ton of photos, such as product images
  • Have a website where the content changes regularly
In a nutshell, the decision to use an image sitemap will depend on the nature of your business, site, and content.

How to Create an Image Sitemap?

Image sitemaps are essential for almost every website that has certain visual elements. Whether your business relies on images or you just want to make sure search engine crawlers index your hidden images, here are two different ways you can create a Google image sitemap.

Creating an Image Sitemap Manually

The manual process of creating an image sitemap includes the following steps:
  • Create a new XML file
  • List the images you want to include
  • Identify where the images are found
  • Add the image URL and a short description
Even though the manual process is quite straightforward, it can quickly become time-consuming and tedious. This process is ideal for small websites that do not have too many images. If you have a website with plenty of images, it would be really challenging for your team to add each image tag and metadata. Even if you use Webmaster tools to add tags to an existing Google XML sitemap, it will still take a significant amount of time.

Generating Image Sitemap Automatically

There are several tools in the market that can help you automate the image sitemap generation process. With the help of such an XML image sitemap generator, you can streamline the entire process. You only need to plug in a web page URL while the tool does the rest for you. Just copy and paste the results into a tax file and save it as an XML file. The automated process is undoubtedly more convenient. However, you need to make sure that the tool is capturing the images, titles, captions, and other metadata. You will also have to keep your image sitemap up-to-date as you continue adding new images to your site.

Image Sitemap Best Practices

If your website relies heavily on visual components, an image sitemap can help you boost your SEO performance and drive more traffic to your site. In order to maximize the benefits of image sitemaps, you should consider the following best practices:

Comply with Google Guidelines

While creating an image sitemap, you need to follow all of Google’s guidelines. These guidelines typically include Google’s list of best practices for ranking in Google Images, along with their general Webmaster guidelines. Apart from these guidelines, Google also recommends that you add image metadata to your sitemap. The metadata includes details like contact and license information. Google will include these details in any search results where the image ranks.

Conduct Regular Maintenance

Image sitemaps can quickly become outdated after a website undergoes several updates. For optimum results, you need to update and optimize your image sitemaps regularly. This practice will provide the Google search console with the details it needs to crawl and index those images. If you are using an image sitemap generator, you must update the tool whenever new versions are available. You should also check your image sitemap frequently to ensure that nothing has gone missing or been incorrectly changed since the last update.

Optimize Your Images

It is a good practice to publish optimized images on your site. When you compress the images, it helps your pages load faster. As you may realize, faster page load speed improves the user experience. As a result, users will be more likely to stay on your site longer instead of bouncing within a few seconds. Faster page load speed will also help you earn higher rankings. Since page load speed is considered a ranking factor, having optimized images on your website can have a positive impact on the site’s SEO. It is recommended that you compress the images before you start building the image sitemap.

Use Alt Tags

You should also remember to use alt tags on all your images. Alt tags are small pieces of text you add to images to describe what they portray. While the tags help users understand what the images depict, they also help contextualize pictures for search engines like Google. When search engines index your images, this text tells the crawlers what those images show. Adding alt tags is an effective way to contribute to your website’s rankings. It also boosts your chances of appearing in Google Images searches. These practices can significantly improve your site’s SEO. As a result, you can see more organic traffic and improved user engagement on your site. For SaaS and tech websites, where visual elements play a crucial role in product demonstration and user experience, a well-constructed image sitemap is essential for online success.

Wrapping Up

There is no denying that image sitemaps play an important role in helping your website images become more visible to users and search engines. While this practice boosts the SEO of your images, you can also provide more details about the images to the search engines. Even though you can generate image sitemaps with automated tools these days, it is always recommended to follow the best practices for image sitemaps to achieve the desired results.