Google Will Update Referral Source to Show Image Traffic
on July 18, 2018
Yesterday Google announced that it is going to update the way we see traffic from Google images to our websites. The update will be rolling out in the next months which is definitely good news!
What’s Changing
Currently all the traffic which is coming from Google search and Google image search is shown under Google.com in Google Analytics:
Once the update is live I assume will be able to see something like this in GA reports:
Note: Google Search Console does give you the info on traffic from Google Images now:
How to Optimize Your Images
There are some easy steps that are surprisingly neglected by many website owners. In order to get maximum exposure from Google image search you should:
- name your images for people and search engines (i.e. instead of iyu70.png use google-analytics-traffic-sources.png)
- give titles to your images
- add keyword optimized alt tags
- create an xml sitemap for your images
- optimize and compress images
So let’s welcome this change and see how it will look like!
I cook digital marketing dishes. Take 3 tablespoons of on-page SEO, add 2 pinches of backlinks and sprinkle it all with paid advertising. Season to taste with actionable data from Analytics and bake until golden brown. Serve hot.