Website Image SEO Checklist: 25 Tasks to Complete Today

Use this checklist to audit and improve the image SEO on any website. Work through it systematically — even completing 50% of these tasks will produce measurable improvements in image search rankings and page speed.

Part 1: Alt Text (Critical Priority)

• ☐ Every informative image has descriptive, unique alt text
• ☐ Alt text is under 125 characters
• ☐ No alt text starts with "image of" or "picture of"
• ☐ Focus keywords are included naturally in alt text where relevant
• ☐ Decorative images have empty alt attributes (alt="")
• ☐ Logo image has brand name + "logo" as alt text
• ☐ Button images have alt text describing function, not appearance

Part 2: File Names (High Priority)

• ☐ All image filenames are descriptive (no IMG_1234.jpg)
• ☐ Words in filenames separated by hyphens, not underscores
• ☐ Filenames are lowercase
• ☐ Filenames include primary keywords where relevant

Part 3: File Optimisation (High Priority)

• ☐ All images compressed (target: under 100KB for blog images)
• ☐ WebP format used where possible
• ☐ All img tags have width and height attributes specified
• ☐ Lazy loading implemented for below-fold images

Part 4: Page Context (Medium Priority)

• ☐ Key images have informative captions
• ☐ Images are adjacent to relevant text (not randomly placed)
• ☐ Page title and H1 are aligned with image content

Part 5: Technical (Medium Priority)

• ☐ Images included in XML sitemap
• ☐ No broken image links (check with Screaming Frog)
• ☐ Images served from CDN
• ☐ LCP image (largest above-fold image) preloaded

Part 6: Structured Data (Low-Medium Priority)

• ☐ Product images included in Product schema
• ☐ Recipe images included in Recipe schema
• ☐ Article featured image included in Article schema

Quick Reference: Priority Order

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