The last core updates caused a lot of change and moved some websites down a few places in the organic ranking. However, image rankings were spared, as some observers were able to notice. Since the image ranking did not have quite as much influence on the ranking position before, this area was partly neglected. Now, however, image SEO has come to the fore again after the Core Update caused a turnaround.
Where pages and content were moved down in the rankings, images remained in the same place or even moved further forward. According to Blutwert.net, image SEO even went up significantly after the core update. In addition, more and more image on-boxes were displayed for specified keywords.
However, the development of image SEO cannot be tracked properly. On the one hand, this is due to the fact that Google Analytics does not show which click came via an organic result and which via images. On the other hand, the Google SearchConsole does not show the image traffic exactly, so that something could be done with it.
For example, if a certain keyword was entered, many users clicked on the image next to the first search result in the Google search results and thus did not reach the page of the first organic search result, but rather the website of the image. This showed that keywords with high impressions and thus good positions and rather poor clicks and CTR values were represented by images in the onebox or in the knowledge graph. Unfortunately, image SEO is still often underestimated and neglected.
After the update, image SEO had saved some websites from a worse ranking. Image SEO thus represents a stable basis that should be used even more by other companies and websites.
