Tools to optimize images for visual search

Visual search has gained a lot of popularity in the last few years with the big players like Google, Bing and Pinterest, launching their visual search tools. While local brands and businesses ramp up their efforts to improve the quality of their product images on their websites and e-commerce platforms, the question of image size has become a hot topic. Does the image size matter for SEO? How does the size of the image affect the speed of the page?

What does Google recommend?

• Use high-quality images
• Place them on a prominent spot on your page
• Always use Alt text for images
• Use descriptive page titles and file names for your images
• Provide an image caption if possible

While is great having high-quality images on your website, they are considered a website resource and do affect page speed loading time, therefore they should be scaled and compressed. Whether your image is 1200px in width or smaller, what matters most is the weight of the image, which is the file size in MB, not necessarily the pixel size. While there are quite a few image compression tools available below is a list of some smart image compression tools that use lossless compression, which doesn’t negatively affect image quality.
They compress images quite a lot, without any perceivable loss in quality.

While image compression is important to improve page loading speed, it is important to note that over-compression images can have a negative effect, especially if they are product images and the goal is to rank high for visual search on mobile.