Image Search Traffic

[Smuck]

As some of you may know, we have a ton of Squidoo lenses. In looking at our traffic stats I've been noticing a trend where folks are visiting our lenses through images searches. Well, I looked at our real estate site and found the same.

I put together a lens on Traffic From Image Searches. Check it out. We put together a bunch screen shots on various image searches including images from our real estate site. The lens is geared towards a Squidoo lens, but you'll get the point.

A personal favorite of mine, not real estate related, is a Save The Children image search! We donate all of our proceeds from our Squidoo lenses to Save The Children. The image we use on the Save The Children lens is #1 out of 23,600,000 returns! Beating out Save The Children's own website!

Anyway, back to real estate. You ask, "What does an image search do for my real estate site?" Well, let me put it to you this way. I was a contractor for years and would sponsor little league teams in our community. More out of support than anything. To my surprise, Colleen and I were inundated with folks wanting to use the services our business offered as a result of seeing our sponsorship banner at the little league baseball field. These folks didn't go to the baseball field to hire a contractor! However, they happened to need one and saw our banner. I think the same thing holds true with image searches.

[Markz]

I focused on images searches and still do, we rank pretty well for some major keywords and it brings good traffic. The only downside I see is that it increases your bounce rate as many users are just seeking images to use on the web etc for themselves.

After saying that I just took a look and the bounce rate for images is 71% with an average time on the site of less than a minute so this confirms it.

[Smuck]

...and the bounce rate for images is 71% with an average time on the site of less than a minute...

You can expect a high bounce rate on this type of search, however, 29% may bring a lead. All it takes is one bona fide lead in a year or two to justify the effort. [see little league analogy in my first post]

[Markz]

Oh I totally agree thats why I still work on image searches, I get best results from my own site and REW blogs, Squidoo and AR dont work for me due to the images tags and the way they are coded.

It still baffles me though why/how Google determines what search terms have images showing, some dont seem to make sense.

You can expect a high bounce rate on this type of search, however, 29% may bring a lead. All it takes is one bona fide lead in a year or two to justify the effort. [see little league analogy in my first post]

[Markz]

Just to show others the value of image searches last month I had over 1,800 visits via images so well worth the time and effort.

[Smuck]

...Squidoo and AR dont work for me due to the images tags and the way they are coded...

Actually, the coding for images is no different than any other web page, however, don't use some of Squidoo image uploading features. I wrote about that here.

[curtisreddehase]

What do you do to help your images in the search terms

[Smuck]

What do you do to help your images in the search terms

Not exactly sure what you are asking, but I wrote a blog entry on how to insert an image here. Also, the key to ranking an image is the site's authority, as well as using the alt tag.

For the record, because of the blog entry cited above, I'm ranked #1 for handsome bald dude and bald dude in an image search! Google doesn't lie, right?

[thataway61]

I learned this from a photo shopped image of a deer with super large antlers. I get from 40 to 60 visits to my wordpress blog for "big rack" and "monster buck". #1 on the "big rack" image search - check it out, there are some other interesting big racks on that page. LOL

I still haven't figured out how to get lots of images indexed though.

[Markz]

The key to getting high traffic is to get an image ranked where they show above the web search as I managed to do below and also on a number of other terms:

Palm Jebel Ali