Image SEO: a walkthrough for small Sunshine Coast sites

Image SEO is one of the few website jobs a small business owner can do well without a developer, and most sites already have plenty of room to improve. To show how it works in practice, we’ll follow a hypothetical surf school in Coolum through the whole process, in the order we’d recommend, starting with the images already on the site.

1Audit the images you already have

Say you run a small surf school in Coolum. Your website has a home page, a lessons page, a page for school holiday camps, a gallery and a short about page. Over a few years you’ve uploaded photos straight from your phone, plus a few from a friend with a good camera.

Before changing anything, make a simple list. A spreadsheet works fine. For each page, note:

• which images appear on it
• the current file name (often something like IMG_4821.jpg)
• whether the image has alt text
• roughly how large the file is

Most website platforms show file names and sizes in the media library. To check alt text, open the image settings in your editor. If you’d like a quicker overview, a free page speed test will usually flag oversized images on a given page.

Then decide the order. Start with the pages that bring in bookings: in this case, the lessons page and the holiday camps page. The gallery can wait. It’s tempting to fix everything at once, but working page by page keeps the job manageable and makes it easier to see what changed.

2Name and resize before upload

For the surf school, the photos on the lessons page are the first fix. Each one is a full-size phone photo, several times larger than it ever appears on screen. That slows the page down, especially for visitors on mobile data at the beach.

Here’s the routine for each image:

1. Resize it. Make the width close to the largest size it displays on your site. For a full-width banner that might be around 1600 to 2000 pixels wide. For an image inside the text, much less.
2. Compress it. Free tools can reduce file size a great deal with no visible loss. Many platforms also offer modern formats like WebP, which are lighter again.
3. Rename it. Swap IMG_4821.jpg for something that describes the photo, like beginner-surf-lesson-coolum-beach.jpg. Use hyphens between words and keep it short.
4. Re-upload and replace. Swap the new file into the page and remove the old one from the media library if nothing else uses it.

A descriptive file name is a small signal on its own, but it helps Google understand what the image shows, and it keeps your media library far easier to manage. Resizing and compression matter more for how quickly the page loads.

3Write alt text that describes

Alt text is the short description attached to an image. Screen readers read it aloud to people with low vision, and Google uses it to understand the image and the page around it.

The test for good alt text is simple: would it make sense if someone read it to you over the phone? For the surf school, compare these:

• Weak: “surf lessons Coolum surf school best surf lessons Sunshine Coast”
• Better: “Instructor helping a beginner stand up on a soft board at Coolum Beach”

The first one is stuffed with keywords and tells a listener nothing. The second describes the photo and still mentions what and where, naturally.

A few guidelines:

• Describe what’s actually in the image, in one short sentence.
• Mention the place or service when it fits, not in every image.
• Leave alt text empty for purely decorative images, like background textures.
• Don’t start with “image of” or “picture of”. Screen readers already announce it as an image.

Google’s own image best practices cover alt text, file names and image placement in more detail, and they’re worth a read once you’ve done the first page.

4Image SEO beyond your website

Image SEO doesn’t stop at your own pages. For a local business, your Google Business Profile photos are often the first images a potential customer sees, sometimes before they ever visit your site.

For the surf school, that means adding clear, recent photos of lessons in progress, the meeting point, the boards and gear, and the team (with their permission). Visitors searching from Mooloolaba or Noosa want to know what to expect and where to go. Locals searching for school holiday activities want to see that the business is active and real.

Keep these photos genuine. Stock images and heavily edited shots tend to put people off, and they don’t show anything a customer can rely on. Add new ones regularly through the year, not all in one go.

Image context matters on your website too. Place each image near the text it relates to, and use a caption where it adds something useful, such as the location or the skill being taught. Images buried in a gallery with no surrounding text give Google very little to work with.

5Check the results in Search Console

Once the main pages are done, it’s time to see what’s changed. Google Search Console is free, and if your site isn’t connected yet, setting it up is worth doing on its own.

In the Performance report, you can change the search type from Web to Image. That shows which searches led people to your images and which pages they landed on. For a small site, the numbers may be modest. Look for patterns rather than single days: are the lessons and holiday camp images starting to appear for relevant searches?

Also check page speed again for the pages you updated. If the lessons page still feels slow after resizing images, the cause may be elsewhere, such as the theme, plugins or hosting. That’s the point where technical SEO support can help find the underlying issue.

Finally, keep the habit going. Every new photo gets resized, renamed and described before it’s uploaded. It takes a minute or two per image, and it saves another clean-up later. If you’d like help deciding where image work fits in your wider plan, our team offering SEO services Sunshine Coast businesses use can take a look with you.