Sean Walsh
Sean is a Director at Intelligency heading up our digital marketing and client services operations. Sean has 15+ years experiencing working both in-house and agency with brands including Lloyds, Alstom, Hitachi, Lufthansa, Viaplay, DFDS Seaways and Mercedes-Benz.
Google has made a small but useful update to its image SEO guidelines. If you’re using the same image on different pages of your website, Google now recommends that you reference that image using the same URL each time. This helps with website efficiency and makes it easier for Google to crawl your site.
What’s new in Google’s guidance?
In its updated advice, Google now suggests that websites should avoid uploading and referencing the same image multiple times using different file names or links. Instead, reuse the same image URL wherever the image appears on your site.
The reason comes down to something called a “crawl budget.” This is the amount of time and effort Google spends scanning your website. If you’ve got several versions of the same image under different links, Google ends up wasting time looking at duplicates. Using a single URL allows Google to recognise and reuse that image, which speeds up crawling and improves efficiency.
Other image SEO best practices
Alongside this update, it’s a good idea to keep the rest of your image SEO in shape. Here are some other best practices to follow:
- Use descriptive file names: Give your image files names that describe what’s in the image (e.g. red-running-shoes.jpg instead of IMG1234.jpg).
- Add alt text: Use alternative text (alt text) to describe your images for users with visual impairments and to help search engines understand what the image is showing.
- Choose the right image format: Use modern, web-friendly formats like WebP or compressed JPEGs to improve page speed without losing quality.
- Compress your images: Smaller file sizes help pages load faster, which improves user experience and SEO.
- Make images mobile-friendly: Ensure your images resize properly on smaller screens.
- Use image sitemaps: Including images in your sitemap can help Google discover them more efficiently.
- Provide context around images: Use relevant captions and place images near related text so Google can understand their relevance.
Why this matters for marketers
If you’re managing a website with lots of content, small tweaks like this can have a noticeable impact over time. Avoiding duplicate image uploads keeps your site lighter, more organised, and easier to maintain. It also makes life easier for Google, which can contribute to better search performance.
For marketers working with developers or managing CMS platforms, it’s worth checking whether your site reuses image files under different links. If it does, consider streamlining those into a single, consistent image URL wherever possible.
Even though this change may seem small, it’s a helpful reminder that SEO isn’t just about words – it’s about how your whole website is structured and how efficiently it performs.
