How to optimise your e-commerce store images

t’s likely that your website is optimised for search engines – but are the images?

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If the images on your website aren’t optimised, your ranking on Google won’t be as high as it could be, and this means that you could be missing out on a huge audience of people who would be interested in your products.

If you want to improve your Google ranking, here’s how to optimise your e-commerce store images.

Use text

Search engine bots are very smart, but sadly, they aren’t smart enough yet to read images, so you will need to add text to all of your images so that search engines can ‘see’ them. If you upload an image of a bike that you are selling, for example, you should also add relevant text to the image so that it can be correctly indexed.

This is especially important if you run an e-commerce website, as most of your website comprises of images.

Be careful with your keywords

Images and videos are the future of content marketing, but if you’re not using the right keywords, they won’t be seen by the right people. Remember that people use different keywords when they are searching for images instead of pictures, and tailor your keywords accordingly.

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If you want to find a London SEO agency who can help you create useful and relevant image keywords, check out https://www.elevateuk.com/.

Strengthen your technical SEO foundations

You should also make sure that the technical SEO foundations on your website are solid, as if they are weak, you may encounter issues with your images. Start by looking at all of your image filenames, as they need to be relevant to the actual image. This is especially important for product images, so customers will be able to find them through Google search.

Create an image sitemap

An image sitemap can be used by Google search engine bots to map all of the images on your website, and this will help to boost your store images’ online ranking. Make sure you also include relevant metadata, and if you are using a CMS, make sure it will automatically update the image sitemap.

These updates may take a while to make, but they can massively boost your SEO ranking, helping to improve your outreach and engagement, so it is well worth making the changes.

What Direct Funding can do for Your Company’s Bottom Line?

Most businesses have a problem with capital adequacy in their operations. Recent studies done on companies both large and small indicate that many lack the money necessary to meet growth needs. Financing options such as operating leases, capital leases, and bank loans exist, but not every business either qualifies for them or is best suited to exploit them.

The best alternative to maximize available capital for businesses is through direct funding of equipment instead of outright purchases. The beauty of direct funding is that it frees up capital so you can invest it to help generate more cash for your business.

With direct financing, you can purchase equipment from leasing agents which you can then lease to other third-party users. Through this arrangement, you don’t burden your business with an inventory of equipment that holds your cash; instead, you only enter into the financing agreement once you identify a client to whom you are going to lease.

How Direct Funding Affects Your Bottom Line
Many benefits accrue to your business from direct funding. Amongst them include:

Tax Deduction
Since you are using the equipment to earn income that is accessible, the rental payments to the leasing agent will be treated as business expenses and therefore tax deductible. Thus, you should ensure that the payments are recorded well by your accountant.

Cashflow Management
With direct funding, you have immediate access to the services of equipment without making an initial capital outlay. This means the cash you could use for this purpose is saved and becomes part of your free cash flow. Since you will tailor your rental payments with your seasonal cash inflows, you will not burden your cash reserves. Often, you can use the leased equipment as the collateral. Hence, your other assets will be free and not tied to the funding.

Flexibility in Rental Options
Direct funding companies like BSB Leasing allow you to negotiate a workable lease rental payments periodicity that works for you. For instance, you may agree on a monthly, bimonthly, quarterly, semiannually, annually, or on a seasonal basis. You can often make payments through a nominated bank account agreed upon by the contracting parties.

With flexibility in payment, it means you will never have cash-strapped operations and your books will always look healthy because you are matching expenses to revenues they help generate.

Creating a Direct Funding Arrangement
To safeguard and guarantee the equipment they are giving to you; leasing agents may require some form of collateral from you. It is in no way a statement of mistrust, but rather security that their future payments will come according to schedule. However, the beauty of direct funding is that the leasing agent will take the equipment as the collateral which means failure to honor payments can make them repossess the equipment. Therefore, before committing to any direct funding agreement, ensure that your client can meet the periodic payments and that they are sufficient to cover the lease payments you are to make to the leasing agent and leave some profit for you.