Google Images

Going through some of my analytics I notice that a few of my images are ranking pretty well for keywords that I'd like to target, but my actual pages aren't. I'm getting good amounts of impressions, but zero clicks. A couple of questions:

1. Can I replace those images (making sure I keep the same file name/location) without being penalized by Google? Will it affect rankings positively or negatively?
2. Do you guys have any strategies of making those images more appealing to get clickthru's to my pages? I was thinking of adding text to the images with teaser lines that might interest prospects enough to clickthru to the site.

Thanks in advance!

cousty said:

2. Do you guys have any strategies of making those images more appealing to get clickthru's to my pages? I was thinking of adding text to the images with teaser lines that might interest prospects enough to clickthru to the site.Thanks in advance!

Click to expand...

Yes. This is what I'm doing to Featured Images and thumbnail images whenever I update my client's websites. Apart from the title and meta description, I also write something on the ALT text.

cousty said:

Can I replace those images (making sure I keep the same file name/location) without being penalized by Google? Will it affect rankings positively or negatively?

Click to expand...

Sure, you can implement some minor changes to the images. For example, adjust their size a bit, apply some text, stickers etc. All that is unlikely to affect your current Google's rankings.

... but there's also no guarantee that it will improve them and make people click more.

Are they ranking in google images or google search results. If they are ranking in google images, altering the picture (color, size etc) would affect its rank in google images. However if you are interested in google search results, altering an image (adding meta, descriptions, etc) will not affect your search rankings.

Thanks for the help. The pages themselves aren't ranking, but the images are. So if someone searches my keyword, the 3rd or 4th result on the page is the first 5 images from Google Images, and I'm in that group. I'm just not getting clickthroughs. I'm hoping to replace that image with something that is more desirable to be viewed and hints that the page it's from will be valuable.