Picture speaks louder than words
Here’s a screenshot taken on 8/23/2018 for my own name “derek chew” in Google image search.
I captured the first fold of the results page. It contains a total of 36 images; 9 per row. At a glance, there’s a professor with the same name who’s dominating the first row of the image results.
As it stands today, I have 4 out of the 36 spots or 11.11% of search real estate. What I would like to accomplish over the next 30 days is to improve my visibility to 12 spots or 33% of total real estate. Sounds doable? Let’s give it a whirl.
Let’s try to unseat him and improve my brand awareness through Google image search results.
While I’m building a corporate brand for our ad agency, I am also building my personal brand.
I will update this post every time I make a change that I feel will affect this page. So whether it worked or failed, you will know exactly what I did and learn from my mistakes or dominate your own image results searches.
Follow me as I catalog my journey into Google image domination!
8/23
I noticed that LinkedIn names your profile image filename 0.jpg for some reason. So there’s nothing you can do about that.
But I renamed the image anyways just in case there’s some shenanigans behind the scene.
And as of today, in Google main search, I am nowhere to be found in the image pack mainly. It only pulls the images from the first row of Google image searches.
So far, this is a great start – I’m pretty much invisible except for my LinkedIn profile!
And of course, I have my name in the URL as best practice.
Update: 1/27/2019
My initial goal when I started this experiment was to rank for 12 image spots after creating, distribution, and optimizing content and images.
While I didn’t get to 12 slots, I did manage to go from 4 to 8 image slots recently.
Getting featured in websites and contributing content to other websites is important if you want to show up for more images. Why? Because there is no way you can rank images from your website alone.
I was fortunate to be featured in VoyageLA.com’s edition featuring local businesses in my city.
One of the simplest thing you can do if you get featured is request the editor to use your name in their image alt attribute.
This helps your image rank in Google Image results on the respective websites.
Since then, I was featured on podcasts and other interviews as well. So I am waiting for those to get picked up very soon.
Until the next update.
