The Ultimate Image Link Building Guide to Better Your SEO in 2025

image link building
Table of Contents

Image link building refers to a technique that helps you enhance your backlink profile by using visual content. 

As SEMrush pointed out in their content marketing report, articles with more than seven images attract 555% more backlinks than those without. 

While adding images to your content is not rocket science, successfully earning links with your images requires effort, resources, and effective image link-building methods.

In this article, you’ll learn:

  • The best visual types for attracting backlinks
  • Advanced image link-building strategies
  • Tactical image outreach and promotion methods
  • Common mistakes to avoid

You’ll also discover how expert link-building services like GrowthOG, with innovative SEO tactics, can help you master image link building and improve your overall SEO.

What is Image Link Building?

Image link building is a digital marketing technique that creates high-quality, compelling images that others want to use. In return, you receive credit for the images in the form of backlinks. 

This strategy leverages visual content, such as infographics, videos, graphs, and photos, to secure links from other authoritative websites and sites. 

Image link building is a powerful method to earn strong backlinks and enhance your image SEO. Wondering how to implement this strategy effectively? Look no further! GrowthOG can help you! 

With our extensive knowledge and experience, we can assist you in identifying and utilizing image link-building opportunities to attract valuable backlinks and significantly improve your SEO. Check out our backlink packages today! 

Benefits of Image Link Building

According to OptinMonster, content with images attracts 94% more views than content without visuals. 

Impact of images on performance

Image source

So, if you’re not already using image link building as part of your SEO strategy, you’re missing out on a great opportunity to improve your website’s ranking and visibility. This is why:

  • Earn quality backlinks: Other websites may not have the resources or expertise to create their own visuals. Creating high-quality, unique images can increase the chances of other websites using them and linking back to your site.
  • Increase referral traffic: If other sites use your images when they link to your content, people clicking those images will end up on your website, greatly boosting your traffic. Plus, visual content shared on forums and social media platforms can further amplify your content’s reach, driving traffic from various sources beyond just search engines.
  • Improve your Image SEO: Optimizing your images with relevant keywords in their ALT text enhances their visibility on search engine result pages (SERPs) and Google Images. Consequently, this attracts more users’ attention and valuable clicks. 

Types of Linkworthy Visual Assets

You can’t simply post a photo of your cat, expect it to go bananas, and bring hundreds of backlinks to your website. Keep in mind that your visual content should provide value to your site visitors, spark their interest, or entertain them in some way. 

To achieve this, ensure to create images that are eye-catching and relevant to your target audience. 

Some of the most effective types of visuals for magnetizing high-quality links include infographics, custom photos, interactive content, animated GIFs, and videos.  

Infographics

Infographics are incredible traffic and link magnets. 

They can transform complex and dull data into visually appealing and easy-to-understand formats, increasing views, shares, and links.

Recent statistics reveal that content featuring infographics can generate up to 12% more traffic, while articles that include infographics can boost external backlinks by up to 178%. This explains why infographic link building has gained so much attention for years.

Look at the Coke infographic below. It is simple, clean, and filled with interesting information to read. The infographic itself attracted 1K+ referring domains in a couple of weeks, including authoritative sites like Yahoo, The Telegraph, Vice, BT, and Mashable.  

Coke infographic

Image source

Custom photos

High-quality, original, and eye-catching photos of trendy or evergreen topics, including products, destinations, events, or data can attract links effectively. 

To achieve this, ensure you take or create exclusive and unique images that cannot be easily found elsewhere. Consider capturing images from different angles or perspectives to make them stand out. 

By doing so, it becomes more likely that people will use your photos and link back to your site as the image source. 

Interactive content 

Quizzes, polls, surveys, calculators, image sliders, and interactive maps and reports tend to attract more engagement and embedded links because they are fun, engaging, and educational. 

This interactive map “What Powers The World” has helped GoCompare earn backlinks from 256 unique domains. 

"What Powers the World" interactive map

Of course, creating interactive content requires significantly more time, effort, and investment, but it is one of the most efficient ways to attract links on a larger scale. 

Animated GIFs 

People love animated gifs because they can break up long text articles, evoke emotions, and keep them engaged on a page longer. 

Additionally, the more well-branded and shareable GIFs are, the longer they will circulate within the meme ecosystem. When your GIFs are shared widely, they can generate more clicks and recognition for the source, often with a link back to your site or original content.

This impressive data presentation GIF earned Fractl notable features on Yahoo, MSN, and USA Today. 

Presentation GIF example

Image source

Videos 

Using video content is an excellent way to generate links to your website. 

Consider creating videos that discuss intriguing or relevant topics in your industry, or interviewing a respected expert in your niche. You can also create “how-to” videos related to your products or expertise. 

If your videos are high-quality and informative, people will be more likely to share and link to them, even without you explicitly asking them to. 

Now you know the visual types that work best for attracting backlinks. The question is, how do you create images that go viral and serve your link-building purpose?

Answer – Tap into the TRUST formula.

The TRUST formula 

In a nutshell, the TRUST formula stands for Trending topics, Research and analysis, Unique takeaways, Simple visual, and Tactical promotion. 

Trending topics

Align your visual content with current interests and trends. This will help ensure that your content is relevant and timely.

Google News, Google Trends, and Exploding Topics are some of the best ways to find trending topics. 

Google Trends example

Research and analysis

Conduct thorough research to uncover new data, interesting angles, or unique insights about your topic. This will give your content a strong foundation and make it more credible. 

Don’t know where to get started? Here are some trusted data sources you can go to. 

Unique takeaway

Your images for link building should convey something unique that wows audiences or imparts valuable insights. Selecting and determining the unique ideas, data, or angles to put into your image is usually the most time-consuming part. 

Plus, don’t overwhelm your audience with a dense block of text. Instead, distill your research down to a few key points that are easy to digest and remember.

Consider David McSweeney’s infographic, “Is Tiger Smiling in Your State?” for instance. 

Everyone knows Tiger Woods is the top golf player, and he makes a lot of money. However, no one knows exactly how much he earns in each state. 

Wikipedia does provide statistics, but they are extensive and tedious to read. David took that information and transformed it into an appealing and fascinating infographic that was featured on Yahoo Sports and FHM. 

"Is Tiger Smiling in Your State?" infographic

Simple visual

Design your image in a simple and visually appealing way. Make sure the colors and text style are harmonious and easy on the eyes.

Use Canva, Crello, or Visme for inspiration and getting go with designing your visual content. 

Tactical promotion

Create a buzz around your image content to attract the attention it deserves. 

Identify sites whose target audiences resonate with your topic and reach out to them, submit your image content to reputable image directories, run ads, or share it on social media.

Pro-tip: Easily make your visual content go viral with GrowthOG! We specialize in creating visual assets tailored specifically to your audience and handling outreach, all to help you achieve better link-building success. 

Optimizing Images for SEO

To ensure your images are share-worthy and link-worthy, you must optimize them for search engine crawling, indexing, and ranking. 

Descriptive image file names and keyword-rich ALT text are essential for SEO, as they help search engines understand your image content. 

For example, an image file named “PNG_0001” makes no sense to users or search engines, while “white-hat-link-building-tactics-infographic.png” is way more descriptive and informative. 

Additionally, adding relevant keywords in your image ALT text provides context for search engine crawlers, enabling them to return the most relevant images for user queries. This practice also aids visually impaired users who rely on screen readers to access image descriptions. 

On top of that, high-resolution, easily embeddable, and responsive images are more likely to be cited and linked back to. Make sure your images can be easily inserted into web pages using HTML code snippets. 

To maximize your image reach and discoverability, research the keywords your target users search for in visual content and optimize them in the image file names and ALT text. This will significantly help your image rank higher in search results.

Developing an Image Link Building Strategy

Creating high-quality images and optimizing them for search engines is just the first step. To generate image backlinks in the long term, you need to develop effective image link-building strategies. 

In addition to the TRUST formula mentioned earlier, keep reading to discover three more proven image link-building tactics. 

Finding link placement opportunities

Consider this: small or medium-sized websites often lack the resources or budget to hire talented photographers or design teams to create their visuals. As a result, they typically resort to using stock photos or images from other sites as visual aids. 

By reaching out to these websites and offering your images, you can solve their problems while simultaneously securing a valuable backlink in return. 

Here is how you can find link placement opportunities for your images: 

  • Research and identify authoritative and relevant websites in your niche. Use Ahrefs to keep tabs on your competitors to see where their image backlinks come from. Make a list of these sites. 
  • Look at their blogs and note any pages that have stock photos, outdated data, no photos, or broken image links. Use tools like Semrush or Pitchbox to find 404 image errors. 
  • Create relevant, unique images (infographics, visual statistic graphs, charts, product photos, etc) that can add value to these pages. 
  • Craft a blog post and upload images on your website with a short, relevant introduction or description.
  • Conduct outreach to those sites and offer your images as replacements.

If your images add value to their content, they’ll likely be happy to use them and give you a link in return.

Claim links from unauthorized use

Not everyone will credit you when using your images. To claim a link from an unauthorized image, you must first find the unlinked images. 

You can do this by uploading your image or inputting the image URL into Google Reverse Image Search. Google will retrieve all the web pages that use that image. 

Example of reverse image search

Next, you will need to thoroughly examine each web page to ensure that your image is there without being linked to you for credit. If you want to build links with them, quickly look through their website. If it is authoritative and legitimate, then yes, definitely ask for a link. 

Find the website contact, reach out to them, and request attribution. 

Outreach example 1

Pro-tip: If you have a large number of images to check for unauthorized use, consider using Image Raider. This paid tool allows you to monitor up to 10,000 images. 

Claim links from improper attributions

In this situation, other websites credit you with a link, but instead of linking to the blog post that hosts your image, they link directly to the image itself. This does not help your page’s ranking on Google. 

Claiming proper attribution for these image links can be narrowed down to two steps: identifying improper attribution and requesting a proper backlink. 

Identify improper attribution

  • In Ahref’s Site Explorer, enter your website. 
  • In the “Backlink” section, look for .jpg or .png in the backlink URL. 
  • Under “Link Type”, select “dofollow.” 
Ahrefs backlink tool

Image source

You’ll receive a report of unique domains that link directly to your image. Double check to ensure they’re linking to the image files and not the web pages. 

Reach out and request proper attribution

To find the email address of a person associated with a website, use hunter.io. Then send a quick email request. Keep your email tone polite and appropriate.

Outreach example 2

Don’t wait until competitors seize your image backlink opportunities before you start securing them. 

Understanding the importance of backlinks to SEO and your bottom line, GrowthOG ensures that no link opportunities slip through the cracks. Our outreach team specializes in identifying prime link placement opportunities that deliver maximum ROI.

Outreach and Promotion

Outreach plays a vital role in image link-building strategies. Professional and well-crafted outreach efforts increase the chances of your imagery being featured and converted into healthy backlinks. 

Like guest post outreach, image outreach also involves finding the right contact, personalizing your pitch, and following up. However, instead of pitching guest post ideas, you pitch your images. 

The key difference is to showcase the advantages of using your images by pinpointing why your visuals add value to their content and target audiences. Make your proposal enticing by offering exclusive or time-sensitive content they can’t find anywhere else. 

When following up, be polite and don’t get discouraged if they decline.

Why bother with that when GrowthOG can help you? Our professional outreach services excel at transforming potential opportunities into high-value backlinks. We don’t just say it, we prove it through our successful case studies.

Regarding promotion, you can try the following unpaid promotion methods: 

Embed codes

By including embed codes, other sites can easily share your images. When they insert the code into their websites, it automatically links back to your content. 

Additionally, using embed codes is beneficial for analytics when you want to track and fine-tune your image link-building approach. 

To create an embed code, follow these steps: 

  • On the post you want to embed images from, right-click on the image and choose the “Embed Code” option. 
  • Copy the embed code. 
  • In your content management system, go to “Post” and open the HTML block. This will generate an HTML box for you to add the code‌ to.
  • Paste the embed code, preview it to ensure the image is displaying nicely and save your post. 

You can also use the Iframely Embed Code Generator to embed a variety of visuals, such as videos, photos, images, slideshows, maps, 3D models, puzzles, quizzes, graphs, and infographics.

Infographics directory sites

Choose your top-notch infographics and submit them to popular infographic directories like Behance, Visual.ly, eLearning Infographics, Daily Infographics, the Infographic subreddit, etc. 

While submitting your work is simple and easy, the approval process might take a long time.

Reddit infographics

Social media platforms 

Social media platforms are unparalleled in making content go viral rapidly and extensively. Posting your images on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Pinterest can help them reach a broader audience. 

While links from social media platforms carry no-follow attributes, they remain influential in giving your images visibility, garnering eyeballs, and generating social shares. This, in turn, increases the likelihood that other websites will use your images and link back to your site. 

To maximize the impact of your images, remember to craft engaging introductory text or captions and leverage the power of relevant hashtags.

Venngage on X (formerly Twitter)

Measuring and Refining Your Approach

Once your visual assets begin funneling link juice and direct traffic to your site, it’s time to focus on measuring and tracking your approach. 

Not all images successfully build links. Identify which images are generating attention and performing well with links, and which ones are not. Then, pinpoint the reasons why. This will help you concentrate on creating similar visuals and refining your image link-building approach for improved results. 

Google Analytics, Google Alerts, and Ahrefs are valuable tools for analyzing the performance of image backlinks and monitoring image usage, including link clicks and image SERP rankings. 

Besides, pay close attention to your target keywords, particularly those incorporated in Alt text, and observe if their rankings have improved. Based on these insights, you can strategically adjust your keyword research, image optimization, and outreach strategies.

Advanced Image Link Building Tactics

To further amplify the link-building potential of your visuals, consider employing the following proven advanced tactics: 

Image bookmarking sites

Image bookmarking sites are a lifesaver for both image users and image owners. 

For image owners, they can promote their share-worthy pieces of work there for free, with the potential of earning a backlink. 

Meanwhile, image users can download these images for free, and all they have to do is link to the image owner’s website. What a brilliant idea! 

So, which image bookmarking sites should you visit? Plenty! Unsplash, DeviantArt, Zoto, Scrapblog, and Fotolog, to name a few. 

Deviantart example

Reddit 

Leveraging the giant content rating and forum social networks to enhance your image link-building tactics is always a viable concept.

With a staggering 3.8 billion in traffic, Reddit serves as a perfect platform to float your ideas and gain additional traction for your maps and other visual content. 

However, considering Reddit’s competitive landscape, your visuals must be exceptionally compelling to cause a stir. Otherwise, they may get lost amidst the vast ocean of content. 

If you have a larger budget, consider investing in Reddit’s promoted posts. These posts resemble regular posts but are marked with a “promoted” tag and can be displayed as ad text or a link. 

Canva promoted post on Reddit

Image source

Quora

Similarly, you can incorporate Quora into your link-building campaign for improved image reach and promotion. 

Join Quora spaces and demonstrate your expertise by providing valuable answers to questions related to your niche or industry. Support your ideas with data visualizations, insightful charts, or engaging infographics to attract more attention. 

As views and upvotes flood in, it will increase shares and discussions, potentially leading other websites to notice and feature your visuals in their content. 

However, it’s important to note that Quora is highly selective about answers. The platform automatically moderates and deletes overly promotional or ad-like content, so focus on adding genuine value to the space with helpful answers.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

Don’t let mistakes ruin your efforts. Here are some you need to avoid at all costs when conducting image link building:

  • Avoid using low-quality or irrelevant images that don’t provide value to your audience. If your audience finds an image lackluster and mediocre, why would other sites like and use it?
  • Don’t neglect to optimize your images for search engines, as this can reduce their visibility and linking potential. Adhere to Google Image SEO guidelines.
  • Don’t forget to optimize keywords in your GIFs file name ALT text. 
  • Avoid spammy or untargeted outreach, as this can damage your reputation and reduce the effectiveness of your image link-building strategy.

To ensure a successful link-building strategy, it’s essential to eliminate any potential errors. Leveraging our extensive expertise and industry experience, GrowthOG provides comprehensive support to help you steer clear of common pitfalls while maintaining a professional and effective link-building approach. Partner with us now!

Additional Resources

Building a strong backlink network is never a piece of cake. Fortunately, the resources provided below can help simplify and speed up the process, making your journey to build links with images less hassle.

Google Trends and Keywordtool.io are two free link building tools that every content creator, business owner, or online marketer should utilize. They’re particularly effective for identifying trending topics and conducting keyword research.

It would be a significant omission if Ahref were to be missed from this list. Ahref’s versatile tool kits support your link-building goals by conducting keyword research and backlink analysis, discovering unlinked images, and identifying broken link building opportunities. 

When it comes to creating high-quality images, you can rely on online image editing tools like Photoshop, Crello, or Canva. These tools provide thousands of sleek premade templates and inspiration for various topics, saving you the time and effort of crafting images from scratch.

Canva templates

If you think managing these tools and staying up-to-date with your link profile is a lot to handle, GrowthOG can lift this burden off your shoulders. Book a free consultation and let us get you started with advanced link-building strategies without stress or confusion.

Over to You

Image link building is a potent technique for earning high-quality backlinks and improving your site’s authority and rankings. 

By creating high-quality visual content, optimizing your images for search engines, and using the strategic outreach and promotion methods outlined in this article, you can attract high-quality links and drive more traffic to your site.

To ensure long-term success, regularly analyze your image backlink results, monitor keyword rankings and track website traffic. Make timely adjustments and refine your image link-building strategy to keep it on the right track. 

You’ve learned all about image link building. Start using it alongside other link-building methods today for better overall results. 

Get in touch with GrowthOG, and we’ll show you how to skillfully transform your visual content into a powerful backlink magnet and integrate it seamlessly into link-building strategies tailored to your budget and preferences.

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