3 months into building an image SEO tool. Early traction and lessons so far
Hey IH đź‘‹
I’m Cameron, and I recently launched a small tool called OPT-IMG to solve a problem I kept putting off on real projects: image optimisation.
The problem
Image SEO is one of those things everyone agrees is important, but it rarely gets done properly.
In practice it usually looks like this:
One tool to compress images
Manual file renaming
Manually writing alt text (or skipping it entirely)
Once a site grows past a few dozen images, it becomes slow, repetitive work that gets postponed indefinitely. The result is bloated images, poor Core Web Vitals, missing alt text, and inconsistent naming.
I kept seeing image optimisation end up on the “we’ll fix it later” list.
What I built
OPT-IMG started as a way to bundle all of that into a single workflow.
You upload images once and it:
Compresses them into modern formats like WebP or AVIF
Generates sensible, SEO-friendly filenames
Writes descriptive alt text focused on accessibility
It works in bulk, so it’s usable whether you’re dealing with 10 images or thousands. The goal wasn’t to invent a new SEO trick, just to make the fundamentals easy enough that they actually get done.
Why now
Between Core Web Vitals, mobile-first indexing, and image-heavy sites becoming the norm, images matter more than they used to. At the same time, most tools still solve only one part of the problem.
AI didn’t change what needs to be done here, but it makes it possible to automate the parts people avoid.
Current status
Live at opt-img.com
Free tier available (limited monthly usage)
About 3 months old
Roughly 4.8k impressions and 44 clicks from organic so far
SEO has been slower than I expected, but impressions are trending up and it finally feels like Google is starting to test the site more seriously.
Tech stack
Keeping it fairly simple:
Frontend in vanilla HTML, CSS, and JavaScript with Tailwind
Serverless backend using Netlify Functions
Supabase for data and storage
Image processing via Sharp
Image understanding via GPT-4 Vision
Everything runs serverless so it scales up and down without much babysitting.
What’s next
Platform integrations (WordPress, Shopify, Webflow)
API access for automated workflows
More control over naming and alt text rules
The ask
I’d love feedback from people who’ve built or grown content-heavy sites:
At this stage, would you focus more on content depth or a handful of strong backlinks?
For those who’ve launched SEO tools before, what helped you break out of page two?
Any obvious gaps in this approach?
Happy to answer questions about the build, the SEO side, or what I’ve learned so far.
– Cameron
