Foot Locker was able to increase their image thumbnails on Google by 343% for category pages with this one simple change.
They received a significant uptick in images being indexed, resulting in them surpassing key local competition with their image previews.
The change involved increasing the size of the image in their category page sever side rendered HTML (pre-JS), going from 67x67 to a minimum requirement of 200x200.
Google was previously able to crawl the images on their category pages, but they weren't committing them to their index due to how small the resolution was.
Benefits to Foot Locker from this change include an improved CTR, and also having more important content being indexed for core pages, which correlates well with improved rankings.
I’ve worked on a lot of Image SEO projects over the years (more recently with the largest stock photo site in the world - Shutterstock) so it was great to see that learnings from my blog could be used by other well-known brands such as Foot Locker.
With technical SEO, it is sometimes the simplest change that can have the greatest impact. In the case of Foot Locker, increasing the size of the indexable images resolved the issue.