Google Doesn’t Care About Your TPT Image Filenames? TPT Seller Tip E89
Summary:
The video explains that adding keywords to your TPT image file names does not help Google SEO because Teachers Pay Teachers automatically renames all uploaded cover and thumbnail images before Google sees them. The creator tested this by uploading images with custom names and confirmed that TPT replaces them with product ID-based file names. The main takeaway is that sellers should focus more on product titles, descriptions, and click-worthy thumbnails rather than image file names for SEO.
Transcript
Hey, TPT sellers. Someone in the Pro community recently asked me, “Do your file names matter from a Google SEO perspective? Do I have to put keywords in my image file name so I can rank better on Google?”
The answer is no.
Wait, what?
I thought Google SEO looks at image file names as a ranking factor.
Yes, that’s true. Google SEO does look at image file names as a slight indication of what a product might be about.
But that’s not the question you need to be asking yourself.
The question you need to ask is is the file name that I upload to TPT the same file name that Google sees?
And the answer to that question is no.
Hi, my name is Mike Futchergami and I’m the host of the SEO Tpreneur YouTube community. In this video, I’m going to talk about how much traffic TPT sees from Google. I’m going to show you how to see the image file names that Google sees.
And finally, I’m going to upload a brand new product with different image file names to see if that makes a difference. Make sure to watch to the end cuz I have a free Google Sheet that tells you whether or not your store is up or down compared to TPT as a platform.
This is not an issue about whether Mike is correct, whether your AI chatbot is correct, or whether this person is correct. Information changes. And what we need to be able to do is think critically and verify independently what TPT is actually doing at the current moment.
Today is April 17th, 2026. As of today, right now, the image file names that you use do not impact Google SEO at all because TPT renames your files. Before 2019, before TPT used Algolia, could it have made a difference? Maybe. This isn’t an Algolia thing.
This is a TPT deciding what to name the file names. So we don’t know when TPT changed this, but I can tell you right now, TPT automatically renames your thumbnails and your cover image. So the pretty file names that you’re using aren’t seen by Google at all. If you’re new to the channel, welcome aboard.
This is a place where we independently check what we hear on TPT land to see if the information actually holds true today. So don’t take my word for it. Watch this video and check for yourself to see what the image and cover file names are that Google can see.
First of all, let’s talk about how much traffic TPT really gets from Google. If I go to my traffic dashboard, if I change the time to March and click save, if I type search non-TPT search, 32 visits.
But the problem with this is when it says 32 click-throughs from non-TPT search and 2,267 from people visiting TPT from TPT directly, this isn’t completely accurate. TPT uses Google Analytics. Our marketplace traffic sources is showing us information from TPT’s Google Analytics.
But basically, the way that it works is if the system can’t figure out a source, it automatically defaults to saying this was direct traffic to TPT.
So how can we get a sense of how many people are really visiting TPT?
Great question. You know how you pay a company for internet access?
Those companies are called internet service providers. And they can see every single webpage that you visit, unless you’re using a VPN. And basically, what they do is they take all of that traffic data, they remove any personal information, they aggregate and combine the information, and they sell it to marketing companies.
And we call this clickstream data. And then based on the clickstream data, the marketing companies come up with models and they estimate how much traffic a website gets.
Now, clickstream data is just an estimate. It’s going to be different from Google Analytics installed on TPT’s website. So we don’t know for sure how much traffic they get. It might be more, it might be less.
But what we can use clickstream data for is to compare between months to see whether things are improving or getting worse.
Because your internet company knows you went to Google and then you went to this TPT page and then maybe you logged in and then maybe you purchased this page and then maybe you clicked away to go to a different website. SEMrush can take this data, combine it together, and it can come up with patterns.
We can see that in March, 45% of the people in the clickstream data typed in teacherspayteachers.com directly and they went to the website directly. That’s 45% of traffic. 32.15% of traffic came from google.com.
And there’s a green arrow here saying that it’s up compared to February’s traffic. So based on this, roughly a third of traffic to TPT is coming from Google. We would have no idea of that sense of scale from our TPT UTMs, but clickstream data knows this because it knows every single page that every single person visits for that internet company.
This second part here, google.com down 2.15%, that’s paid Google. Some people are talking about how Pinterest is really important for TPT. It accounts for 1% of traffic on the platform. And then down here, I can see that Bing is up and it’s at 0.63%.
So yes, Google search traffic is important. 100% agree. But the real question is what can we actually control for Google SEO? Because yes, Google SEO works a certain way, but no, TPT as a platform has made decisions about Google SEO that we can’t control.
So just because someone says that Google SEO is looking at image file names and that’s why you should rename file names, doesn’t necessarily mean that the file name that you choose actually shows up on TPT, which gets seen by Google. Let’s check this out. Here is my reading comprehension resource.
If I right-click on an image, I can open the image in a new tab. I can see up here at the top, the file name is 750F-5671018-1. That’s the file name. And I notice that the 5671018 is my product ID cuz that’s part of my URL. I’m going to copy the URL, so control C to copy it. I’m going to go to docs.new to create a new Google Doc.
I’m going to command V or control V to paste in this link. And that is the link to my cover image. And then I’m going to go back. I’m going to right-click copy the image URL, so copy image address for my first thumbnail. Paste that in. I’m going to go back and right-click copy image address for my second URL. Paste that in here.
And then I’ll go back and right-click copy the image address for this third thumbnail. I’ll paste it in here and I can see that there’s a pattern. If I click on any of these, this will take me to the image.
Now, I do see keywords in here, so I’m going to make this a little bit bigger. This to me looks like the title of my product. And if I make the titles a little bit larger, I can see it’s the exact same title for all four images.
Now, my product title is currently reading comprehension strategies posters differentiated passages small group. And that doesn’t match the title that’s in the path of this image. So I think what’s happened here is at the time that I uploaded my cover and my thumbnails, I think what happened is the system saved the title in the path to the image and it’ll stay that name until I upload a new cover or I upload a new image.
So check it out. I made the file names a little bit larger so we could all see. The file names are identical. 750F- the product ID-image 1 image 2 image 3 image 4. So it doesn’t remember the file name that you uploaded for the image. It’s going to convert it to your product ID and a cover number anyway.
Now, that’s what I currently think. But is that actually the case? So now I’m going to try it to see if that works out. So here’s a product that I haven’t published for my TPT store yet. I’m going to add my PDF resource. I’m going to scroll down. I’m going to upload my thumbnails. Let’s choose for my main cover. I have this TPT seller tip 29 cover A.
And then I’m going to upload TPT seller tip 29 cover B. And then I’m going to upload TPT seller tip 29 cover C. And then I’m going to upload for my thumbnail TPT seller tip 29 cover D. And then let’s open that up. All right, here’s my product description. I like to make my resources free when I first launch them.
And I’m going to make the listing active. Let’s hit submit. So if I have control over my file name, then there should be an A, B, C, and D in each of these images. And if I right-click and open this image in a new tab, up here at the top, I can see 750F-16030453, which happens to be my product ID. That makes sense. And dash one is the cover. So the file name has been renamed. But let’s look at the path for the file name.
So I’m going to copy this. docs.new. Let’s paste in this first link here. And I see my title at the time TPT order analyzer, how am I doing compared to TPT TPT seller tip 29. And that matches the title of my product. And right now, I’m going to copy the image address for my second thumbnail. Let’s copy the image address for my third thumbnail. Let’s copy the cover image address for my fourth thumbnail.
And I can see the title of my product at the time of cover image upload is the title that’s being included in the path to the file name. And I can see my file image name is just a bunch of numbers. It has zero keywords in it. I can see that the image file name that Google can see doesn’t match the file names of the images that I uploaded.
So now we want to see what happens if I change the product title. So I’m going to go to edit listing and I’m going to change the title. And I changed it to TPT store at a glance tool. How am I doing compared to TPT TPT seller tip 29.
And let’s scroll down. Let’s submit this. All right. So I’ve named it TPT store at a glance tool, how am I doing compared to TPT. I’m going to right-click. I’m going to copy the image address. I’m going to go back to this Google Doc. I’m going to paste it in here.
And I see that the file name has not changed at all. I see the old title is still there. And just to confirm, let’s copy the other image addresses. Paste that in. That’s identical. Let’s get the third image. Copy the image address. Paste that in, that’s identical, nothing has changed. And then if I get the fourth image, copy the image address, paste it in, that hasn’t changed at all.
So, based on today’s analysis, when you right-click, copy image address, and you paste into a Google Doc, you can see the file name that Google can see. I can tell that TPT is renaming our cover images and our thumbnails at this point in time. Now, when you watch this video in the future, TPT may have changed that.
But right now, there’s no Google SEO benefit, there’s no TPT SEO benefit to having keywords in your image and your cover thumbnail image file names. I don’t know what I don’t know. So, leave a comment below.
Let’s start a discussion because just because I have a soapbox on a YouTube channel doesn’t mean I’m right.
Just because I found these file names doesn’t mean that’s what Google’s looking at, although that’s what I think Google’s looking at cuz that’s the source code. Let me know in the comments if you’re going to change your file names to include keywords in them.
Oh, and the bonus, this store year-over-year at a glance tool is free right now. There’s a tutorial video in it that shows you what to do. We can compare August 2025 with August 2024, and this is a nice, pretty, colorful way to see whether your sales are up or down, but it also shows you the number of orders that have been placed on your store, as well as the average earning size for those orders.
So, you can see if people are buying more expensive bundles or you’re more affordable products. But here’s the cool thing, if you are a larger seller and you have sales every day of the year, then you can actually estimate how many orders have been placed on TPT, and you can see what percentage TPT is up or down, and you can compare your number of orders up or down with TPT’s number of orders, and you can see whether, well, I’m down 5%, is it me or is TPT also down 5%?
And that gives you perspective whether or not it’s a TPT platform thing or whether your store is actually outperforming or underperforming the market.
If you learned something new, make sure to check out the SEO Tpreneur email community. I often talk about little tips and secrets that I don’t have time to record in a YouTube video.
The link is in the video description, and I’ll see you next time.
Bye for now.