Does having an image in a page help with SEO?

Yukon is your man for images and SEO, hopefully he'll chime in.

Personally, I don't think you need images at all for SEO. I've good pages that rank well without them. I wonder why you ask the question? Are your competitors seemingly ranking better with images on their pages?

If used for SEO purposes, images should be unique to a single page and the image itself should be relevant to the topic at hand.

Yes, images can help with rankings. My brother did an experiment once where he measured his page rankings for certain keywords before & after adding image with alt text. Within a day or two of adding images, his page rankings increased by a few ranks each (say from page 2, position #6 to page 2, position #4 or 5).

As per your name and phone number, those won't really help you rank unless you plan on pretending that they are related to your keyword and labeling them with alt text that doesn't really make sense (unless you are trying to rank for your own name, in which case, go for it).

Putting the same image on multiple pages will probably only help one of those pages rank, or at least only help one of them rank in Google Image Search. Google can detect duplicate and similar images and will usually not rank multiple copies of the same image.

Having multiple copies of the same image on multiple pages won't get you penalized, but it won't help you very much either.

Is there actually an image that's needed? If not, why add one?

Dressing up a site has nothing to do with SEO.

Maybe you heard people say to stuff images and alt tags, but that's
perhaps SEO for the image, not the page. You want to name
an image exactly what it is. Which means, if you have a cute
cat image on a page about student loans, and put alt="student loans"
that's just nonsense.

Here's another real world case. If you have an image with MENU
instead of text for the Menu, you had better put alt="menu" because
that's what you are using the image for and that, remarkable enough,
is what the image is for.

Now if you have the student loan page, and put a pic of college
students, completely different. alt="college students" would
be accurate and related to the page. Does it help with the
page's SEO? Well, if it did, in the real world, then I imagine
wikipedia would be full of images. But they have very
little in relation to text, and certainly never keyword stuff.
Many articles are imageless.

If a picture does not answer a person's search inquiry,
how on earth can an image help?

Paul

It is kind of an old SEO hack tactic that it might cause a few more seconds on site and lower the bounce rate. Hey, that might still be valid.

If you hit a page that has a good title - even before you read the first sentence, you might be enticed from the bottom corner of your eye to scroll down page if you notice the top of an image there, right at the bottom of your screen?

I don't know?

Try it on a couple of pages.

I always have at least one image per page, I can't think of any reason not to have an image.

I think people sometimes over complicate images when it comes to SEO & user experience, for example a very simple image with only text & a background color that clashes with the white background color of Google SERPs draws the traffic eyes to that ranked thumbnail image (example images below).

Why rank a single text link in Google SERPs when you can rank text links + thumbnail image/s, both can be ranked at the same time.

Either of the images below could be used as a page filler & located next to a call to action to again draw the traffics eyes to whatever your trying to accomplish on the page (click, opt-in, purchase, etc...).

Another on-page tip that helps associate images with keywords is to surround the image with relevant keywords (in moderation), example, use an <hX> tag above the image & include a keyword, use plain text below the image as an image caption.

Example:

Of course it helps.. This way people that are looking for a specific things, could use Images Search to find your image and then... they will visit your website if they like the picture or would like to read more about it... Also, this picture could help you for SEO like Pinterest for example, which allows you to submit your pictures in the Social Media... Why not help in Google+ or Facebook where when you place the link the picture automatically becomes visible!