SEO and Visuals: A Winning Combination

November 21, 2024 - 8 minutes read - SEO, Social Media

There’s so much value to be gained from adding visual content to your website, and while text is vital for incorporating keywords and ranking in search engines, there’s no denying that you’d be missing out on a huge SEO opportunity by neglecting visual assets. To stand out in a sea of digital content, you need to make sure you’re aligning your visual content with your SEO strategy to appease search engine algorithms. Here, we’ll explore why SEO and visuals go hand-in-hand and why photos, videos, and graphics should form a central part of your digital marketing efforts. 

The value of visuals

Greater user experience

User experience is the process of making your website easier to use and understand, so your audience is more likely to stay and explore for longer which increases the likelihood of them converting. In the eyes of Google, content that’s user-friendly and engaging is prioritized, so it’s in your interest to create a positive user experience and visuals can help with this.

From creative product images that capture the essence of your brand while also being useful to customers, to videos that explain how a product or service works to educate, visuals can be a highly effective way to make your website more informative.

Improved search engine rankings

Search engines prioritize sites that have engaging visual content, and by optimizing your visual assets with your target keywords, such as in the alt text, file names, and image descriptions, you can boost your site’s ranking potential considerably.

Many people forget about image search results, a subset of search engine result pages, which will display image results that are relevant to the user’s query. The search engine algorithm processes the user’s query to understand the intent and context behind the search, and visual content can be incredibly useful in helping Google understand the topic of your page more accurately

Direct your audience

Videos and images can be used to subtly guide your audience to different areas of your content or site, which gives you greater control over what they see and engage with. Breaking up your content with relevant visuals also gives them a break from reading text, making pages more interesting and navigable.

This is especially useful if you’re trying to explain a complex subject or presenting statistics or data that could otherwise be missed through skim-reading. Visuals are more easily digested and absorbed, so you can convey your message more easily and increase your ROI.

Increased opportunity for backlinks

The better quality and more engaging your content is, the more likely it is that other sites will link to it. Adding visuals will make that content more appealing and linkable, to positively impact your SEO efforts.

Search engines see backlinks from authoritative sources as an indication that your content is relevant and trustworthy, which boosts your rankings, so it should be an important part of any digital marketing strategy. Engaging visual content is far more likely to be shared to strengthen those social signals and increase your brand visibility to drive traffic back to your website and social channels.

How to start using images in your SEO strategy

Now you know why incorporating visuals is important, it’s time to move on to the ‘how’—how can you apply visual marketing to your SEO efforts to boost the value of your content and improve your position in the SERPs?

Convey information with graphics and screenshots

Sometimes, conveying a message or a story concisely can be challenging. But visuals make it easier for your audience to comprehend what you’re trying to say, and they’re also more likely to remember the facts.

For example, videos or screenshots can be instructional to show people how to do something far more easily than writing it out, while a graph can quickly and clearly show a connection between two facts, so the core message doesn’t get lost. Make sure your visuals are clear, relevant to the topic, and aesthetically pleasing to add value to the story you want to tell and engage your audience.

Don’t forget to optimize

Keywords shouldn’t only be used in text—in fact, if you’re using visuals of any kind, you need to make sure they’re optimized in several ways. You don’t want to slow down your site speed times, as this can have a negative effect on user experience and rankings, so make sure you’re using the right formats for images and compressing them before publishing.

Videos should be hosted elsewhere, such as on YouTube, and embedded in your content instead of being uploaded directly to keep load times to a minimum. You also want to add meta tags to any visual content so that search engines can see what it is and why it’s relevant to the page.

Make the most of off-site search

Google may be the primary search engine, but it’s not the only option when it comes to search. YouTube is the second-largest search engine and is under-utilized by many when it comes to SEO. Naturally, YouTube is off-site, but it offers so much value to your brand that it shouldn’t be overlooked.

If you optimize them correctly, your videos can earn plenty of SEO value and you can include links back to your website in descriptions to drive more traffic to your site. With millions of people using YouTube every day, investing time in growing your YouTube channel could result in a huge boost to your site traffic.

Images, videos, graphics, and data visualizations—there are so many types of visual content to choose from, but what they all have in common is that they can bolster your SEO strategy and provide huge benefits for your business. Users are becoming more visually focused, and this has been proven through everything from the rise of short-form videos on TikTok to image-led platforms like Instagram. So, make sure you’re staying on top of this trend by including visuals in your content to enhance your SEO.

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Tags: mod girl marketing, Seo, seo ranking, seo strategy, Visual