08 Mar
Visual content is the new trend nowadays. In the early days of the internet, creating bulky, all-text articles was considered good enough. But now, it takes more than just words to make a good impression on website visitors and search engines.
Your content should contain different formats such as video, GIFs, infographics, etc because they also impact on your website’s SEO.
How does visual content impact SEO?
Adding visual content can benefit your website in so many ways. While your text-based content lets you include important keywords naturally and helps you rank higher on the SERPs, the visual content, on the other hand, boosts that content further.
1. Video content keep visitors on the page
If there is one performance metric that Google loves the most (among others) is time on page. If your site visitors land on your website and leaves quickly after an average of 15 seconds, this indicates to Google that your content is of poor quality or irrelevant to the search topic. However, you can put a video in the middle of your content to make the visitors stay on your page a bit longer.
For instance a visitor takes 15 seconds to read your blog post’s first paragraph, and then they find a video below it that they can watch. Now, this adds more value to your piece of content.
They click on it and end up watching the complete three minutes long video. This tempts the visitors to dig deeper, and before they can even realize it, they would have already spent more than 5 minutes on your website. This can effectively boost your site’s Time on Page.
Video content also impacts other important metrics, including Bounce Rate, which is another crucial factor that Google considers. The last thing you would want is your visitors to bounce away after reading a line or two of your blog within a couple of seconds only. Meanwhile, adding videos on your page might persuade the visitors to stick around for a little longer and decrease your bounce rate.
2. Visual content helps guide the visitors through your content
Reading a 1500 or 2000 words long blog post can easily become a boring task despite how well you have written it. The best way to keep the readers moving through your content is to include elements such as screenshots and infographics to allow them to visualize the idea that you are putting forward and push them down the page further.
Splitting your content by adding a few relevant visuals in between lets the readers to pause for a while and look at some infographics, videos, or other visuals instead of simply consuming the content. Moreover, it also allows the readers to take a break and check out the related visuals that might help them understand what you are trying to put in words in a better way. Humans are naturally visual creatures, and they tend to grasp things better when presented in graphics.
3. Google’s machine learning is learning how to read visuals
While this isn’t official yet, it has become a well-known fact that Google is actively trying to learn to read visuals on web pages. There are billions of visuals across the web. Google’s machine learning is becoming proficient in using shapes and other components to compare and understand what the visuals on your web page are portraying.
Having said that, what else is left there to say? If Google is learning to crawl an element and attribute it to the value your website adds to the web, you must pay attention to it. This is the reason you should be sure to use relevant images and format them in a way that makes it easier for Google to understand it.
4. People are more likely to link to your videos
On a related note, quality backlinks are one of the most critical factors that Google uses to determine search engine rankings. The more people are linking to your content and to your domain, the more authority you are seen as having. The more authority you have, the higher your pages rank in the search results.
Publishing video content on sites like YouTube, on social media, or even on an OTT service or VOD platform is the perfect opportunity to not only earn referral traffic but also quality traffic that can dramatically boost your rankings. Not only that, but this will also have a positive ripple effect across your social media efforts. Don’t forget that although Google does keep the exact architecture of its own algorithm a secret to prevent people from gaming the system, there’s a very strong (and very real) correlation between high volumes of social shares and higher positions in search engine results pages. Yes, it’s true that this is largely an indirect impact but it’s an impact just the same, and it’s one that you can’t afford not to pay close attention to.
How can you use images to boost SEO?
Let’s see how to use visuals to boost your website’s SEO
1. Make sure your images add to the story
Images, graphs, screenshots are some relevant elements that add value to your content. There is less value in adding generic images that simply represent the concepts and don’t really add anything. Adding relevant images that add value to the story can boost your SEO.
2. Optimize your images
Adding images to your content just not just enough. You also need to make sure that they are optimized. And by ignoring this you can run into issues with the performance of your site.
In order to make sure that you aren’t slowing down your website with heavy unoptimized images, you should start using suitable image formats. The best image formats to use are JPEG, GIF, and PNG. For videos, the best thing to do is host them on some other platforms such as YouTube and then instead of publishing them on your website directly, embed them.
While optimizing your images, another crucial factor you should consider is adding tags. Just the way you add meta tags to your posts, you should add tags to your images too. This acts as a way to tell the search engines about your images and what they show.
3. Take advantage of off-site search
You won’t have heard this before, but it is important enough to be discussed again. After Google, YouTube is the second largest search engine. The best thing to do is to utilize this platform by posting videos and optimizing them to provide you more content to rank in search.
While this is an off-site strategy, producing high-quality video content and then optimizing it appropriately to show up in search can help your videos grasp remarkable SEO value.
Moreover, you can also add your website links in your video descriptions and on your YouTube channel. As your videos start getting more views, eventually, your website will also receive traffic from there, boosting your website traffic.
Summary
Up till now you must have understood that adding images and other visuals to your website is good for its health as well as SEO. They add life to your content and help capture the readers’ attention while improving crucial metrics that help boost your website’s SEO.
However, if you are already utilizing visual content on your website, the first thing you need to do is review them and ensure that they are all optimized. If not, then it’s time to start using visuals in your content to stay at the top of the trends, stay relevant, and give your site that much-needed SEO boost.