Incorporating some visual content into your content is an easy and effective way to further boost your SEO strategy.
It is often an overlooked technique, with most people focusing on keyword research, competitor analysis, and other SEO methods. That is not to say that these components of SEO are not important, but there is potential in using visual content in your SEO strategy.
Check out the reasons why you should be using visual aids in your content, but also how you can optimize them to reach their full potential for your SEO strategy.
Support your text
One reason why you must use images and visual content in your SEO strategy is to support your article or text.
Let’s say you’re writing about a complex idea or perhaps discussing a complicated plan. It is a good idea to supply an accompanying video or visual aid to support your text. This will make it easier for the reader to fully understand your text and follow your line of thought when it comes to explaining complex details.
Incorporating visuals in your article will create a better post and thus enable you to receive a higher Google quality score. This, in turn, will boost the likelihood of attracting high-quality traffic to your website – and who wouldn’t want that?
Make it look pretty
Not only will using visual content help the reader understand the meaning of your article, but it makes your article look more aesthetically pleasing.
The insertion of images breaks up a long wall text, which can be pretty off-putting and cluttered when first faced. Using images or visual content in your article provides a point of interest and allows your readers to have a small, aesthetically pleasing break from your well-written text.
Dwell time is swell
Inserting the right image for your content can increase website visit time by nearly 50%. Since Google wants to reward its most loyal users, it assumes that the pages with the longest dwell times are of the highest quality.
This high dwell time also results in a better position in the SERP (search engine result page), will lead to more web visitors, and will easily boost your SEO strategy – it’s a win, win! Want to find out more about SEO?
The power of infographics
A good method of boosting your website traffic is to create informative infographics. This is a great technique to use, especially if you discuss a lot of diagrams or charts on your website.
Creating an original infographic that is relevant and interesting to your audience is almost a sure way to boost engagement and reach other SEO goals.
Where should you publish?
Start by publishing your infographic on your website and then launch them on your social media platforms.
You can also reach out to infographic directories, as this is a great way to get a link back to your content from a platform with a wide audience and specifically focused on visual content. Want to know more about link building? Find out more here.
The most common way to create external links back to your website is through Google Images. Over 10% of Google traffic is for Google Images. This means that Google Images’ huge user base has the potential to spread your visual content even further.
3 Ways to optimize for Google Images
To get your infographics or images shown on the first results page on Google Images, you need to ensure your visual content is properly optimized. This is so that Google knows how relevant both your text and visual content is to the searched keyword.
1. The naming game
A simple and small detail that is sometimes overlooked is to name your files correctly. Name them according to their content or what they are relevant to.
Usually, photos or videos are automatically named by your camera or computer with a random generation of numbers or letters. Delete this and name your content more accurately. This helps Google index and understand what type of content you are displaying.
2. Alt tags are everything
Secondly, to further help Google know what the content is, you must optimize your alt tags. The perfect example of an alt tag would be short and rich in keywords.
Try to keep it simple and purposeful. Alt tags are like mini meta descriptions of the image/visual content, and a good alt tag will result in a better SERP position and improve your SEO.
3. Compress your content
Compressing your visual content is a great way to reduce the size of storage while at the same time maintaining the quality of your visuals.
Ideally, you want your visuals to be large and to make a statement. However, if the image takes up a lot of storage, the user experience of the website may be reduced as the loading time is prolonged. This will have a negative effect on your SERP and SEO strategy.
So, compressing your images reduces the size without compromising the quality or effectiveness.
Now that you know how inserting images and visual content can easily boost your SEO strategy, you can start to increase your website traffic and meet your SEO goals.
Remember, incorporating visual content into your articles alone will not result in miraculous SEO growth.
You still need to work on the other relevant parameters. A poorly written text with very few keywords will not reach a top position in SERP, simply because it is accompanied by great images. At the same time, it is crucial that the images are relevant to the pages they appear on, and the fundamental legwork like naming and alt tags determines the success of your image efforts.
It is a combination of using visual imagery, backlinking, keyword research, and other SEO techniques that will give you the best results. They work hand in hand and should be used simultaneously if you want to achieve the best results.
I do hope this article has helped you understand more about the potential of visual aids, and how they must be used in SEO strategy.
