The landscape of SEO marketing is turning from incredibly text heavy to purely visual. With the continuous rise of platforms like Instagram and TikTok, it just goes to show that the foundation of the internet is going to change from text to images – and this includes how startups market themselves. Consumers no longer have the time, or attention span, to wade their way through a wall of text and would rather absorb everything in the easiest format possible: the picture.
Everything you know about SEO talks about keywords and phrases, a word-based technique to get your startup in front of as many eyes as possible, but this has been slowly changing. Visual content is taking the reins with consumers wanting to find out information about a product, service, or startup with the least amount of effort they can give. This all sounds well and good, but how does it boost your SEO ratings?
Visual content makes users stay on your sites longer, with 88% of users spending more time on a website that has a video featured. Content like this, videos and the like, makes information more digestible and if they’re really interested in what you have to offer, something like a video will be irresistible. This means users are interacting more and increasing their dwell time on your website, which will only improve your SEO rankings.
Speaking of rankings, focusing on your visual SEO content will feed that almighty Google algorithm and place you above your competitors on the SERP. Quality visual content has become one of the defining factors in how Google decides your page rank as use of images naturally entices users to visit and stay on your page. Articles and blog posts that include an image right off the bat are more likely to appear at the top of the search page, and pages that include videos is 50 times more likely to get that first ranked spot.
Once you’ve got this wonderful content created and ready to upload, you can boost your SEO ratings even further by compressing your media files. A lot of the time, the size of your image files will be large and once you’ve uploaded a fair amount of visual content to your sites, the loading times may be affected. Page speed is a big factor within your ranking, so making sure your file types are as small as possible without compromising the quality will give you that edge when it comes to gaining a higher rank.
When you take into consideration that humans are visual creatures, it makes sense to include as much good visual content as you can in your marketing strategy. Once you’re consistently putting out this content, your users will keep coming back to you as you’ll build startup trust and loyalty with this content, showing to the algorithm that you’re trustworthy, thus increasing your SEO ranking. All from good quality images and videos, insane right?
Using visual content to boost your SEO is good for diversifying your website and balancing out how much text-heavy content you produce. This also allows you to cater to every kind of person within your audience: some will want to learn about you through text, others will want to watch videos and absorb information through images. By putting out a balance of content will allow your audience to seek out the kind of content they’re after, and if they find out you cater to them, your website will be more popular and will rank higher.
You can also use the pattern interruption method to catch the attention of any internet user. This is when your content stops a consumer in their tracks and challenges the usual responses they may have to run-of-the-mill marketing techniques like cold-calling and pop-up adverts. By introducing the element of surprise to your visual content, like including an animation or a drastic colour change, you’re more likely to keep the user’s attention on your site instead of them clicking away.
Quality visual content will result in more backlink generation to your website. Content like infographics and how-to’s which compress information into a bite-sized, digestible piece of content is the most valuable at providing backlinks, with 62% of infographics produced receiving more backlinks compared to other types of content. Another way to increase backlink generation is by producing content that is highly shareable. We’ve all seen the way a single image or video can take over the internet for a while, so making your content shareable is one of the best techniques you can utilise.
Furthermore, when you appropriately caption and tag your images and videos through use of relevant keywords, will help your SEO ranking. This is where all our knowledge on textual SEO will come in handy. You will be aware of the keywords and phrases that are prevalent within your niche, so it will be no surprise that the visual content you produce will be relating to this. Adding these will make your sites more visible to those searching.
Alt text comes into play here, as well. These are text alternative to visuals which provide a brief description of the media content and is for internet users who may be using screen readers and, sometimes, alt text is useful when a page is slow to load. You will be able to add those all-important and precious keywords to your alt text, you will be serving your ranking in addition.
Though the world of SEO seems ever-changing, we here at blazon are on hand to help you with the shifting landscape so you can make the most of your SEO strategy.
