Gone are the days when we flip back and forth within pages in text-bulky user manuals just to learn about a product or service. Visual content has become more mainstream, making all the difference in content marketing strategy. We live in a digital world where information confronts us at every turn. Our brain can’t simply cope with all the abundance of information without feeling so overwhelmed.
Visual content is what it sounds like – the content that conveys valuable information in an engaging visual format. More often than not, it uses the power of design to get the message across. Concepts can get complicated sometimes, and one of the best things to deliver it is by using visuals. The human brain is hardwired to absorb images.
That’s why we process images 60,000 times faster than plain text. That’s what makes visuals rise above the clutter. As a savvy marketer yourself, leveraging visual content to your marketing strategy won’t only help you to give your audiences easy-to-digest content, but it can also be your SEO goldmine. Here are some popular types of visual content that most businesses use to cut through the noise:
- Images
- Explainer videos
- Infographics
- Charts
- Screenshots
- GIFs/memes
Visuals can increase your website ranking, making it much easier for your target audiences to find you. While written content can help you to insert target keywords and practice the general SEO efforts, adding visual content can give you an extra boost. Are you not convinced yet? Here are some reasons why you should care more about visual content for SEO practices.
1. Improve readability and interest
Visual content always looks more appealing and easier on the eyes compared to text-heavy, bulky paragraphs. It should come as no surprise that visuals can increase the audiences’ desire to read by 80%. It can also break up heavy chunks of text and long paragraphs, making the content much more visually appealing and easier to read and retain.
This, in turn, will offer the audiences a better experience. Too focused on text-written content will only scare away your audiences since they don’t have time and energy to read them all. It makes them quit your page quickly. As a result, it can increase your bounce rate that can harm your SEO practice.
2. Higher rank on SERPs
How the Google algorithm works is still a mystery. But, one thing we sure know that visuals can bring your website sits in the top pages of the search results. At least 91% of internet users prefer to consume visual content over written content. And no matter how many times search engines updated their algorithms, quality content that effectively attracts audiences’ attention remains the name of the game.
Google indeed can’t actually see visual content and rank them directly. But, Google, with improved machine learning, learns visual content by matching them with one another and linking them all together. Moreover, a blog post that contains video is 53 times more likely to generate a first-page Google ranking than other web content.
3. Make visitor spend on sites longer
Not only does visuals grab audiences’ attention quickly, but it can also hold it. It means that content like infographics or marketing videos help the audiences or visitors to spend more time on your websites. Visual content provides the audiences with snackable, easy-to-digest information, so they’re convinced to explore more about it on your website. Thus, it’s a fantastic way to reduce bounce rate and improve dwell time, allowing your website to have more authority and relevance – which leads to rankings boost.
4. Diversifying content
You can use visuals to balance out text-based content, giving your website more diversity. Since they’re a lot of types of visuals, you can create and utilize each of them. Of course, constantly producing stunning visuals for SEO might seem like a lot of work. It’s no wonder that more than 43% of marketers claim that they are most likely to struggle when it comes to producing visual content for SEO constantly.
To overcome this, you can repurpose your one content into another format. Some of your audiences like to watch video content, and others are fans of infographics. Creating more diverse visual content for SEO means that it allows your audiences to consume the content the way they like. A website that successfully provides their audiences what they want will always be more popular, and more popular websites will most likely rank higher in SERPs.
5. Generate more backlinks
You can unlock loads of backlink opportunities for your website using visual content. Content like infographics has the potential to bring you more valuable, high-quality backlinks, improving your website authority and credibility. Infographics compress information in a bite-sized, compelling way, helping the audiences to get a gist of the data much faster.
No wonder that a well-crafted infographic received 62% more backlinks compared to any other content. The more you offer your audiences valuable content, the more websites use it as a resource and link back to your website. You can also do an outreach campaign where you approach a high-authority website to feature your visual content.
Wrapping up
Creating a successful SEO-friendly visual isn’t as simple as pasting some stock images into some website copy. You need much more effort to create original visual content that brings more value to your audiences and brings the SEO results you want. Thankfully, there are many affordable and easy-to-use tools out there that can help you craft original visual content for SEO with ease. Even though visual content can boost your SEO content, you still have to optimize them all. Make sure you write descriptive alt text, add metadata, add transcript (for video), and write captions.
