Much like voice search SEO, visual assets usually aren’t the first thing content marketers think of when “content marketing” is mentioned. But our brain processes visuals 60,000 times faster than text and 90 percent of information transmitted to the brain is in visual form.
And that’s not all.
Visuals trigger a quicker and stronger reaction than any other content because they’re processed by our brains in a more meaningful way. So, you may want to include them in your sales copy, too.
More importantly, visual assets can drive traffic to your website, get you backlinks and even boost your rankings.
In this post, we’ll explain the link between visual assets and SEO, why it’s essential, and exactly how to optimize visuals for SEO. Let’s dive in!
Types of Visual Assets
The most popular visual assets you can use in content marketing include:
- Audio and videos (animated videos, motion graphic, recorded or live videos)
- Infographics
- Screenshots
- Images to highlight critical quotes and photos
- Charts and graphs for highlighting data and stats
- Memes and GIFs
- Header images in blogs
- Interactive elements, including maps, calculators, games, and quizzes
The Correlation between Visual Assets and SEO
Other than enhancing the quality of your content, visuals engage your audience and improve ranking on SERPs. Here’s how they boost SEO:
More Engagement
The Content Marketing Institute states that 81 percent of B2B marketers would like to engage their audience. But engagement happens when you use the right content. Visual content often engages the human mind better when it tells a story.
Hubspot knows this, which is why they created a meme that helped align their sales with their audience’s wants. The Facebook meme generated 453 likes, 256 shares, and 57 comments.
Improved Page Dwell Time
Using videos in your content marketing plan allows visitors to stay longer to watch a video, go through your product pages or blog posts. WISTIA studied the 100 highest-trafficked web pages and found that on average, people spend 2.6x more time on a page with a video than without.
Attract More Backlinks
Including visuals like infographics can help you generate more backlinks in a short time. According to a Hubspot case study, articles with infographics generate 178% more backlinks than standard posts.
Creating infographics on trending topics can significantly improve your SEO, as more websites will want to link to your content.
Be sure to plan your content promotion strategy to include outreach to your networks, significant publications, and influencers who can link back to your content.
Better User Experience
Including images in your content can improve user experience, which is an essential SEO factor. It’s vital to create content that will attract your readers’ interests, address their needs and pain points, and leave a good first impression, which will eventually make them want to purchase your service or keep coming back for more.
To improve user experience, include images on your landing page or in your content to make it easy for people to navigate the website or find a suitable product, especially on an ecommerce site. You can start by using bullet point imagery, product photos, and navigation photos.
At the end of the day, user experience is just as important in SEO as it is when developing a project management platform or call center software. There’s no field that comes to mind where optimizing the UX isn’t crucial.
Visuals Increase Search Engine Discoverability
Adding visual assets to your content will not only improve your content marketing strategy but will also increase your search engine discoverability. For example, Gregory Ciotti discovered that “the science of productivity” was a popular search term among users. He joined AsapSCIENCE and created the video below that’s generated over 4,000,000 views to date.
Want to rank on page one easily? Use videos. According to a study by Forrester, videos are 53 times more likely to rank on page one than text.
Ways to Optimize Visual Assets for SEO
Here are a few ways to optimize your visual assets for SEO.
Videos
When editing your videos, remember to include a transcript. Facebook users watch 85% of videos without sound. Thus, by having a video transcript (text shown as captions), viewers can consume the video anywhere. Besides, transcripts enable search bots to index the videos for more phrases and keywords.
Include keywords in the video title, tags, and description, as these elements play a vital part in your video’s ranking. Add five to 10 tags relevant to your video content and ensure they reflect how users may discover the video.
Additionally, create shorter videos – one to two minutes long. You can go up to four minutes, but anything longer than that, and the viewership will drop. This is according to the WISTIA case study that analyzed 564,710 videos and over 1.3 billion plays. The study concluded that 2 minutes is the sweet spot for the best videos.
Images
Include some quality images in your content and a keyword in the image alt text and file name. This step allows Google and other search engines to display them in an image search. Always compress images before uploading them, as bulky images may slow down your site’s loading speed.
Infographics
Infographics are the most shared and liked content on social media. When creating your piece, include some text to describe your infographic posts and sprinkle relevant keywords in that content. Doing this will help Google know what the infographic is all about and rank it accordingly.
The content should be unique and highlight the points featured in your infographic. Also, add social sharing buttons to make it easy for users to share the infographic. You may also repurpose your top-performing posts into infographics to improve your SEO.
The Link Between Social Media Visuals and SEO
When developing a social media campaign, don’t forget about visuals. Other than Instagram and Pinterest, which require you to post photos, you should also use photos on Facebook posts.
Hubspot analyzed 8,800 Facebook posts from B2C and B2B companies’ pages. The study compared each company’s likes-per-photo vs. likes-per-post. The results showed that photos received 53 percent more likes than an ordinary post without photos.
A comparison of each company’s comments-per-photo vs. comments-per-post showed that photo posts had 104% more comments compared to a normal post.
Thus, companies can use imagery to get more comments and likes. A boost in Facebook likes helps to increase EdgeRank, Facebook’s visibility algorithm, which may cause the content on your page to show up in the news feed frequently, increasing visibility.
What’s more? There’s a strong correlation between social media engagement and search engine rankings. Thus, more engagements on social media posts increase your content visibility, which ultimately boosts search positions in both Google and Bing.
Wrapping Up
Visual assets provide quick answers to users’ queries. They make content more engaging, explain complex ideas, entertain viewers, and offer an upscale user experience. Integrating them into your content allows you to tell your compelling story and optimize it for SEO. Of course, all of this takes work and a coordinated effort between all of the creatives on your content team. If you need any help in the planning and coordination department, that’s where a platform like DivvyHQ really shines.
To take DivvyHQ for a test drive, start your 14-day FREE trial today!