8 Simple Tactics For Boosting Your SEO With Visual Content

Are you on a content marketing journey for your website?

If so, then you already realise the important role that visual content plays in SEO. While text-based content is an integral part of marketing today, incorporating visual content helps set you apart from everyone else.

How so?

Consider this:

90% of the information that goes to the brain is visual, and 65% of people are visual learners. With these stats, it’s easy to see why your text-based content is incomplete without a visual element in it. To help you add that much-needed visual flair, we’re looking at how you can boost SEO for your website through the use of visual content.

1Adding videos in your content marketing strategy will fetch traffic

Here’s the simple truth: consumers prefer video content over text content. Statistics show that 4x as many customers prefer to watch a video advertising a product or service rather than reading about it.

Is it any wonder? When you make a search on the web, your attention goes straight to video results. AimClear did a study on this and, guess what, search results containing videos got a 41% higher click-through rate than plain text.

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And that explains why video is eating the internet. About 74% of all internet traffic today is represented by video content! This figure is poised to grow substantially in the future as Cisco projects that videos will make up almost 80% of internet traffic in the next two years. So if you are not already using video in your content strategy, you are missing out on a potential source of traffic.

Takeaway:

If you haven’t utilised the power of video marketing yet, do it now. Adding videos to your site will help you win your consumers’ attention and generate a ton of traffic.

2Even Google Rewards Websites With Video Content

So we know that people – your customers – love video content. Apparently even Google feels the same. A Forrester study states that pages that contain video content are 53 times more likely to rank on the first page of Google’s search results.

In short? Google Search Engine Result Pages (SERP) prioritise video content over other type of content. It’s a little obvious given Google owns YouTube, the second largest search engine.

So hurry up and get on the visual marketing bandwagon. Create a lot of short, snacky videos – a few to market your products and services and to communicate your product’s USP, some as part of a funny social media promotional campaign, and some to merely send across a personal message to your consumers on their inbox.

While you’re at it, make sure to backlink to your website in the description section whenever you are uploading videos on social platforms.

Takeaway:

As video content is favored by Google, including it on your website can increase your visibility.

3Kill Your High Bounce Rate With Homepage Videos

Visitors to your site tend to leave in about 10-20 seconds, or even faster. That’s bad. Sweating over marketing to get traffic onto your website just to see them run off in seconds doesn’t make for a happy ending. A simple solution is to add a short explainer video on your homepage or landing pages to engage your visitors.

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The explainer video on the homepage (pictured above) helped RankWatch reduce the bounce rate from 62% to just 35%, improving the overall visitor engagement which led to an extra 27% more account signups.

How did that happen? The explainer video on the top-fold of the website grabs your user’s attention and increases their dwell time by around 2 minutes. Higher dwell time translates to less bounce rates.

The dwell time is a metric that Google’s algorithm uses to analyse the quality of content. Higher dwell time also increases your Page Authority (PA), since Google will note it as an important page if visitors are spending more time on it. In the long run, all of this contributes to improving the SEO of your website.

However, you need to be cautious with how you put up video content on your website. If the videos are slowing down your website then it can actually do more harm than good. Make use of embedded thumbnails to make sure that videos are not played until they are actually clicked on.

Takeaway:

Incorporating video content alone doesn’t boost your online presence, you should focus on its optimisation as well. Monitor your video’s performance, check load time and use video analytics tools to see where most users begin to lose interest and then optimise accordingly.

4Generate high domain authority backlinks through infographic articles

Infographics are commonly used by digital marketers, not just because they are more appealing, but because they can be backlinked easily as well.

The best aspect about infographic articles is that these are generally preferred as guest posts on high-authority websites, and can be used to generate high domain authority (DA) backlinks which is a blessing for the SEO of a website.

Moreover, when you generate an infographic with meaningful information, it is likely to be referenced by other blogs and websites in your niche which will eventually lead to more backlinks to your website. Eye-tracking tools have even shown that internet users pay close attention to images that contain information.

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While infographics themselves are sparse in text and rely on visuals for telling the stories, you should never publish an infographic without supplementary text.

This is because while the infographic itself might rank highly in the image search, it will not be found anywhere in regular search results (since there are no keywords or metadata associated with the infographic).

In fact, having no text might even backfire since it could result in the penalisation of your website, as per Google’s guidelines. The content that you add needs to be nothing more than a discussion or even analysis of the information that is discussed in the infographic (do not simply repeat the information in the infographic though), but be sure to include relevant keywords in it to maximise the SEO.

Takeaway:

For boosting SEO and driving high-quality traffic to your website from search engines, you should produce valuable content that goes hand-in-hand with infographics and publish them together as a single article.

5Creating unique Visual Content Encourages Social Sharing

Most SEO experts believe that the performance of a business on social media directly affects SERP and pagerank. In fact, the better the following of your brand on social media, the higher its ranking will be. Your popular social media updates can easily land in the top section of Google’s SERPs.

Furthermore, when you generate visual content that encourages social sharing, it increases page visitors and diverts traffic to your website which means that social media serves as a broadcast channel. But all of this holds true only when your content is unique and of high quality.

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Statistics show that tweets containing visual content (particularly images) are shared (retweeted) up to 1.5 times more than tweets that contain no visual content. With Facebook, this stat rises to 2.3 times as posts that have images are shared 230% more times than posts that do not contain images. This clearly points to the fact we previously stated: visual content boosts user engagement.

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Takeaway:

Support the textual data with relevant images, as social media posts that contain visual content are more likely to be shared than posts that contain only text.

6Images in Your Website Influence SERP Ranking

Google also prioritises websites that have images on most of their web pages. In fact, you are likely to be ranked on the top of the search engine results if 98% of your web pages contain at least one image, as illustrated by the figure below:

Source: Backlinko

Takeaway:
Incorporate visual elements to support the textual information on different web pages.

7Optimise images and videos for SEO

Use the website’s underlying code to your advantage. HTML elements like Title tags (image description users see while hovering on the image) and Alt tags allow the web bots to decode the content of an image or video. The key is to use proper keywords.

Making use of 5 video tags with at least one tag with the video’s keyword topic, will help YouTube’s bots as well as viewers identify your video. You can even put up a transcribe with the video to further boost your rankings (just ensure that valuable keywords are included in the video’s audio content).

Takeaway:

Image1112 or Video001 won’t make your content searchable. Give the image or video a relevant name, preferably with the main keyword.

8Repurpose old content into videos, images and slideshares

As per a Hubspot study of more than 13,500 websites, companies that published 16 or more blog posts per month received 3.5 times more traffic than those that published four times or fewer each month. Frequent and consistent updates are the driving forces of modern SEO. If you feel that you are running out of ideas, repurpose old textual content into videos or images, and embed it on your site.

Takeaway:

Utilise your old marketing content to spread the same information through new marketing avenues and trending mediums.

Conclusion

Visual content is eating the internet, and statistical evidence shows that this is a trend that will last over the coming years.

The modern-day consumer expects you to include images, videos, gifs, and infographics in your content. People love visual content and so do the search engines. Incorporating visual content in your content marketing strategy will give you an advantage over your competition (unless they are also actively pursuing the same visual marketing strategy- go for quality, quirky videos if that’s the case).

A successful content marketing strategy is one that incorporates visual content along with text-based content for conveying the call-to-action. Striking a balance between text and visual elements is of extreme importance.

Do you know of some other strategies to boost SEO with visual content? Please share them in the comments below. We would love to hear from you.

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