How Visual Content Can Boost Your SEO

SEO practices aren’t all about keyword research and writing articles. It’s also about including visual content on your website too. In this article, you’ll see how visual content can boost your SEO.

Visual content like infographics, featured images, explainer videos, or checklists plays a significant role in boosting your SEO efforts. The reports even said that visual content is better than your long or short-form plain text-based content.

Internet users retain 65% of the visual content that they see almost three days later. Meanwhile, they can only retain 10% of the information when they absorb it through text-based content in the same amount of time.

From there, you know that when you provide your audiences what they want, Google will value your site and higher your rank in the first place.

Not convinced yet? These reasons below will show you how exactly visual content can impact your SEO practices:

#1. Most Visitors are Visual Learners: Visual Content To Boost SEO

Psychologically speaking, human brains process visuals 60,000 times faster than bulky text paragraphs. It makes sense that at least 65% of the population are visual learners, as most information sent to the brain is visual.

Not to mention that today’s generation consumes a lot of visual information through social media like Instagram or YouTube.

Including visual content to your website can help visitors get the answer they’re looking for in no time. This, in turn, will signal Google that your website is relatable and relevant, so it deserves to appear on top of the search results.

#2. Google Process Content Visually

Guess who else processes things visually other than humans? Google itself. Google algorithm can’t really see the visual content, but it learns to match visual content with other images.

As you might‘ve already noticed, there are billions of images of all sizes and shapes out there. In this case, Google will search images by matching shapes, metadata, embed code, and other elements in other images and link them all together.

So, make sure you also optimize all your visual content by adding the alt tag and giving related titles. It’ll make it much easier for Google to crawl your website and show your visual content on top of the search result.

#3. Makes Visitors Stay Longer on Your Site

Not only does visual content grab visitors’ attention quickly, but it also holds it. Since visual content gets your message across more captivatingly and easier on the eyes, visitors will spend more time to explore more and more information.

Thus, it will lead to an increase in dwell time and reduce bounce rates. The higher dwell time you have, the higher your chances to sit on the front page of search results.

The reason is that the longer visitors spend time on your website, the more likely it is that they found your content useful. Thus, the search engines can sense this by considering the dwell time to determine your rank.

#4. Improves Readability

We talked about how most of us are visual learners. So, it should not be surprising that 91% of people like visual content over written content. What’re more, visuals increase the desire to read content by 80%.

In other words, providing your visitors with only bulky, text-heavy content can only scare them away. Reading all of those paragraphs is just too much to ask for the visitors. They’ll exit your website immediately, increasing your bounce rate that will harm your SEO.

Visual content can break up those text-based paragraphs, making it easier for visitors to read and understand. An infographic, screenshot, or chart can be a great visual guide to supplement and balance out your written research-dense articles.

#5. Attracts More High-Quality Links: Visual Content To Boost SEO

Backlinking remains one of the most powerful strategies in SEO campaigns. It’s a top search ranking factor that can add to your site’s authority. In this case, visual content can help you gain more high-quality backlinks in no time as it’s extremely shareable.

For example, infographics can be your backlink goldmine since it shares value to other sites. If it’s designed well and conveys crucial information, other sites will more likely link to your site.

For maximum results, you can also do outreach campaigns to distribute the content to get maximum exposure. Try to find relevant websites and ask them to link back to your piece of content.

#6. Gives the Visitors More Options

In today’s digital era, the internet provides people with endless options. Therefore, internet users (including your website visitors) demand more options to consume the content they want.

Some of them like to skim through infographics, while others feel comfortable watching videos. Including visuals on your website means diversifying your content in multiple ways for different people.

When you can convey the information in a couple of different forms, it will make your content accessible to a broader audience – which means more website traffic.

Visual Content To Boost SEO Wrapping Up

While text-based content will still be a core of your content marketing strategy, you can always include visual content to balance it out. It brings text-based content to life by adding more color and flavor. In this case, creating a balance between text and visual content can improve your delivery of content and helps you with audiences’ retention.

Author

Andre Oentoro is the founder of Breadnbeyond, an award-winning explainer video company. He helps businesses increase conversion rates, close more sales, and get positive ROI from explainer videos (in that order).

Twitter: @breadnbeyond

LinkedIn: Andre Oentoro