Using visual content properly can boost your website performance a lot! Still, it’s not only limited to performance only, because it will also help you improve the overall SEO score when used properly.

But unfortunately, many people only focus on writing quality articles while forgetting to use enough visual elements to make sure that their audience doesn’t get off the hook!

Marketing professionals know how much difference visual content can make compared to normal ones. Not using enough visual elements can negatively impact your SEO score.

How to take advantage of visual content? Improve your SEO with these methods

So how to optimize these visual elements to your advantage?

First things first, go through your recently published articles and try to figure out how many images and videos you normally include in each article?

If you’re not using more than 2 images and embedding a related video to help your audience, then you’re missing out on so many potential visitors. You need to understand the importance of visual content in SEO to start evaluating it the right way.

Importance of visual content in SEO

Gathering in-depth information regarding trending topics and then publishing them in a simple traditional manner won’t produce many results for you.

But if you can break your content into small pieces of information with related imagery then it can perform better compared to the earlier version. Allowing the readers to take a break from continuous reading and help them understand a complex topic more thoroughly!

Which type of visual content you should use?

Now you are aware of how important visual content is for being successful with SEO. You must be searching for ways to optimize the right visual content for your site right?

Well, we’ve got you covered. Below is the complete list of some popular visual content types that are used by professionals to drive in extra traffic every month!

Let’s dive in.

High-quality images

Using high-quality images can help you gain the attention of your readers while publishing articles with too much written content.

No matter which niche you’re targeting, never download random images from the internet for using them with your blog. Instead, we suggest you create your own high-quality images using free tools like canva.

Infographics

Infographics are gaining a lot of attention from marketers recently. As they tend to perform ten times better when it comes to teaching or explaining complicated stuff to someone.

Short videos

You can embed few short videos within the article to help your readers go through any tutorials on the spot!

YouTube is the best platform for publishing your own videos or finding similar useful videos.

Detailed graphs

Graphs are very useful when presenting data of a specific time range or events in front of a large audience group.

You can create such detailed graphs easily using Microsoft excel or online tools, and include them within your articles later.

GIFs and similar media

GIFs ( graphics interchange format ) are very popular among social media lovers.

Whenever you get a chance to be sarcastic or funny with your content, it’s always better to use a GIF or memes to entertain your audience with the content of their interest.

How visual content can help you improve overall SEO?

Google’s machine learning has started to improve and get better at scanning visuals.

So whenever a site owner uses visual content to make it easier for the readers to understand the concept, they can prioritize such quality content sites over others. But it’s possible only if you’re using enough visual content combined with your written content properly.

Visual content is easy to scan and understand

The type of visual content we have suggested to use along with your normal block of content is simple to produce.

While being very convenient for your readers, visual content is much easier to digest compared to the normal information that we provide in a written format.

Gather the media files you wish to use and try to keep their size and format the same.

Otherwise, you may regret it later when your site performance starts decreasing, because of oversized images and videos.

You can use either the free or paid tools according to your choice to edit and produce such quality visual content.

In case you don’t have enough to produce them by yourself, we recommend you hire a freelance graphic designer who is experienced enough to meet your deadlines and requirements.

Can help you reduce the bounce rate of your site

Another great advantage of using related visual content within your article is that,

The people who read your article for the first time won’t get bored reading long paragraphs of information.

It can be even boring for some people, as everyone is short on time nowadays, which leads to a higher bounce rate on your website. And an increased bounce rate means bad news for your SEO! Using visual content can help you overcome this problem.

By using quality images, video tutorials in between your written information, you can keep your audience connected with the process. As they find your visual content to be interesting, the chances of reading the whole article are increased automatically.

Using SEO optimized images

To improve the overall SEO of any website using visual content, images play an important role during this process. Whether they are featured images of your published articles, images related to your content within the article, or promotional images.

You can not use any random images for this purpose, because the type of images you use affects your SEO score.

If you have visited any professional business site or a popular blog, you may have noticed that the images they’re using follow a proper format.

No matter what niche you’re in, using images without optimizing them for better search engine optimization is a very silly mistake.

But you don’t have to worry if you have no idea how to optimize the images for SEO. Because you can download such plugins (if you’re a WordPress user), that can optimize the images for you and make them SEO friendly. Correcting oversized images, adding proper alternative text, for making them SEO compliant.

Submitting image and video sitemaps

If you’re one of those people who have a lot of visual content on their sites like images and videos. Then, creating and submitting an image sitemap or video sitemap, or both according to your requirements.

Because even Google itself suggests everyone submit an image and video sitemaps if possible. As the processing of metadata becomes much faster when you submit the sitemaps, your visual content can get indexed quickly.

Which can help you appear in organic search results related to the content and target keyword of the article.

Visit the Google search console, and log in using your Google account.

In the case that you don’t have an account yet, create a new account and complete the process of setting up your search console dashboard. You can use the guidance directly from Google to create quality sitemaps for your images or use any third-party tool to do so.

The same goes with the video elements, including them in the sitemap can help Google to display your videos in the SERPs.

Discuss your strategy with your influencers

Investing a decent amount of your income into influencer marketing can improve your growth if you choose success in choosing the best social media influencers.

In case, you are already using influencer marketing for promoting your business/brand then it can be beneficial for you! Because your influencing partners have a lot of knowledge regarding, how to work with visual content, how to create quality visual content, and how to promote it strategically.

Discussing your future schedule and plans with them can help you remove any visible mistakes in marketing strategies. That can actually help you increase your overall SEO for the website, along with the visitor count.

Wrapping up

Finding the videos, images and other visual content that suits your niche and goes with your audience’s interests can take some time. But if you start using random media files without analyzing the audience requirements, everything will be in vain for sure.

That’s why we highly recommend you perform in-depth research on your niche. And audience to avoid any shortcomings when you start using visual content!

Hope this article helped you do share it with others if you found it useful, and also don’t forget to mention your suggestions or queries below.