It’s a fact: we live in an attention economy. This means that every business must vie for attention in an online space saturated with content.
Creating compelling visual content has become a cornerstone of effective modern SEO strategies in the digital marketing world. It is also an essential skill to master to ensure that your business can maximize its content marketing strategy.
The good news is that most online content for small businesses is not well written or well designed for search engine optimization.
The experts at Imagineery Studio have thoroughly researched and tested the most powerful and proven techniques for visual SEO strategies that will help your business stand out from the crowd and succeed.
Let’s dive in and learn about the best strategies for creating and presenting engaging content that will push your business high in the rankings of the leading search engines.
Create Captivating SEO
Visual content not only captivates your audience but also significantly enhances a website’s search engine ranking, driving more organic traffic and ultimately boosting online conversions and brick-and-mortar sales.
At its core, visual SEO content includes images, infographics, videos, and other media that are optimized for search engines.
Search engine optimization involves the strategic use of keywords, file names, meta tags, and ensuring that visual content is mobile-friendly and loads quickly.
There are two key reasons for emphasizing visual content in SEO:
- It caters to the evolving preferences of users who favor engaging and easily digestible content.
- It aligns with search engines’ algorithms that prioritize user experience. Google, for example, makes page ranking decisions based on user experience signals that include how users interact with visual content.
Images for Brand Recognition
The impact of visual content on user engagement and SEO is striking.
Studies have shown that content with relevant images gets almost 95% more views than content without, and 65% of people prefer to learn through images!
This translates to more engagement and more retention of your business messaging, all while building your search engine ranking.
First, all images should organically align with your company’s branding, reinforcing core company culture, products and services.
The standard “Three C’s” must be maintained for brand consistency, while providing meaningful organic content, before deploying the full power of SEO techniques.
- Color – Serves as a constant communicator that influences brand perception and customer decisions. Studies have shown that color enhances brand recognition by up to 80%, evoking specific emotions and associations that drive consumer decisions.
- Contrast – Use of contrast helps to differentiate content while promoting purchasing intent. Educational or motivational elements, for example, can be framed around more direct promotional material to add style and reasons for social media comments and engagement.
- Clarity – Powerful, punchy content should be crisp, clean and well-defined. Concise sentences should deliver key information. Strategic keyword placement relevant to your business is a perfect way to grab the attention of customers and search engine ranking bots.
Behind the images themselves, three foundational approaches to SEO also need to be employed.
- Keywords – Research must be specific for visual content by adding proper alt text to image metadata. This is important for SEO ranking, but also vital to ensure that your entire audience has access to your content.
- Image optimization – File sizes should be compressed for faster loading times and must be responsive across different devices. SEO ranking can decline due to poor quality and loading times.
- Social sharing – Incorporating social sharing buttons throughout visual content will encourage user participation. Even better, user-generated content can be promoted to amplify reach. A wide network of social sharing also builds the perception of a company dedicated to creating a large and engaged community.
Informed Infographics
Infographics have become another pivotal tool for business marketing and SEO.
Visual representations of important facts and knowledge cater to the modern consumer’s preference for fast, easy-to-digest content.
By condensing complex information into an easily understandable and visually appealing format, infographics appeal to a broader audience, enhancing the likelihood that readers will share your information.
Sharing, whether on social media or via email, blogs and websites should be viewed as free promotion for your business!
From an SEO perspective, exciting infographics have the potential to go viral, significantly boosting a website’s traffic and improving backlinks. This also signals to search engines that the content is valuable and authoritative.
Incorporating relevant keywords into the infographic’s title and description can further optimize it for search engines, making it a powerful tool to target specific search queries related to the business or industry.
Infographics are also versatile and can be repurposed across various social media platforms, amplifying a business’s marketing strategy without requiring any additional resources.
This adaptability, combined with their potential for increasing user engagement and improving SEO, underscores why infographics are indispensable in the digital marketing toolkit for all businesses.
SEO Video Content Rules!
Videos are the final piece of the puzzle that will significantly increase the time users spend on a site. One of the most critical metrics for SEO success is engagement, and videos are a prime promotional tool.
Did you know that videos get three times as many shares as text and images combined? Or that the average reviewer will retain 95% of what is presented in a video, but only 10% of text and 65% of an image?
Engagement metrics send positive signals to search engines, indicating that a site is providing valuable content, which helps boost SEO rankings.
But the benefits of visual SEO content extend beyond higher rankings. By providing a richer, more engaging user experience, businesses can increase brand recognition, foster trust, and encourage social shares, multiplying their content’s reach and effectiveness.
In the digital age, video content has emerged as a powerful tool for businesses aiming to enhance their visibility and engagement online.
Using video in a company’s SEO strategy is no longer just an option – it’s a critical element for staying competitive and relevant.
There are several key factors that highlight the role of video in modern SEO practices:
- Retention – Search engines like Google prioritize websites that offer valuable content and retain visitors for longer. Videos excel in grabbing attention and keeping users interested. By embedding videos on websites, businesses can reduce bounce rates and increase the average time spent on-site, signaling to search engines that their content is relevant and valuable.
- Click-through rates (CTRs) – When video content is indexed and appears in search results, it often includes a thumbnail image, which makes these listings more noticeable and appealing compared to text-only results. This advantage encourages more clicks, driving additional traffic to the business’s website.
- Content diversity and keyword targeting – Videos allow businesses to cover topics in-depth, using both visual and auditory elements to address various aspects of their products, services, or industry. This multifaceted approach enables the inclusion of a wider range of keywords, including long-tail keywords, which can be strategically placed in video titles, descriptions, and tags. Lastly, with the rise of voice search and automatic transcriptions, spoken content in videos can also be indexed, further enhancing SEO potential.
As consumer preferences continue to evolve towards more dynamic and interactive content, the importance of video in achieving and maintaining high search engine rankings is only set to increase.
Businesses that recognize and act on the potential of video content will not only enhance their online visibility but also forge stronger connections with their audience, laying the foundation for sustained success in the digital marketplace.
Here is an example from Imagineery Studio of a high-ranking SEO video for YouTube that engages viewers in a fun and organic way to promote a company’s brand and message:
And here is an example of a “short” for Instagram that concisely drives brand awareness with enticing visuals:
Your Business – Your Message
Reminder: As we discussed in our SEO Writing for Beginners, the SEO strategies outlined in this article should never be used as a way to cover up uninspired content. Content is king! And great content will help you expand your kingdom!
The full potential of designing visuals that will boost your business SEO rankings must start from a place of genuine inspiration and a desire to communicate the deeper message of your business to the world.
Capturing and retaining audience attention is paramount for businesses of any size, and visual SEO content plays a pivotal role in modern marketing strategies.
SEO optimization for your company brand will expand your reach, but also will build an organic and strong community that will care deeply about your product or service.
Building a strong online community will also pay dividends offline, as word-of-mouth begins to add a new dimension to your promotional arsenal.
As the online world becomes more visual, the importance of integrating high-quality, optimized visual content into SEO strategies and techniques will only grow.
By embracing visual SEO content, businesses can create a more dynamic and engaging online presence that will set themselves apart in a highly competitive market online and offline.
Imagineery Studio is a content marketing agency for small businesses. Want captivating content that converts? Contact us here!