How Visual Content Can Boost Your Website SEO

Have you ever struggled with explaining a complex topic to your friends until you draw something down to illustrate those points and they finally went, “oh, right, I get it now!”. That’s how visualization can help you deliver messages more effectively and make others retain them better.

That’s why in today’s fast-paced marketing world, more and more marketers rely on visual content. Not only do they help you illustrate complex objects, but visual content can also be a powerful tool to improve your website SEO performance. This way, you can increase your online presence, drive more traffic to your website, engage more visitors– which all can lead to higher conversion rates.

Now, the question is, “how does visual content work to increase your SEO rank?”. Let’s find out!

Reason #1: Help Visitors Understand Better

We’ve talked about it before, but it’s worth repeating that visual content can break down abstract topics into more snackable and digestible chunks, so it’s much easier for visitors to retain.

A study found that the human brain processes image 60,000 times faster than text, and 90 percent of information transmitted to the brain is visual. It makes sense now why we can retain information or data better when we absorb them through explainer videos or infographics.

Thus, when you help your visitors understand your messages better, it means that you also provide them with content they really want to consume. This is how you gain their trust. When you can gain trust, you can make them stick around, making it much easier for you to maintain your website traffic. A solid traffic profile will lead to a higher SEO rank.

Reason #2: Help Visitors Stay Longer

Your visitors will only stay on a page where they get the information they actually want and are able to digest it conveniently. When you use text-heavy content to convey your messages, your visitors are more likely to get overwhelmed since reading seems like a chore for them. They’ll close your website and go back to the SERPs. This can increase your bounce rate that is so harmful to your SEO and your online credibility in general.

Meanwhile, when you use visual content and make everything easy to navigate, you can keep them longer on your website which increases your dwell time and reduces your bounce rate. The long dwell time tells search engines that you get value from your content. Thus, they will give your website a rankings boost.

Reason #3: Google Loves Visual Content

Did you know that a website that includes a video is 53 times more likely to appear on the top page of Google SERPs? Also, articles that include images appear on the top pages of search engine results and are viewed up to 94% more often than those without images.

The Google algorithm loves websites with rich multimedia and diverse content, including video, images, interactive elements, etc. Not only will multimedia make the website more trustworthy and professional, but all those types of content can also provide more value compared to stand-alone text-based content. In other words, they spice up the plain text and your articles.

Visual content such as videos and images allows you to add alt attributes to describe to search bots what the visual content is. Those alt attributes also improve accessibility for people who can’t see the visual content on web pages.

Not to mention that Google is the parent company of YouTube. So, when you post a video on the YouTube platform and optimize it, it’s more likely to appear on Google SERPs.

Reason #4: Build a Solid Backlink Profile

Link building is a ranking factor for SEO. In order to maintain a well-built backlink profile, you need to be sure you’re creating quality content that provides value to your visitors and readers.

A website with a strong backlink profile will most likely appear at the top of SERPs as Google sees it as a reputable and authoritative website many audiences like. That’s where visual content comes in handy.

Let’s say you create an infographic and other websites find it helpful, so they use it as a reference for their next content. They’ll give you credit by linking back to your piece. This is how visual content helps you secure links you couldn’t acquire with text-based content.

Reason #5: Drive More Traffic

Visual content such as videos, GIFs, and infographics, are highly shareable across social media, websites, and other digital platforms. These types of content can be such potent tools to help you drive your website traffic.

Although the total amount of website traffic isn’t going to significantly influence your search rankings, it still plays an important role in where your website appears in the SERPs. More traffic you’ve generated means more visitors that you’ve attracted, increasing your website popularity. And the more popular your site is, the better.

Final Thoughts

With all those reasons mentioned above, now you understand why you need to add visual content to your overall content marketing strategy. Of course, the meat of your message is likely going to be in words, but those words will almost always need to mesh with visuals so that you can deliver them engagingly to your visitors.

So, rather than relying on 3,000-word articles, it’s always better to consider adding visuals to illustrate crucial points or complement the topic. A well-balanced text and visuals will make a website much easier on the eyes and rank higher on SERPs.

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