18 Jul Spread The Word With Visual Content

Businesses are constantly vying for the attention of potential customers, but attention spans are short these days. If a person ends up on your webpage or happens across a blog post, chances are they are probably skimming the surface: Nearly 80 percent of visitors scan content and spend an average of 15 seconds on page. What does this mean for business owners? You have a very small window of opportunity to catch their interest and get them to do what you want. So, how can you captivate the minds of an impatient audience? Visual content. Images appeal to the wandering eye – optimized images make sure you get in front of those peepers and enhance the shareability of your content (that’s free marketing people!). The stats don’t lie:

• Tweets with images were retweeted 1.5 times more than tweets without images.
• Facebook posts that included an image have 2.3 times the rate of engagement than posts without.

And if you want to leverage image-driven platforms like Pinterest and Instagram, text alone simply won’t do. But haphazardly copy-pasting images throughout your content won’t do the trick. First, you need to choose or create visuals, such as photographs, cartoons, and infographics, that are both appealing and relevant to your content. Then, you need to incorporate a few simple search engine optimization (SEO) elements to increase online visibility. Here are some steps you should follow to take full advantage of visual content:

1. Needless to say – but we’re going to throw it out there anyway – choose QUALITY images. While the quality of appeal may be subjective, there are certainly other elements you can control, such as clarity, lighting, and color, that are sure to draw the eye.

 

2. Think about how your pictures will appear on the results page of Google Images. Scaling images to standard dimensions (16:9 or 4:3) will ensure desired details aren’t lost in translation.

 

3. Loading images takes up a lot of bandwidth and can slow your website down. To avoid this, you should compress the image file size and remove useless data, such as location and camera information.

 

4. Change the default image file name. When you upload a photo, they’re generally assigned a meaningless name such as IMG_010101.jpg. People don’t search Google this way. They use keywords. So, for example, if your image is a photo of Harrison Ford in the new Blade Runner movie, you’d want to name your photo blade-runner-2049-harrison-ford.jpg.

 

5. Use alt tags. Alt tags are the text or HTML alternative to an image, and HTML is the language of search engine indexing bots- those algorithms responsible for your rankings. A good alt tag for that Blade Runner image, for instance, might be “screen capture from Blade Runner 2049 of a worried Harrison Ford pointing a weapon at Ryan Gosling”.

 

6. Include captions beneath images on pages and posts. According to kissmetrics, these captions are read on average three times more than the body content. Considering most people are scanning your content, captions are prime opportunities to get your message out there and include call-to-actions that convert.

Not only are images more likely to be shared across social media platforms, but there are more than twice as many page-one above-the-fold opportunities on Google Images result pages than there are on traditional SERPs. Including optimized visuals in your online marketing strategy can serve as that added exposure needed to get ahead of the competition. To capture the attention of your target audience, get your free SEO report to see if your visual content is boosting your brand awareness!