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The early days of SEO have left a legacy that leads many people to think all it involves is creating content that’s stuffed with keywords and letting Google’s algorithm do the rest. Today, the underlying formula is much more sophisticated and Google has over 200 ranking factors to determine where your website or pages should fall in its search results hierarchy.
Among the most important ranking factors are relevancy, high-quality content, page speed, backlinks and image / video optimization. Visuals are an integral element of social media and branding success which should not be overlooked. While images are important for SEO ranking, so too are their intention and perspective within a clearly-defined context.
We live in a visual world and whether we are grabbing people’s attention with a slick marketing campaign or looking to pass on simple information with an infographic, companies must have a strategic focus carved out for their visual content. They can be used to engage and connect with your audience or customer base while also portraying a strong impression of your brand from the outset.
Let’s explore why visuals play such a crucial role in online success for businesses.
The Connection Between Social Media and Images
Images are everything on social media. Spending just five minutes on most any of the popular viral channels will showcase just how visual these platforms are and on a basic level, posts with videos or images are more likely to be seen than those without.
This may be because our brains are programmed to process images in a split second, while reading text is much slower, so social media posts must be visually engaging to help them stand out from the hundreds of millions of other posts that day alone.
For companies wishing to connect with their customer base and target audience on social media, they must also create a strategy to determine the appropriate and adequate visual content for each. This could be a product demonstration video on YouTube, a sleek series of brand images on Instagram, or a fun viral-style video for younger platforms like TikTok.
Quality Over Quantity
It is not just about being seen, to help a social media post ‘go viral’ it must also be of sufficient quality where users share it with their own followers, friends or family. In this way, social media visuals allow you to not only stand out from other users but also your competition in the market. Furthermore, strong visual social media posts allow you to quickly convey your brand story, helping to build customer loyalty and creating an emotional connection with your followers.
Branding Relies Upon Strong Visual Content
To help create a connection and sense of loyalty to your brand, it’s important that your customers and audience see things that resonate with them in your content. Visuals are a great way to get this messaging across in a distilled format, avoiding the need for long or complex explanations of what your company stands for.
Through effective visual branding, from your logo and the font you use in your communications to how well your website works, you can convey a sense of competence and trustworthiness to your customers.
Consistency Remains Key
Consistency is one of the most important visual aides for building a reputation for competency and quality in customers as it helps set customer expectations and also come across as a trustworthy brand. If your customers are used to a particular aesthetic with your social media communications they may be caught off guard if your website has a completely different look.
But not only will this be jarring to anyone landing on your page, it can also cause them to question the connection between visual communications (or lack thereof) and whether it’s the same company in control of both - especially if there is a significant disconnect between the two. If you aren’t consistent across the board then it becomes much harder to meet customer expectations, and this is perhaps most noticeable with your visuals.
Even something as seemingly benign as choosing the right font can have a psychological effect on those reading them. For example, a study conducted by the Software Usability Research Laboratory (SURL) found that traditional fonts like Arial or Times New Roman are easy to read, stable, and mature. However, the study also found the fonts to be unimaginative and conformist. Meanwhile, standardizing the presentation of visuals on social media, such as the size of images or the length of video content not only looks professional, it shows that you value paying attention to detail.
SEO Performance and Visuals are Interlinked
Whether you are a business owner or you work in a marketing department, it’s important to recognize that it can be extremely difficult (but not impossible) to succeed in today’s commercial landscape without some element of digital marketing. And in SEO, we can use the user’s search intention as a driver for the use of images to boost visibility through search engines.
For example, someone searching for gifts to buy their son for their birthday will be expecting an instant visual result rather than having to read a lot of text. This user will want some text but mostly some visual aides to help in their purchasing decision. This is something that search engines look for to help them understand the relevancy of page content.
In this scenario, Google recognizes the need for visuals and won’t place pages that are text-heavy too highly compared to results that offer more visual results, and in cases such as this, importance on images should be placed higher than written content. You should also be sure you understand the basics of social media and security as well.
Following Industry SEO Guidelines to Boost User Experience
It is also worth mentioning the part visuals have to play in the user experience – Google’s John Mueller emphasizes how the quality of content encompasses the overall website, including its layout, design, integration of images, and page speed. Most people when looking at a website or page want to scan it for information, rather than reading every last word and it must also be visually appealing.
We must design our pages to be easy on the eye for viewers and visitors so careful consideration of page layout, supported by images and videos, is important. In SEO terms, if your company website is not an enjoyable experience for your visitors, they will bounce back to Google and seek out a similar brand that gives them what they are looking for – this is known as bounce rate and plays a key role in how pages rank.
Image Optimization for SEO
To help boost the search engine-friendliness of your images consider applying the following optimization tips:
- Resize your images – this helps to keep them consistent but also reduces page load speed.
- Compress images – compressing images helps to reduce their load speed further.
- Create unique images – original content is another ranking factor and if you can create your own images, your ranking can improve.
- Correct image file names and alt text – the image file name and alt text are textual clues that help Google to understand what it is looking at. Make your alt text SEO friendly to help your images be found by your keywords.
- Use mobile-friendly images – so much of online search is done by mobile so failing to optimize your images for this format will hurt your site.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why are images important for social media?
Images are important for social media because they grab attention, convey messages quickly, and enhance engagement by making content visually appealing.
What are the characteristics of a good social media image?
Characteristics of a good social media image include high quality, relevant to the content, eye-catching, properly sized for the platform, and consistent with the brand's style and message.
Are videos more important than images for social media?
While videos have their own benefits, images still hold significant importance for social media as they are quick to consume, easily shareable, and effective in capturing attention in a scrollable feed.
Will AI-Generated Images Become a Factor in SEO or Marketing?
Artificial intelligence has become the latest buzzword and is dominating headlines across a wide range of industries. Of course, once mastered this technology is going to significantly change the way we do many things in business, and in some instances it already has – such as automated inventory control.
AI image creation tools like Midjourney are allowing us to create almost 100% photorealistic images with little more than a handful of prompts entered by the user. It’s an amazing way to circumnavigate issues such as copyright but in recent news, Google has announced that it will be watermarking images that have been entirely generated by computers or artificial intelligence.
Google will also be upgrading its own AI conversational chatbot, Bard, to become more visual by allowing users to include images with their text in prompts with an end goal of integrating Adobe’s AI image generation tool Firefly to allow for the creation of high-quality images.
With the ease now of creating new images, it's a great time to ensure that web pages are deemed higher quality by search engines – for the sake of our SEO results and marketing resources.
