According to Social Media Examiner, 80% of marketers use visual assets in their social media marketing, and video (63%), alone, has also surpassed blogging (60%) in usage as a social media marketing asset. Google loves video content and a simple reason why: consumers like video and they are demanding more video content! Cisco projects in their Annual Internet Report (2018–2023) that global internet traffic from videos will make up 82% of all consumer internet traffic by 2021. We, humans, are visual creatures, and 65 percent of us are visual learners who process information based on what we see.
Google will give you thumbs up if your content is not only relevant to the audience but manages to engage them as well: a higher time spent on a website correlates with higher search rankings. In 2015, Google implemented the RankBrain algorithm. “RankBrain” is Google’s name for a machine-learning artificial intelligence system that’s used to help process its search results. Users spend more time on a website with visual content: videos, images, data graphs, iconographic, etc. When every visitor spend more time on your website then your website is standing out in the eyes of Google, and Google pushes your rankings to the top, giving you more visibility.
Google crawls social websites for data in the same way that it would any other site, that’s why we see the posts made on Twitter and Facebook in the search results. Social network updates that include an image had 2.3x more engagement than those without one, according to BuzzSumo, and Buffer reported that tweets that contain images lead to 150% more retweets.
Does it all mean the visual content is the best way to improve your online presence? It is one of the best ways to boost your site’s ranking and your social media presence. While “an image is worth a thousand words” and a video is worth exponentially more, your visual content will give you the best results only in combination with written content. Search engine bots are primarily dependent on text associated with your visual content.
The significance of visual content optimization cannot be neglected! It helps to make your content useful for both humans and search engines.
Before you upload an image or a video, give the file a name that is directly related to the image content, don’t forget to include the appropriate keyword, tags and descriptions. Avoid using spaces and underscores, use a hyphen to separate words. For example: john-smith-bankruptcy-lawyer-on-the-treasure-coast.jpg. When you upload your company’s logo, use a unique name with a few keywords related to your business / organization.
Reduce your file’s size. The massive file sizes aren’t doing your SEO any favors. Google takes site loading speed into account, and very large files slow down page load times, and it will impact your rankings. Slow speed also affects how quickly the bots can index your site.
When you embed a media file in your page, use ALT (alternative) text, which allows the search engines and the users to understand more about the media file. Also, give the relevant title with appropriate keywords to the embedded file as it helps to provide additional information to the ALT text. Try to use unique authentic images instead of stock images. Stock photos won’t help to surge up the rankings of your website as many other websites might also be using the same photos.