We all know that imagery is the key to engagement…everything looks better with a picture, right? What a lot of people don’t realise however, is that visual assets can actually help to boost SEO, here’s how:
Improves Average Time on Site
Studies have shown that the more time visitors spend on a website corresponds with higher search rankings, which means having video content on your website’s landing page will get your audience to stay longer (hopefully for the duration of your video). The same goes with images and infographics, which are commonly found on blog posts like this one!
Generates Backlinks
Including visual assets is a great way to generate more backlinks quickly, which is another important part of SEO. Backlinks are links from one website to a page on another website. They signal to major search engines (like Google) that other websites vouch for your content. Visual assets are a great way of generating backlinks, especially if the content focuses on trending topics or news stories.
Google can Visualise Images too
There used to be a time when getting search rankings was dependent on how many keywords you saturated your content with, but luckily SEO has come a long way since then and although Google can’t actually see visual content, it can certainly learn it. Visual recognition is still being developed, but we know that Google has the ability to search images by matching their shapes in other images and linking them together.
Visual assets do much more than just look pretty; they provide contextually relevant keywords and can improve user experience, a must have in modern SEO!
