We continually stress the importance of visuals in your marketing. Adding images attracts the search engines as well as your audience. That doesn’t mean you just keep adding them, don’t give them a purpose and forget about appropriate SEO settings. “By adding more context around images, results can become much more useful, which can lead to higher quality traffic to your site. You can aid in the discovery process by making sure that your images and your site are optimized for Google Images.”
First off, if you have too many visuals, your viewers can become distracted and overwhelmed and ultimately lose track of the point in being there. You need to find a healthy balance of content and the visuals needed to enhance the marketing goal. Distraction comes easily with today’s viewers. If you create those distractions with too many visuals you are hurting your own marketing efforts.
Secondly, every visual should carry a purpose. Don’t just add a visual just because you didn’t have any. Tossing something in to look at becomes just that…something to look at, distracting your viewer for no reason. If your content can benefit from a graphic of some sort, put careful thought into the best options, what action it should encourage and where to place it. Whether placing video, images or animations, consider the supporting drive and where it fits in the content deliverables.
Once you’ve found the perfect visuals and have incorporated accordingly, don’t forget about the SEO. After doing all that work to get exactly what you needed, exactly where you needed it, why would you skip out on the important step of alerting search engines of the relevance? Ensure you are utilizing the Alt and title tags appropriately. Using a tool like SEO Yoast, which we are big fans of, help guide you in the right SEO direction.
“Google uses alt text along with computer vision algorithms and the contents of the page to understand the subject matter of the image. Also, alt text in images is useful as anchor text if you decide to use an image as a link. Alt text (text that describes an image) improves accessibility for people who can’t see images on web pages, including users who use screen readers or have low-bandwidth connections.” “Google extracts information about the subject matter of the image from the content of the page, including captions and image titles. Wherever possible, make sure images are placed near relevant text and on pages that are relevant to the image subject matter.”
Make the most of your visual marketing and read more on Google’s Image Best Practices here.
