For most startups and businesses, high website ranking is still a work in progress. There are no shortcuts to the top page, but with visual marketing smart-cuts are achievable.
Visual marketing is all about using pretty pictures, interesting videos, memes and infographics to grab the attention of your audience and consumers.
And it works like a charm. The investment you make in visual marketing can give you crazy returns:-
No wonder, 65% of senior marketing executives believe that visual content is core to how their brand story is communicated.
However, generating visual content is just half the story. You have to market them as well to reach more customers and improve your overall web presence.
Lucky for you, we’ve compiled a list of the best visual marketing tricks and practices to help you in your marketing and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts.
Did you know that 75% of users never go beyond the first page of Google search results?
No wonder, everyone wants their website to show up on the very first page.
A video can help you achieve that dream in no time.
Researches revealed that Google has a soft spot for videos. If you put up a video on your homepage, then that will make it 53% more likely to appear on the #1 page of Google.
The science behind this increment is that having a video will make the visitors spend 88% more time on your page. This leads Google to believe that your page is of importance, and raises its ranking.
On top of that, MarketingSherpa reports a 157% increase in organic traffic from search engines by including more video on your site.
There’s also the sales side of videos too. Putting an explainer video on your homepage increases conversion by an average 20%. Don’t believe me? Then ask Dropbox. Adding an explainer video in the Dropbox homepage yielded 10 million extra consumers and $48,000,000 in extra revenue.
It is true that visual content is over 40 times more likely to get shared on social media than other types of content.
At the same time, it is also true that social media is about people, and we like to share content which makes us look cool in our timelines.
So, the best practice to get your visual content viral is by tagging influential people.
One like, share or comment from such super-social people can burst open the floodgates of engagement.
For instance, the infographic “Future of SEO” that we created for RankWatch grabbed thousands of likes in just a couple of hours when someone influential shared it. FYI, the infographic contains tips and opinions from the 25 high profile marketers like Rand Fishkin of Moz and Neil Patel of Quicksprout and Crazy Egg. No wonder, it was a hit.
The search engine can read words but not the visual content. Ergo, Google looks for the metadata to understand what your visual content is about.
This gives you an opportunity to influence search by associating relevant keywords and text to your visual content that you expect your target audience to use when googling for similar contents.
Both image and videos have some common metadata fields. Like Title (the headline of your image or video), Description (what the content contains or is about), Tags (what niche/subject it belongs to). And don’t forget to make your alt tags interesting if the image fails to load up.
If it’s a video, do also put the transcript in the comment section as the text will help search engine match your content to users’ queries.
A recent trend we have noticed on many blogs is the use of illustrated preview images. Like headlines, such preview images, if interesting, will motivate users to click open the article. This dramatically decrease your website’s bounce rate.
On top of that, sharing your article over social media with an illustrated preview image will grab more eyeballs. And, if the image is beautiful, then it will get shared without the user reading the whole article. Yeah, that happens a lot these days. You get attracted by the preview image, read its headline and then if it looks interesting enough to you or relevant to your social group, then you give the thumbs ups.
By adding social media buttons next to your images or videos, you will make it easy for your audience to share your visual content. When it’s easy, people will do it.
Link building is an important part of SEO.
And, the easiest way to do so is to optimize and distribute your visual content over different platforms like Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google Plus and YouTube.
Do it not just to get points from the search engine but also to reach out to your prospects.
Images that appear nice on desktop/laptop screens might not look good on the small mobile screens. Also, they might not load fast enough. And we know that mobile users are faster to abandon websites that take like five seconds to load up.
Ergo the need to optimize your visual content for mobile and other screen sizes.
Work with your designer and developer to resize images and videos for smartphone and tablet users.
Google’s algorithm updates has been constantly breaking the hearts of many marketers and entrepreneurs.
Your SEO tricks of today might not be good for tomorrow.
But by publishing quality visual content regularly and interacting with your audience on a daily basis, you can outlast any algorithm updates.
You can use free design tools like Canva and Piktochart to produce visual contents like posters, picture quotes and infographics at a fast pace, even if you are not an illustrator or a designer.
To make animated short videos, you can use Animaker, which has a free version as well.
Colors are powerful, and using the right combination of colors and graphic design can make your message powerful.
In fact, 84.7% people let ‘color’ influence their purchase choices.
Ask Bing! Choosing a specific blue over some other hues amounted to an additional $80 million in annual revenue for Bing.
On the same lines, researchers observed that colored visuals can increase people’s willingness to read a content piece by 80%. That’s why infographics and animated videos are so good at grabbing visitor’s attention.
You sure don’t want to be in Google’s blindside.
But sometimes, Google and other search engines would overlook/ignore some pages, images and videos of your website. When that happens, your web presence will suffer as people won’t be able to search your content unless Google has them indexed. That’s where sitemaps come as a big relief.
XML/HTML Sitemaps help search engine crawl and index your website pages faster. How fast? Well, Casey Henry, for instance, tested the power of sitemaps on a client’s website, and discovered that when a sitemap was submitted, it took Google bots only 14 minutes to index the new posts.
But without sitemaps, it took 1,375 minutes for Google to crawl the pages. In other words, sitemaps sped up the indexing process by 22.5 hours.
So, get started with creating Image Sitemaps and Video Sitemaps to optimize and boost the search visibility of your visual content on Google and other search engines.
Rankings are important.
When your website ranks up on the first page of Google, good things happen to your business. You get more traffic. Your domain becomes credible and so does your company. And, it all translates to higher sales and stronger market presence.
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Crackitt is a Conversion-focused Design Agency that specializes in the production of Explainer Videos, Infographics & GIFs. We spend time understanding your core business offering. This knowledge is collected through a thorough analysis of your users which we then use to create stunning visuals (videos or graphics).
5 Jacobs Close,
Epping NSW 2121
174, Udyog Vihar Phase 1,
Gurgaon 122016,
124 Symonds Street Eden Terrace,
Auckland 1010
2035 Sunset Lake Road, Suite B-2,
Newark, Delaware, 19702
