Video, Images, and Text for SEO Ranking Success
When it comes to digital marketing, the importance of visual content continues to rise. Whether formatted as video, image, or infographic, the ability to educate your audience visually is important for your SEO footprint. Web design experts have long seen this trend coming, and most modern website content management platforms already support fully visual formats.
However, that doesn’t mean that text is long gone – quite the opposite in fact. Search engines still rely on text for the bulk of contextual data clues. Optimizing a mixture of the text, image, and video content is key to achieving top results in today’s SEO ecosystem.
Using Video Content for SEO
According to Hubspot, video content makes up 74% of all internet traffic. That number should immediately tell you that people are interested in watching videos about their favorite subjects. Other data suggests that four times as many consumers would rather watch a video about a product than read about it.
Internet users prefer video content to most any other format, and search engines results reflect the trend. Any modern digital marketing campaign should rely on video for nudging consumers down the sales funnel – this can be done through live streaming, narrative storytelling, or direct advertisement.
Video has its drawbacks, however. It is the most expensive type of content to produce, and search engines cannot yet tell what video files contain. For this reason, they should be placed further along your sales funnel, attracting high-value consumers who are already interested in your product or service.
Images and Graphic Content
Images are both eye-catching and inexpensive to create. This makes them an ideal tool for lead generation – on social media, for example. Importantly, images must still serve some sort of educational role – they must offer value to the reader.
Infographics represent one of the best ways to combine imagery with solid data to generate leads. With an attractive design and some relevant key points included, a good infographic keeps consumers riveted to the screen.
For most industries, a healthy digital marketing campaign relies heavily on outward facing image content to generate leads. Some marketers find that dedicating up to 50% of content generation to image content, including illustrations, charts, and diagrams, produces ideal results.
Text Offers the Foundation
Video and image content are both highly optimized to consumer expectations – but neither is as indexable by search engines as text. Blog posts are also key to offering reliable and easily referenced data – nobody wants to have to search for the “4:30-mark” on your presentation video to prove a point they could find written elsewhere.
These content types work together. To fully optimize YouTube content, for instance, you should post transcriptions in plain text, and tag your videos with keywords for search engines to crawl. This ensures that you don’t miss out on indexing opportunities when blogging. Use these three content formats to complement one another for the best results.
Vortex Communications builds websites and SEO campaigns for clients in a broad range of industries. Find out how we can help you create a content strategy fit to promote your brand.