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People are consuming media nearly all the time, whether they are scrolling through Facebook or TikTok, surfing the web, or even just listening to the radio. With the abundance of online media available at users’ fingertips, it can be challenging to break through the clutter with visual content that benefits your website’s SEO strategy. Staying up to date with the latest trends in visual content will help ensure your content aligns with strong SEO goals.

Why Is Visual Content Important?

Considering the fact that people are increasingly absorbing content while simultaneously having a decreasing attention span, it is crucial to have engaging visual content to maximize your website’s reach.

Additionally, the changing structure of Google’s search algorithm is utilizing visual content to determine search rankings. In other words, Google is using video and image content from a website, social media, Youtube, etc. to help determine the ranking and displays of search results for users. Additionally, the new Google AI-generated search results are incorporating visual content.

To increase the likelihood that your website will appear high on the search results, visual content needs to be consumer focused, attention grabbing, and informative.

What Are The Current Trends in Creating Visual Content?

With more focus on Google’s search algorithm to provide users with authentic, credible, and educational resources, having a lot of visual information may seem like the best option. However, the lowered attention spans of users demonstrate that visual content needs to be able to relay the most important information in an engaging, easily comprehensible manner.

Concise yet still informative content that can grab the attention of the target audience will have the most benefits to your overall engagement levels. Visual content should be created with the user’s best interest in mind, so considering your target audience’s demographics, location, and behaviors is key to creating relevant content.

Interactive content is also a good way to catch the eye of users. For instance, visual content can include “choose your own path” videos, 360-degree and zoomable photos, or polls and quizzes.

A key tip for creating visual content that aligns with all users is considering how the content will appear on different devices. Specifically, visual content should be equally digestible and engaging on a mobile device as it is on a laptop.

7 Steps To Make Competitive Visual Content That Boosts SEO

Having a strong SEO strategy is fundamental to having a successful online presence. Visual content is an important building block to having an effective SEO strategy and these tips will help ensure content creation aligns with SEO:

1. Curate a list of all the ways your visual content is consumed by users (channels, vendors, departments, etc.). Knowing who and what is involved will strengthen the management process.
2. Create a centralized system for all content for seamless posting across multiple platforms. This is known as a digital asset management (DAM) system.
3. Optimize content to ensure images and videos are high quality, relevant comments and/or tags are used, and locations or links to more content are included.
4. Using the DAM, distribute content from a single location to ensure all platforms remain consistent.
5. Review content to make sure it is scannable, well-structured, relevant, concise, and can be accessed across multiple channels.
6. Utilize a quality control system to check that all content is aligned with consumer values, both before and after the content is posted.
7. Decide which metrics and KPIs (such as click-through or impression rates) to measure to determine how content is impacting reach and adjust content creation accordingly.

In an ever-changing, innovative digital era, having an online presence that is adaptable and up-to-date is crucial to remain competitive in nearly any industry. Giving attention to your visual content and ensuring it aligns with your SEO strategy is a must to optimize your strategy.

Reach out to BluShark Digital to learn more about partnering with our team of professionals to customize your visual content strategy.