5 ways to boost your site’s SEO with your visual content
Learn how to optimize the visual content on your e-commerce platform to generate more organic traffic to your store.
Every session on your site is a potential sale. The more sessions, the better. Search engine optimization (SEO) is a way to increase those sessions - free of charge! SEO is a free marketing initiative that you can take advantage of to generate more webshop sales if done correctly. 80% of major purchases start with an online search on Google, Yahoo, or Bing. That’s why it’s so important to position your site on the first result page, helping potential customers to find their way to you easily. We collected five ways to increase your chances of ranking higher in search results by optimizing the visual content:
- Speed up your page loading times
- Utilize alt text for your visuals
- Establish a smart file naming convention
- Harness the power of video
- Take advantage of social media
1. Speed up your page loading time
Picture yourself searching for a new pair of shoes online. You land on a webshop page you’d like to browse, but the images won’t load - would you patiently stick around or return to Google and click on the next link coming your way?
Most people will probably leave and rather buy somewhere else. Do you know what your current site speed is? (If not, you can test it with this free Google tool). The slower the page loads, the higher the bounce rate, which signals search engines that your link is not worth clicking, resulting in a lower search engine result page (SERP) ranking. To lower your bounce rate and essentially increase your conversion rate, we urge you to optimize the size of your product images.
JPEG or JPG files usually offer a good balance between quality and file size, enabling you to optimally showcase your products while ensuring speedy page loading times. Shopify, the biggest e-commerce platform, accepts a file size of up to 20MB. However, the smaller the file, the faster your site. We recommend compressing your image to a file size of a maximum of 4MB.
2. Utilize alt text for your visuals
Adding alt text to your visuals on your non-shopping pages (about page, corporate website, careers, blog, etc.) enables search engines to locate your page for those that use text-only browsers or screen readers. This ensures maximum accessibility for users who can’t see or those with low bandwidth connections. Google uses alt text to understand what your page is about. Therefore, try to use descriptive text with relevant keywords to explain what an image is showing.
Here are some things to keep in mind when writing alt text:
- Simply describe what the image or visual is showing. If there’s more, you’d like to highlight, utilize the image caption.
- Keep it brief and straightforward. Some screen readers have a 125 character limit for alt text.
- Use keywords appropriately. Stuffing alt text with keywords can result in Google reading your site as spam.
3. Establish a smart file naming convention
Search engines not only crawl the text (and alt text) on your site, but they also check what kind of visual content is shown. For that, relevant, keyword-rich file names are crucial. Once you’re getting started with visual content creation, think about a file naming structure that makes sense for your products and is scalable in the long run. You can find some inspiration here.
For most platforms, image file names are restricted to lower case letters from a-z, numbers from 0-9, hyphens, and underscores. Therefore, avoid spaces or special characters in your filenames. Keep it short and descriptive. As a rule of thumb, try not to use more than three or four words in your filenames.
When using Profoto StyleShoots equipment, your files will be named automatically based on the target volume (Profoto StyleShoots Drive or external USB) you choose, your export folder, preset, product, and file type.
4. Harness the power of video
Featuring product videos to showcase items on product detail pages has numerous benefits for your sales performance.
In general, having a diverse selection of media on your site signals the search engine higher value and therefore boosts your SEO. Regarding your non-shopping pages, search engines consider how long people stay on your site (time spent on-site). Customers are more likely to watch videos than reading text or looking at images. Therefore, video content also engages visitors on your site longer. Think about adding a brand video to your about us page or a testimonial video anywhere on your site.
The more high-quality video content you create, the higher the amount of traffic coming to your site, boosting your online shop’s SEO long-term.
When shooting with Profoto StyleShoots Live or Profoto StyleShoots Eclipse, you can choose between MP4 and MOV for your videos. Selecting different aspect ratios, dimensions, and resolutions enables you to create content for any purpose with ease.
5. Take advantage of social media
Producing powerful visual content that works effectively across channels enables you to create an engaged online and offline community. By using the same brand identity and utilizing a smart linking strategy across platforms, social media can give you solid insights into what your audience wants to see. This, in turn, helps you to create more targeted content and even optimize future collections.
This construct named social SEO can be used as a tool to increase your shop’s visibility and search ranking. By genuinely reaching out and connecting with your customers across platforms, you can use your social channels as a traffic driver to your shop. Social sharing of stunning visual content can increase the number of links to your website while boosting awareness and overall trust in your brand. Try producing highly targeted posts on your social channels to increase the time customers spend on your site. By driving more valuable traffic to your shop, your visibility and engagement improve, which in turn fuels your SEO.
The performance of your social channels benefits from strong visual content. High-quality images and videos are the way to go here. Play around with colors, lighting, and props that match your brand story and image. Social videos generate more shares than text and images combined. When creating content for your social media profiles, try to shift your focus towards videos and GIFs to keep your audience interested.
Take-aways
Investing time to optimize your webshop for search engines will pay off in the long run and is a free marketing initiative with a powerful payoff. Every visitor coming to your page due to a higher search ranking means a potential sale. To harness SEO by means of your visual content, optimize your imagery for site speed. Use JPG/ JPEG for your product images and make sure to add alt text and a smart file naming that is scalable in the long run. Next to embedding images on your website, play around with video to appeal and engage with your audience. Create content that works across channels to use social SEO. Engage with your audience and use your social media to drive valuable traffic to your e-commerce platform.