If you’re going to use images and videos in your content, you’ll need to ensure they are up to standard. With the increasingly influential role that multimedia digital content has in attracting and engaging online audiences, producing multimedia content isn’t just a case of putting it on your website or social channel – it needs to be optimised for search engines to enhance your online visibility and drive more organic traffic.
Below we will explore four effective strategies to ensure your multimedia digital content not only captivates your audience but also boosts your SEO results. By producing multimedia content that follows these practices, you can improve your SERP rankings and increase engagement in your content, closely aligning with our comprehensive SEO services.
It may seem obvious, but the quality of images and video can greatly impact engagement. Not only that, it can influence how well your content ranks, so ensuring you optimise video content will mean it will look the part whilst also helping search engines like Google find your content and understand its context.
Content that provides value and a great user experience is crucial, which high-resolution images and clear, appropriate videos can significantly enhance. When you use high-quality multimedia digital content that aligns closely with your textual content, it reinforces your site’s relevance for specific search queries. It will also captivate and retain audience attention longer, increasing the time spent on your site and the potential for conversion. Not only that but when thinking in terms of social media, quality visual content is more likely to be shared and linked to, creating valuable backlinks that further boost your site’s authority and search rankings. Before creating visuals, always ensure that this speaks directly to the content’s topic and adds real value to your narrative.
Properly tagging and describing your multimedia content is essential for multimedia SEO. Using accurate alt tags, file names, captions, and titles for images and videos helps search engines understand and categorise your content more effectively, which can then enhance its visibility in the SERPs. Alt tags are particularly crucial as they provide a text alternative for images, improving accessibility and allowing Google to better index and understand the visual content.
For videos, adding descriptive titles and rich descriptions can significantly improve their discoverability. Similarly, using keywords relevant to the content and context of the media in these tags and descriptions can further optimise your multimedia for specific user queries, helping them find your content. Not only does it potentially increase CTR but offers viewers clear information about the content they’re about to engage with.
Hand in hand with the quality of SEO multimedia content, you’ll need to compress and optimise file sizes too. Why? Well, this directly impacts your website’s loading speed – the last thing you want is to make your website experience slow and less than user-friendly. Not only will it put off users finding your website, but it will also impact your SERP positions. Large files can slow down page load times significantly, negatively affecting UX, so you’ll want to optimise video content and images appropriately.
The balance you’ll need is managing file sizes without compromising on quality, so using the right tools can make this effortless. There are many image and video editing tools such as Adobe Photoshop you can use to compress and optimise without the visual quality reducing.
By ensuring you’re producing multimedia content files that are not unnecessarily large, you not only improve your site’s loading speed but also enhance the overall UX. Remember, every second counts with loading, and as Google points out, the chances of users leaving your site increase 32% when page load time jumps from 1 second to 3 seconds.
Transcripts provide a text-based representation of your audio content, so as Google bots can’t hear the information, they can still crawl and index it. This makes your video content discoverable too when users search for information that is related, whether they are looking for a how-to guide or even a product review.
Having audio descriptions and captions also improves UX, especially for those who want to enjoy your video without having the sound loud or turned on. This is also important for accessibility, ensuring everybody can access your content without issue.
It’s all about making your video content easily discoverable for both bots and your users, increasing its helpfulness and, hopefully, its rankings.
As its importance cannot be overstated, it can take time and effort to make sure your multimedia content is up to the highest standards. If you currently produce a lot or are planning to increase this, you’ll need to ensure you have the resources to make it happen and stay consistent. This is where we can help as a full-service digital marketing agency, so you can spend more time on the most important aspects of your business.
If you’re looking to improve your multimedia SEO, speak to us today about developing a strategy that can help improve your content visibility and push your SERP rankings further. By focusing on quality, effective tagging, file size management, and accessibility, you’ll soon see improvements.
For more insights, please visit our blog where you can read 5 of the biggest eCommerce trends in SEO and discover content marketing strategies that complement SEO and PPC.
