In today’s highly competitive digital sphere, every marketer is struggling to outrank others for highly searched keywords. Therefore, it’s important to make the most of the marketing strategies to boost traffic to your blog.
Creating a successful blog can be a challenge. With millions of blogs available on the internet, it can be difficult to stand out and attract readers. However, one of the most effective ways to increase traffic to your blog is by incorporating visual content into your posts.
In this article, we will discuss what is visual content, and how it can help you boost traffic to your blog.
What is Visual Content?
Visual content includes content types such as images, videos, infographics, etc. Visual content makes your blog more engaging and visually appealing. It also helps to increase the session duration on your site and improve your search engine rankings.
Types of Visual Content for Blogs
With the evolution of multiple formats, content is more visual today than ever before. Marketers use any of the following or a mix of them to drive traffic to their blog.
- Data-driven visuals
- Animations
- GIFs
- Videossoc
- Screenshots
- Illustrations
- Video testimonials
- Video series of demos or product guides
Visual content provides a great brand personality, authenticity, and brand awareness. Whichever visual content format you use, it’s important to stick to brand elements including brand personality, colors, and fonts. In this article, we will explore how visual content can help to boost traffic to your blog. We will also present you with practical tips for incorporating it into your content strategy.
Let's start!
Why Content Marketing is Essential
Content brings you 3x more traffic than paid search. Once you build your audience, all you have to do is focus on creating engaging irresistible and valuable content so that your audience sticks to your blog.
This beautiful visual from Kinsta says it all.
Source Interesting Facts
Here are some interesting statistics about why most blogs and marketers are pumping out huge amounts of content daily and how content marketing is crucial for boosting traffic;
- 68% of people always read content to create awareness about brands
- 62% of marketers claim that they use visual content for blogs or landing pages
- 80% of readers appreciate businesses that create customized content
Percentage of Blogs Using Visual Content
So what percent of the blogs contain visuals?
According to Venngage, 80% of blog posts contain some kind of visual content. High-performing articles often have a higher visual-to-text ratio, and thus have high conversion rates.
How Visual Content Can Help Boost Traffic to Your Blog
Entices the Reader's Attention
Visual content can play a significant role in capturing a reader's attention and driving traffic to your blog. Grabbing readers’ attention is important even for the top b2b eCommerce companies, as visual content helps them to showcase thier products/services in a more engaging and memorable way, which can eventually lead to increased sales. Images, animated infographics, videos, and other visual elements can help break up long blocks of text and make your blog more engaging and visually appealing. You can entice your readers to stay on your blog longer, explore more of your content, and share your posts when you use visual content correctly.
There are countless ways to incorporate visual elements, depending on your blog's theme and topic. You could use high-quality feature images that complement your written content, create infographics or graphs to visually represent data, embed videos, or even use memes or GIFs to add a touch of humor to your blog. According to research, our brains can process visuals up to 60,000 times faster than text.
Example: This blog post from Shopify about SEO for e-commerce websites uses a visually striking featured image that draws the reader in and sets the tone for the content.
SourceEnhances Readability
Visual content can greatly enhance the readability of your blog and attract more traffic to your website. It helps readers understand the information more quickly and easily, and it can also help make your content more shareable on social media.
Readers are more likely to engage with a blog post with great visuals which is also easy to read. This is especially important since most readers tend to skim content online, so using visual content can help draw their attention to important points.
Adding images, videos, or even simple bullet points can create natural stopping points for the reader's eyes and help them focus on the key points of the content. According to Jeff Bullas, blog posts with images, screenshots, or videos receive 94% more views than those without. So, even if you have a blog about online coaching business, make sure to use visuals to break up paragraphs and make it easier for your readers to read your blogs.
This blog post from Social Media Examiner uses images to break up the text and make the content more visually appealing.
SourceVisual Content Increases Engagement
Visual content is a powerful tool to increase engagement and boost traffic to your blog. Visuals are more appealing and easier to consume than plain text. They can also help convey complex ideas and information in a more accessible way.
Being highly visual creatures, humans respond to visual information faster and more effectively than text. So, it only makes sense that incorporating eye-catching images, videos, infographics, and other visual elements into your blog posts can grab your readers' attention and keep them engaged. That’s why 49% of marketers prefer using visual content on blogs.
For example, you can include a video just like BigCommerce did that shows how your product or service works or an image that helps illustrate a story you are telling.
SourceYou can make your content more accessible and appealing to your readers by taking the time to create high-quality visual content and ultimately help grow your audience.
Improves SERP Rankings
Visual content can greatly enhance the user experience on your blog. When readers are presented with engaging and relevant visuals, they are more likely to stay on your site longer, consume more content, and ultimately, return for more.
Visual content can also improve your blog's SEO. When you optimize your images and videos with relevant alt tags, captions, and file names, search engines can better understand the context of your content. This can result in higher rankings in search engine results pages (SERPs) for relevant keywords.
Moreover, visual content can also help to boost the authority and credibility of your blog. When other websites and blogs use your visual content (with proper attribution, of course), it can generate valuable backlinks to your site. These backlinks signal to search engines that your site is a trustworthy source of information, which can further improve your search rankings.
For example, their blog post titled "The Ultimate Guide to Marketing with Infographics" includes several infographics that explain complex marketing concepts in a visually appealing way. This post has received many social shares and ranks on the first page of Google for the keyword "marketing with infographics."
SourceExpands Social Media Reach
People instantly share anything they find valuable with their loved ones. Visual content increases the likelihood that your blog post will be shared on social media. Visually appealing and attention-grabbing content makes users look good to their followers, so they are more likely to share it. When your blog post is shared, it reaches a wider audience, potentially leading to more likes, comments, and followers.
This blog post on Venngage has great visual content and it receives 422 social media shares.
Source Additionally, most social media algorithms prioritize posts with visual content, as they tend to perform better in terms of engagement. This means that incorporating visual content into your blog posts can increase the visibility of your content on social media, making it more likely that people will see and engage with your posts.
And the benefits don't stop there. You can reach more of your target audience on social media by sharing your visually enhanced blog posts directly with those most likely to engage with your content. For direct message outreach, LinkedIn is one of the easiest platforms to use, and by choosing the link preview for your blog post wisely, you can entice more recipients to visit your site. This strategy allows you not only to boost your traffic but also your lead generation efforts — it's a win-win for your marketing team.
Visual Content Improves Dwell Time
Visual content makes the information more relatable, and therefore people stick longer on the web page and it gets higher engagement rates. As a result, it improves the dwell time, and thus they keep coming back.
Producing creative visual content like visuals is likely to have higher clicks. You can use the same video content for paid promotion for your social media so that double the traffic.
For example, if the specific blog success certain features of your product or service, then you can add a demo about how to use the specific product, or you can add video testimonials.
This blog contains video demos of how to use Miro.
SourceSumming Up!
The power of visual content in driving traffic to your blog cannot be overemphasized. By providing relevant and valuable visual content, you can increase the likelihood of your blog being shared on social media, attracting more visitors and driving traffic to your website. So, if you're looking to grow your blog and reach a wider audience, it's time to start investing in visual content and watch as your traffic skyrockets!
