Non-Textual Content SEO

We already know that a mix of textual and non-textual content can keep visitors on a page much longer than just lots of text. Dwell time is an important ranking signal for search engines, and adding more visuals can give us just that.

While images, videos, and other types of non-text elements can help boost our site’s rankings, we’ll need to optimize them for the best outcomes. Let’s learn how to improve our websites by using SEO-friendly images and other media.

Types of non-text elements

Some of the most commonly used non-text elements include:

• Images

• Graphs

• Charts

• Screenshots

• Infographics

• Videos

• Animations

• Audio

• Interactive elements (such as quiz, calculator, games, etc.)

The above examples, along with any others that may come to your mind, can be divided into three broad categories: image, video, and audio.

Reasons to optimize non-text content

While visuals are important to SEO because they help enhance user experience on the page, is there really any need to optimize them? Optimizing multimedia on a web page aims to achieve two goals:

Context for Google

While Image Reading and Object Recognition is something Google will master in the near future [18], resulting in dramatic implications on rankings, it’s not the case today. As of now, Google still relies on “context around images”, such as captions, titles, and alt text to decipher its content and offer it to relevant searchers [19].

Improves accessibility

Visually impaired people use screen readers to have the screen text read out loud to them. With non-text content, such people will need a meaningful alt text to be read out to them to understand the context. Properly tagged visual content improves accessibility for everyone.

Image optimization

Images add more SEO value to a site’s content. Readers want to see some pictures every now and then to relax the eye and enjoy some variety. They don’t always have to be stock images. Original photos, graphs, charts, screenshots, infographics, or anything else that adds value to our words are welcome.

Here are some tips for image selection and optimization that can help improve page experience and increase the potential to rank in Google Images:

Relevant and original images

Add images relevant to the content. Original images are even better. Stock images aren’t original, and not always fully relevant to the subject matter of the page. According to Brian Dean, they might even be hurting our SEO [20]. A webpage loaded with stock photos, gives a poor first impression of the site. Instead, SEOs recommend creating original images, such as a photo we capture ourself, or a graph, chart, or infographic we develop ourself. Original images give the users a unique experience and establish brand credibility.

Choose supported formats

Google supports the following image formats: BMP, JPEG, SVG, PNG, GIF, and WebP [21]. WebP is a new image format that webmasters can use for superior lossless and lossy compression of images. These richer, lighter images help load the page faster without much loss in the image quality.

Resize and compress

Huge images reduce page load speed, decreasing the overall page experience. Smaller file sizes for images are particularly important for mobile user experience. We can size them appropriately using tools, such as WordPress plugin Imsanity.

It’s also recommended to compress images before uploading them to the page. There are plenty of tools for that too. TinyPNG is a good option to reduce the file size without much visible decrease in the quality. We can also install it as a WordPress plugin to make things easier.

Descriptive alt texts