Visual Content

Date

20.05.24

The importance of visual content and properly attributing meta tags to images has never been so important. Discover more about Photography and creative assets

The key to your content

Unique creative

Images serve equal opportunity for optimisation and traffic, in terms of engagement they ensure your marketing connects, resonates and ultimately produces results.

Content with relevant images gets 94% more views than content without relevant images (Source: Skyword).

why utilise photography in your marketing

Visual Appeal: High-quality images grab attention and make a website more visually appealing. They can communicate the site’s message quickly and effectively, often more powerfully than text.

Engagement: Images can increase user engagement. Visitors are more likely to stay longer and interact with the content when it includes compelling visuals.

Branding: Unique, high-quality images help establish and reinforce brand identity. They differentiate the site from competitors who may use generic stock photos.

Storytelling: Photography can tell a story, evoke emotions, and convey complex information quickly. This helps in building a connection with the audience.

SEO Benefits: Properly optimized images can improve search engine rankings, increase visibility, and drive traffic from image searches.

What can make Photography a strong form of site content?

SEO EXPERT OPINION

Content SEO is becomming increasingly important – the many helpful content updates of 2023 -present day are noticably rewarding content that is not only well structured, but that also carries imagery and different formats of content – particularly images, video and audio files. Additionally, ensuring the images a next-gen in format, optimised, size specified and with suitable file names, alt tags (and other meta information) holds additional opportunities in new search traffic and should be incorporated into strategies for all types of content and not just product or shopping info.

PHOTOGRAPHER EXPERT OPINION

COMING SOON

MARKETER EXPERT OPINION

There is so much noise and well-branded original content really does speak volumes. The interaction and engagement metrics obtainable through such imagery is vastly improved – almost beyond compare. To carry this through, from the channel touchpoints to the on-page experience is equally important. You will never hear our marketing team say ‘there is too much quality content’!

Meta Tags - the Image checklist

Meta Tag	Description	SEO Impact
Alt Text (Alternative Text)	Provides a text alternative for screen readers and in case the image fails to load	Helps search engines understand the content of the image, improving search visibility
Title Attribute	Adds a tooltip text when the user hovers over the image	Marginal impact on SEO but can improve user experience
Filename	The image file name should be descriptive and include relevant keywords	Search engines use the filename to understand the image content
Image Sitemaps	Including images in a sitemap helps search engines find and index them	Improves the chances of images being indexed and appearing in search results
Structured Data	Using schema.org markup to provide detailed information about images	Enhances search engines' understanding of the image context, potentially improving search rankings

How much to budget for visual content creation?

This is a little tricky to answer, much will depend on existing content marketing strategies and campaigns. However, I would be inclined to partition as much as 40% to the creation of visual content. If you are looking to incorporate more technical or advanced creative and video, you will need much higher value budgets, but beware of losing the fast, instantly sharable and viewable formats such as photography.

How does the rest of the budget break down?

Again each site and client will have different needs, but you must have a marketing and content strategy, well-structured campaigns and a user journey. it is also essential to have the performance of these campaigns monitored and reported on. These two elements may also be suited to a freelancer – perhaps commissioning an annual review of performance and reporting and the creation of reporting dashboards to allow you to assess the performance of the work and site on a daily/weekly/monthly basis as required.

A professional services company with a T/O of £5M should be looking at spending a minimum of £250,000 on marketing – and the visual content elements and content extend far beyond the landing pages and have relevance to the site as a whole, the social campaigns and posts as well as paid for and organic search. A regular evaluation and refresh of your site would also be recommended every 2-5 years and with technology advancing so quickly, it would be wise to make this a routine and regular appraisal.

The table here shows how the alternative to unique photography stacks up with stock imagery.

Criteria	Own-Brand Photography	Stock Assets
Authenticity	Offers unique, tailored images reflecting brand identity	Often generic and used by multiple businesses
Brand Consistency	Ensures consistent style, tone, and quality	Varies widely in style and quality
Audience Connection	Builds a deeper connection with the audience	May not resonate well due to generic nature
Competitive Advantage	Differentiates from competitors	Less differentiation as competitors use same images
Control Over Content	Full control, ensuring perfect match with brand needs	Limited control, might not fit brand narrative

For stats and more information on visual content performance – visit the build-links.CLUB your essential partner in building quality backlinks and acquiring topical content opportunities.

Design and SEO Services

I offer a range of relevant freelance services, from content audit tools through to retained freelance SEO and site development work, I can also offer ideation, campaign planning and general design services, although the latter, tends to now be a supporting role as opposed to sole designer.

I also work with agencies and other freelancers and as such can provide access to photographers and specialists or help you build out a specification and brief for the work.

For design, website development and SEO I can provide all of the services you require in the process – trusted wordpress freelancers uk