Most Important SEO Graphic Design Tips Part 2

Last time, we discussed why it’s important to create visuals with mobile in mind considering the increasing percent of website traffic mobile devices account for and how to make graphics scannable to keep users engaged and stay on a website longer. Both tips focused on improving a user’s experience, and in this blog, we’ll be focusing a little more on how SEO and graphic design go hand in hand. Missed part one? Click here to get caught up. If you’ve already up to speed, read on to discover more insightful tips from our graphic designers:

Understand the purpose of visuals on the page

Just like written content, visuals should never be inserted onto a page just to fill space. Visual content needs to be just as purposeful as it is quality and good looking. Just as you would with written content, you need to consider what potential users would be looking for and what they would find relevant when adding visuals to a webpage.

Visual content also needs to support written content, and vice versa. Both written and visual content on a page should always work in tandem to achieve the same goal, and this goal will change from page to page. The content on one page may exist to compel visitors to fill out a contact form, while the content on another page might be there to convince visitors to purchase a product.

While written content is important for Google, visual content is arguably more important to the actual users that visit a site because of how the human brain processes information. 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual, and humans process visuals 60,000x faster than the written word, making the power of visuals clear. Graphic design and digital marketing need to be considered when adding an image to a page. Good graphic designers use high-quality images to their advantage when inserting content onto a page.

The technical side of inserting visuals

So, you’ve designed a great visual to accompany the text on a page, now you just upload it, right? Wrong. Graphic design and digital marketing need to be considered when adding new images to a site. Technical aspects like the image size, file name, and adding alt text and tags are all important to SEO.

With access to so much information at their fingertips, internet users have gotten very impatient. You might have the best site in the world that is relevant to all their needs, but if it doesn’t load fast enough, most users will never stick around to see it. Large image file sizes are one of the most common things that slow down site speed, but thankfully there are online tools that help reduce file sizes. Ezgif.com’s WebP maker is one of the most popular of these tools. Using something called lazy loading is also a popular tactic for improving site loading speed because it helps counter the effect of large image sizes. Lazy loading is the practice of not initiating the loading of resources, objects, and content until they’re actually needing to appear on a user’s screen.

Giving images a relevant and descriptive name helps search engines like Google know what’s on your website, thereby helping your SEO and graphic design efforts. For example, a picture of your team could be titled “Company name-team-photo.jpeg” rather than a random assortment of numbers like “IMG8236.jpeg.”

Adding alt tags to images is one of the most important SEO best practices because they help search engines figure out what the content on your page is about so it can be aligned with relevant search results. They’re also very helpful in the event that an image doesn’t load correctly, giving users a brief description of what the image would have been, so they’re not left in the dark.

Graphic design and digital marketing are becoming more intertwined and today there’s a lot more to keep in mind than just asking yourself, “does this look good?” when adding visuals to a website! With how important visuals are to your SEO efforts and the overall user experience on your site, you need experts in both graphic design and digital marketing like the ones at SocialSEO. Contact us to learn more about how our professionals can help create visual accompaniments that further all your marketing campaigns online!