A photo is worth more than a thousand keywords. Although that might not be entirely true (yet), visual SEO continues to be on the rise. For most brands SEO tends to revolve around written content, keywords, links, and technical jargon, but not so much imagery and video. Behind the scenes Google is continuously becoming better at seeing and understanding images and videos, and if you haven’t already, 2022 should be the year where you include visuals as a part of your SEO strategy.

If you’ve been following the latest news from Google, you know that there has been a myriad of updates to Google’s search algorithm this year. So many that if you struggle to sort out how these affect your SEO performance, we get it! Luckily for you, Precis’ SEO specialists have got you covered. We have studied and tested these new updates and found out which of them are going to have an impact on how users search and how Google serves these users relevant information in the coming year.

So read on, if you want to know more about why and how you should optimise the performance of your image and video elements to increase your organic performance in 2022.

You might be wondering…

Why is visual SEO so important now?

One of the key algorithm updates that Google announced in 2021 enhanced the algorithm’s ability to interpret and accurately serve user search intent. This new algorithm is called MUM, which stands for Multitask Unified Model. Not only does it possess the same power of natural language processing as the previous algorithm, BERT, but MUM can also analyse images, videos, text, and 75 different languages to serve even more complex, comprehensive, and nuanced search results. This means that the user’s search results could soon include a combination of text based and imagery based results such as the ones shown below.

And it gets better.

In addition to that, continuous scroll is now being rolled out by Google. This means that instead of only showing 10 organic search results per page, users can continuously scroll through their browser without having to click ‘next’. Many are now speculating that this will make it less important to rank first and more important to have the most eye-catching, relevant information to the user that entices them to click your result.

Although it’s not completely clear on what elements of text, images and video MUM will be analysing, it’s safe to say that properly marking up images and videos in a way that Google’s crawlers can understand will be key to competitiveness in search.

But how do you create a visual SEO strategy?

It is actually quite simple if you know what MUM prioritises. Here is a guide to what your 2022 visual SEO strategy should include.

1. Searcher Intent

Whenever creating content with SEO in mind, it’s vital to consider the searcher intent: what are our searchers really looking for, and how will our images or videos help the user find what they want? Making this consideration will not only make it easier to create the content in the first place, it will make it easier to find.

One of the best ways to understand searcher intent is to look into your primary and secondary keywords from your keyword research to see what types of results are ranking. Are searchers looking for instructional content? Review or comparison content? Or are they looking to understand more specific information about a product that will help them in their purchase journey? Each of these will produce very different videos or images, making this an essential step of your visual strategy in 2022.

This table shows the five categories of searcher intent. Within each category are indications of how to identify what the searcher is really looking for.

Image optimisation

All good web pages include images. They tell the searcher what your page is about, they entice your searcher to stay on your website and continue browsing, and they can be the difference between your website and brand being remembered or forgotten. However, images are not only a key tool generating engagement and communication on a webpage, they are also an essential element of growing visibility in search… as long as they are marked up correctly.

Image markup

Marking up your images is one of the simplest ways to communicate to Googlebot, yet is commonly a forgotten component of optimising a website. Ensuring image file names, image alt text, image captions, and image titles are descriptive and keyword optimised is one of the key ways to ensure your website is signalling relevancy to Google and increasing the chances of ranking in the SERP. Plus, they’re not only important to Googlebot, image optimisation also improves the user experience.

Using alt text and image titles are a way of improving accessibility for visually impaired users. On top of this, image captions, on average, are read 300 times more than the actual body text, meaning that without them, your users may bounce to another similar website that delivers the same information in a more easily digestible format.

Making sure you have an image sitemap is the next thing you need to do to help Google read and crawl your images. Here are Google’s guidelines to image sitemaps, which we recommend you take a look at.

Structured data

Structured data is another element that is proven to improve communication to Googlebot and ultimately to increase visibility in search. By marking up your image with structured data such as image content, title, caption, and whether it’s connected to a product or brand, you’re increasing your chances of gaining more traffic from organic search.

You can read the full documentation for ImageObject markup here.

Image size and file type

Uploading the right size and file type of image should also be part of your 2022 visual SEO strategy. That’s because page speed and the core web vitals are key ranking factors, and image size can directly impact both. Having heavier images that take too long to load create a negative user experience, and they significantly slow down page speed. Users typically expect a page to load in less than 2 seconds, and since conversion rates can fall by 20% with every 1 second increase in page speed, keeping image size low is both good for the user, and for achieving your business goals.

Using WEBP format, the best compression format for images created by Google presents itself as an easy opportunity. However, many are still reluctant to use it due to browser support not being universal yet. But there is still plenty you can achieve with JPEG.

Photoshop can bulk edit images, and what we learned here at Precis is that you can shave off a large amount of weight from images by being a bit nerdy with photoshop. Try exporting your images in JPEG and play with the quality slider, as well as the quality options (Bicubic, Bicubic Sharper and Bicubic Smoother). And remember to always use Progressive JPEG format for images above 10kb.

2. Video optimisation

Just as images will become more visible in search in 2022, so will videos. Videos are already a strong focal point of marketing strategies due to their engaging nature, high level of shareability and most importantly, their ability to drive conversions.

On top of those great benefits, optimising your videos for search engines will increase the possibilities of your videos driving organic traffic to your website as videos typically rank higher in Google.

Video markup

Each of your videos should include a useful, keyword optimised title, a keyword optimised file name, tags or hashtags if using YouTube, and a high-quality thumbnail. Creating a keyword optimised and useful description is also important, and if it improves the user experience, it can be a good idea to include the video transcript as well.

If you host your own videos, then the next step is to make sure that each of the elements are accessible to Googlebot so that your videos can be indexed, so including your video in the appropriate HTML tag, ensuring it isn’t blocked by robots.txt and submitting a video sitemap are best practices.

Structured data

There are a number of specific video features that can be implemented with structured data. This includes chapters, where viewers can skip to specific sections of your video to get the answer they were searching for, or short, moving video previews for the searcher. This is only relevant if you host your own videos, as Youtube will mark up your videos automatically.

Structured data also allows Google to better understand your video and retrieve it for related search queries, so marking it up with as much information as possible, including the title, video encoding, thumbnails and more, can enable more effective ranking signals to Google. Here is the documentation to VideoObject on Schema.org.

3. Further indexable content coming to search

Additionally, it was revealed this year that Google was in talks with Instagram and TikTok to start indexing its content. This means that an even wider range of content will be available to searchers as Google continues to expand its repertoire. Google already indexes other social media platforms such as Pinterest, Facebook and Twitter, so if your website is also running on any of these social media platforms, it’s a good idea to start optimising your visual content here too, with keyword optimised hashtags, alt text, captions, and even geolocalisation.

With all of these 2022 Google updates and developments, it shows that taking a holistic, yet strategic approach to implementing and continuously updating your SEO efforts is essential to building a strong website foundation that can remain competitive.

A huge thanks to my colleague Frederik Drost for collaborating with me on this piece!

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