How SEO Improves Audio-Visual Visibility & Marketing
Your users love your visual content. You love what you’ve created. While your users might love what they see once they get on your site, are they finding it organically? Are the finding it when searching for it?
How can you get people on-site, watching and listening to your amazing audio-visual content?
At the very minimum, you should be making your images, videos, and podcasts findable in search. This way, if someone is looking for your awesome work, they can find it. Flaunting your content with a little search engine optimization will help people find your awesome content. Here are a few easy tips:
Labels
Labeling your content is key to cluing in a search engine on what is happening on-page. Does your infographic include great details about your case study? Does the video give details about your kickin’ products?
Labelling your images, videos, and audio files with alt text is one of the most basic rules of accessible web design; not only does it give your impaired users an idea of what is on the page, but it also gives Google and other search engines an idea of what your content is.
For example, Google may see a picture of Leslie Knope as blonde business woman, but not quite recognize it as a photo of the beloved Parks n’ Rec character. Adding alt text can give Google a little more insight. And that’s always important when looking for effective organic traffic.
So what should be in your alt text?
An accurate label is of the highest importance, but you can also look at what you want that image to represent. An image or video of a standard business person could have many labels. Taking a peek at your keywords and evaluating your reason to use those images will help you decide how to more accurately label your content. Is “blonde business woman” what you want to represent with a Leslie Knope gif, or do you want to represent “powerful business woman Leslie Knope” with your content choices?
Housing
How is your content housed on-site? Can people and Google see your images, video, and audio?
If you own a website, then open it. Double-check to make sure users can look at your images and videos. Then make sure that Google can too! You can render pages in Google Search Console (formally Webmaster Tools) to double check, but a quick rule of thumb is that web crawlers have issues crawling images that are not called out specifically in webpage source code.
Point to it!
You have these amazing images, videos, and podcasts that your users are just dying to see. They are searching for these images, offering an untapped market of organic users. But if you don’t point out these images and videos, then how will Google know to show it to your users?
Consider creating an image/video category in your sitemap to help Google find your images. It’s the quickest way to say “Hey Google, here are all the images on my site. I’ll save you some time trying to find them.”
You can also point to this great content via internal and external links. Internal links are the ways you are pointing to that content onsite. Whether that’s via navigation elements that already exist onsite or if you just want to link to it from other articles onsite. Pointing to yourself as an expert in a field in a way that makes sense to your users is a great way to prop yourself up.
External links are another great way to get other people to put up sign posts that your content is valid, especially if the people who get to your pages from those external links interact with your page.
If you want people to find your beautiful, amazing content, make sure to label it and put it in a findable location.