Quality content writing must be mixed with quality images and graphics

The Internet after all is a multimedia experience. Although most of the information on the web exists in the form of text (written information), visual information has the proverbial edge – one picture is worth a thousand words.

In terms of SEO and unobtrusive communication, compared to writing, video and images haven’t arrived yet. Even if you want to rank images and videos well, you need to depend on the surrounding text.

You may also like to read The importance of visual content in your content marketing.

But content writing – no matter how awesome it is – on its own, has its limitations these days.

If people come across just text on your web page or blog post, they feel intimidated.

A good image gives a welcome break, and so does a captivating video. There is a mix of people who prefer video over text and text over video (and images and graphics) and since these days any person can turn out to be your customer or client, you don’t want to lose out on various media-opportunities technology gives you these days.

Writing text has never been difficult, provided you know how to write.

Until a few years ago, coming up with business-worthy images and graphics was a taxing exercise but not anymore. With a decent camera you can click great photographs. You can mix your photographs with different other graphics available on free stock websites with the help of Photoshop and other image editing tools.

For a few months I have been using Filmora and Movavi for creating videos. Before that, I was also using PowerPoint to create videos. In PowerPoint there is a feature that allows you to export the slides into a nifty movie. These days, I use all the three tools. For example, recently I created this video using Filmora:

Along with content writing, you can use quality images to improve your SEO

I have observed videos aren’t as good as images for better SEO. Videos are good if you simply want to upload promotional videos on YouTube and other social media websites but other than that, when it comes to featuring on search results, I’m not impressed.

Images, on the other hand, do quite well on search engines. Surprisingly, Bing image search is better than Google image search. Even the quality of images and graphics is better on Bing.

Anyway, most of the SEO tools these days advise you to throw in a good mix of images and text. Preferably, one image or graphic after every 300-500 words.

A good thing about strategically using images along with content writing is that the images give you an opportunity to use your primary and secondary keywords.

You can name your images including your keywords. You can use alt text for keywords. You can also use captions.

Surrounding your images and graphics with keyboard-rich content helps Google and Bing figure out what you’re trying to say through your images and graphics.

Some concepts are better explained with graphics: for example infographics.

You can use words, you can use icons, you can use arrows – there are scores of things you can use to explain concepts that are difficult to explain using plain content writing.

Sometimes I also use images for humour. For example, if I tell you to smile. Instead of showing a human smiling, you are sure to smile if you see a dog smiling or a cat smiling.

I was writing about anger. Instead of showing an angry person, I showed an angry baby. With little bit of fun and cuteness, I was able to put my point across.

This post titled 5 ways graphics can post content marketing success says that using images and graphics also increases engagement and shareability. Your readers are more prone to sharing your content if they find captivating images.

Images can also be used to draw people’s attention to your content. When you share your links on social media and social networking websites, you must have observed that the biggest rectangle is assigned to your image. The headline appears over the image. So, the first thing people see about your content is your image.

Images and graphics also give you an opportunity to differentiate yourself from your competitor, as rightly suggested by the above link. Visual imagery is very powerful. And the good thing is, you can create highly unique images with little bit of creativity and some good tools.