How to Use Images in Your Content Marketing Strategy

Content marketing requires much more than written text to really be effective. The real trick to getting noticed by both your prospective customers and the algorithms that rank your site in the search results pages is to use images strategically.

Properly implemented images complement and enhance your content, grab the interest of readers, and increase your odds of being found via organic searches.

Images are undoubtedly important—blogs with images receive many more views than those without, social media updates with images get far more likes and shares than those that don’t contain images. Readers’ eyes are naturally drawn to images.

For many content marketers and bloggers, the toughest part of the process is finding high quality images to use.  Strive to find attention-grasping images online and always make sure to give proper credit for the image—sometimes it’s required and when it isn’t, it’s still common courtesy.

Many marketers aren’t quite sure how to use content marketing for small business, and more aren’t sure how to utilize images in your content marketing strategy. Here are three ways to use images in your content marketing strategy, based on the context of its use:

Blog images

These are basic necessities of a blog post. There are guides to using images on your blog and social media—they cover things that all marketers should know, such as that the image goes in the header on throughout the text. Remember that blog images represent the posts content and often highlight the blog on social media platforms. Simple images are fine; just make sure they’re appealing and represent the post well.

Product images

Any e-commerce platform needs images for each product offered.  Make sure the images are high quality and consistent so users can compare your products.  These images aren’t essential for non e-commerce sites.

Infographics

These require some time to really be effective, but can truly be powerhouses when it comes to your content marketing strategy. Infographics continue statistic and other helpful information that are presented in a visual and engaging way, and they’re good for generating sharing on social media. They tend to get republished and are also magnets for inbound linking.

Once you know how to utilize images, you need to know how to optimize your images for SEO. Images have the potential to improve inbound traffic through SEO—many people don’t realize that, though, because text plays such a prominent role in optimization.

Never underestimate the importance of alt tags. Alt tags with a description on your image is what it takes to make search engines realize what is happening in your image, giving it the potential to be features in relevant image results.

In addition, remember to keep images high in quality but small in size; your page load time plays a major role in how your website is ranked via the search engines.  Faster load times are important and too large images can slow the time significantly, in turn, lowering the ranking of your business.

Images are essential to get a reader’s instant attention, and some of the biggest brands are using image rich content on their blogs to engage customers. It may take you some time to find the best images for your posts, but it’s effort that is worth the time and energy.