Posting quality written articles on your blog is a great way to build links. It’s straightforward to target specific keywords and produce content that’s useful for readers and highly shareable – but written content has its limitations. Not everybody finds it the easiest way to learn or the best way to consume information online.
Leveraging visual content adds a completely new element to your link-building efforts and opens you up to a host of potential new websites. There’s no doubting its popularity – YouTube has more than 1.3 billion users alone. But how do you harness this power for your travel business? We take a look at the different ways you can use visual content for your website.
Destination photography
The good news for travel businesses is that in most cases there will be no shortage of visually engaging destinations. Beautiful beaches, vast mountains, leafy rainforests and stunning sunsets are all things people love to look at.
To make the most of these spectacular locations, it’s worth investing in quality, professional photography. It doesn’t have to cost the earth. A little research on sites like Instagram or Flickr and you can quickly find a host of talented freelancers who will jump at the chance to photograph some exotic locations.
Eye-catching photography can help build links as other sites will be jumping at the chance to reuse your images. All you need to ask for is a link in return.
Interesting infographic
No list of visual link-building techniques is complete without mentioning infographics. Although some people consider them a little clichéd, if done well they can still be hugely popular.
Travel SEO agency Ad-Rank says that on social media, image-based posts get up to 600 times more social engagement than text-based posts.
They’re great because you can do them on almost any subject. Here’s a Pinterest list of 145 of them for inspiration. The key is to find a way of displaying the data only you have, to give people a reason to choose yours over anyone else.
Make the most of maps
A subset of infographics, maps are currently proving hugely popular and highly sharable, and they’re particularly relevant to travel companies. Again, they can be done on a wide range of topics like most popular holiday destinations by country or by UK county, favourite cuisines, most popular airline – the list goes on.
Visually arresting video guides
A great way to really showcase the character of your destinations is through a video guide. Whether it’s of a country, city, hotel, restaurant or activity, making a high quality video will give people a much better idea of what to expect than a written post ever could.
Again, a well-created video guide is sure to attract links from people eager to showcase an area they’ve visited or want to visit in the future.
<iframe width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/SVLZTttOO58″ frameborder=”0″ allow=”accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture” allowfullscreen></iframe>
Host your content elsewhere
As well as on your blog, a quick and easy way to build links is to host your content on other sites and link back to yours.
This is a quick list of high visual content sites with a high domain authority:
- Images: Flickr, Instagram, Imgur, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest
- Videos: YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook, BrightCove
- Infographics: Visual.ly, Piktochart, Facebook, Twitter
- GIFs: Giphy, Twitter, Imgur
Repurpose popular posts visually
A quick way to find inspiration for visual content is to take a look at your most popular blog posts and repurpose them. If it contains a lot of data and information, turn it into an infographic. If it could be cut down and put into a longer format with your photography, make it into an ebook. As we’ve said above, videos are a hugely popular format so repurpose your post into a video script and add some exciting visuals.
Make sure you optimise, optimise, optimise
With visual, content optimisation is key. Always add a title to your image that contains the keywords you’re targeting and what it is you’re trying to get across. Alt text is important, too. It’s primarily designed for the visually impaired so make sure you explain what the image actually is. It’s also crawled by search engines so again, you should include your keyword.
Page-load speed is an important ranking factor so make sure you optimise all of your images to get the smallest file size possible, while not sacrificing resolution – no one likes looking at blurry pictures!
Eye-catching content means results
The great thing about modern devices is they all have high-tech, high-resolution screens with an internet connection that is capable of loading far more than text. Make sure you give people what they want with content that looks just as good. Text posts are great, but by creating visually engaging content, you’ll be able to take your travel SEO efforts to the next level.
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