Written
by Braden Becker @BradenBecker
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Cliché:
A picture is worth a thousand words.
Fact:
HubSpot's pictures are worth 120 thousand clicks.
Last
year, my colleague Karla Cook gave our
readers a 3,000-word peek behind the curtain into a new SEO strategy we
implemented at the beginning of 2018. That strategy, which was designed to fix
a traffic plateau across the blog, increased our organic traffic by 25% year
over year -- to eight million organic pageviews per month. This is about three
million new organic views we didn't have at the beginning of 2018.
Where
that traffic is coming from is equally exciting.
As
I said, our new SEO strategy launched our organic blog traffic to heights it
had never been to before. But that strategy had another, somewhat unintended
consequence for us.
While
we increased our total organic traffic by 25% from last year, we increased our image
search traffic by … wait for it … 779%. This refers to traffic that comes
from people who conduct a search in Google, or a similar search engine, and
click on an image result that leads to the HubSpot Blog.
"Pics
or it didn't happen, Braden.” As you wish:
Source: Google Search Console
Take
a look at the royal blue tile in the chart above. Between April 2018 and April
2019, HubSpot literally increased its organic traffic from 14,100 organic views
per month to 124,000 organic views per month — a nearly 8X lift.
Our
image traffic accounts for just under 2% of our blog's total monthly organic
traffic, which, in the scheme of things, is not all that significant. But even
though the vast majority of our organic traffic still comes from web search
(the written blogs themselves), our image traffic's rate of increase (779%) is
vastly disproportionate to that of our total blog traffic (25%).
And
let's be honest, 2% of 8 million is nothing to sneeze at.
But
what made the difference, if not just our new blog-aligned SEO strategy?
Image SEO Best Practices That We Learned
As
it turns out, we had a few other tricks up our sleeve along the way that gave
our images some extra juice on the search engine results pages (SERPs), all of
which are just good best practices in commercial content creation.
1. Optimized Alt Text
In
the HubSpot COS, we’ve almost always filled in image alt text fields with text
that (tries to) describe the image it's associated with. Last year, though, we
started taking alt text way more seriously.
Rather
than automatically fill image alt text with the image file name — something the
HubSpot COS conveniently
does for you so this field isn't left blank — we now optimize each image we
embed with the keyword the blog post is targeting. Then, we add language that
puts this keyword into context that reflects the image it's describing.
For
example, if we're embedding the image below into a blog post about
"college courses about SEO," our alt text might look something like
this:
Now,
let's modestly estimate that one in three HubSpot blog posts (33%) have at
least one image embedded on them, not including the article's featured image.
HubSpot publishes (or republishes) approximately 260 blog posts every three
months. If we were to extrapolate this alt text process for 33% of these blog
posts, that's at least 87 images that can potentially capture new organic
traffic for us every quarter.
And
if the average blog post targets a keyword that receives 3,500 searches per
month — a rough estimate based on the HubSpot Marketing Blog's editorial
calendar — that's a landscape of 304,500 searches per month to which we're
adding more HubSpot content (87 images x 3,500 searches per month). In other
words, we’re putting ourselves inside hundreds of thousands of Google Image
galleries we weren’t ranking in before.
Read
more about our team’s approach to alt text in this blog post.
2. Branded Images & Templates
At
HubSpot, we create a ton of valuable resources for
our readers to download, ultimately making them a qualifiable lead for the
business. However, there are still a ton more resources our readers want for
which we necessarily don't have a lead generation strategy but still garner
valuable organic traffic. And these resources appear in image form on many
SERPs that are important to us.
These
resources include inspiring business quotes, resume templates, sample emails,
and even image thumbnails that appear in Google's featured snippets.
To
identify these images, the SEO team analyzed where HubSpot was getting most of
its image traffic already, and categorized these sources into image types.
Then, we worked with HubSpot UX designer Amanda Chong and the
rest of our creative team to develop original HubSpot image templates for each
image type.
These
new image templates allowed the blog team to effectively "brand"
various images they might not otherwise embed into a blog post and add alt text
for each image using the style described above to expose it on the right SERPs.
Here are a couple examples of these branded images now live on HubSpot content:
3. The Search Insights Report
HubSpot's
“Search Insights Report” is a quarterly manifestation of our SEO strategy,
delivered directly to the blog team every three months. These reports consist
of more than 200 blog post topics, all rooted in searches for which we want to
appear on a SERP, that our writers take up and publish over the course of 90
days.
And
although we have obviously made deliberate moves to capture more image traffic over
the last year, the radiative effect these reports have on our website traffic
can't be overstated.
For
one, as we create these search insights reports every quarter, we’re tapping
into topics that are increasingly being found in image form. There’s even data
to support this -- here’s a five-year trend line showing an increase in Google
Image search for all queries related to “marketing”:
Source: Google Trends
Here’s
one for all searches related to “sales”:
And,
finally, for “customer service”:
Conveniently,
these three topics reflect the target markets of three of our blog properties:
the Marketing Blog, the Sales Blog, and the Service Blog. But image
traffic has gone up across the board, which means more traffic from image
searches has become a byproduct of our new SEO strategy — one that has
continued to grow as we capture more space on SERPs we didn’t have before.
Plus,
having a document that distills all of our potential content topics, and
aligning the content team with this document, has earned us ranking on some of
the most competitive search engine real estate we've ever seen. It stands to
reason we'd see a little (alright, a lot) more image traffic as a result.
It’s
easy for marketers to attribute website traffic increases to good SEO, but
these results ultimately aren’t possible without the time, creativity, and good
judgment put into the content itself.
Originally
published Sep 12, 2019 7:30:00 AM, updated September 19 2019
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