We're often told SEO is all about keywords and links — and that's still true; they remain the two most important things to work on. But there's a whole other layer that many businesses overlook: "non-text" content like images, video and infographics. Optimise these well and they can lift your rankings, keep visitors on your page longer and set you apart from competitors. Here's how to get the most out of your visual content.
- Name and describe images well, and compress them so pages load fast.
- Video keeps people engaged — add transcripts and host on YouTube.
- Infographics earn shares and links when they're genuinely useful.
- Clear labels and transcripts also help AI search understand your visuals.
Images
A picture may be worth a thousand words, but search engines can't read one — so you have to help them. Pairing a relevant image with text also helps people remember far more of what they read, and makes your content more comfortable to skim. To get the SEO benefit, rename each image with keywords related to your content (the same logic as your keyword strategy, just applied to the file name and alt text). Watch loading time too: large images slow your page, and visitors leave quickly when a site is sluggish, so scale and compress your images with a tool like TinyPNG, Squoosh or Photoshop before uploading. At least one relevant, well-optimised image per page is a sensible minimum. More on optimising images →
Videos
Video has become one of the most consumed formats online, and it's now well within reach for small and medium businesses. Search engines treat video as high-value content, and pages with video tend to hold visitors' attention longer — both positive signals. A few essentials: put keywords in your video's title and description; add a transcript so the spoken words become searchable text search engines can actually read; and host on YouTube, the world's second-largest search platform (and owned by Google), with a link back to your site in the description. The more people watch, like and click through, the stronger the signal that your content is worth surfacing.
Infographics
Infographics turn an article, concept or product into an easy-to-digest picture — and because our brains process visuals so readily, they tend to get shared far more than plain text. Used well, they're a great way to earn quality links. The approach is simple: pick a topic that's fresh and interesting to your audience, keep it to around ten clear ideas so it doesn't feel cramped, then reach out to reputable sites that cover the subject and offer them the graphic in exchange for a link back to you. One extra tip — publish the key statistics and text alongside the graphic, because search engines can't read the words baked into a PNG or JPG. The visual and the text work hand in hand.
Non-text content and AI search
This all matters more than ever now that AI is part of search. Google AI Overviews and tools like ChatGPT are getting better at interpreting visuals, but they still lean heavily on the text around your media — file names, alt text, captions, transcripts and structured data. In other words, the same habits that help Google understand your images and videos also help AI answer engines understand and cite them. Describe your visual content clearly and you're optimising for both today's search and tomorrow's.
Visual content can improve both the experience on your website and your SEO — as long as you take the time to optimise it. Pair well-labelled images, engaging video and shareable infographics with strong keywords and links, and you've got a page that works hard on every front. Want to know how your site stacks up? Register for a free SEO audit and we'll take a look.
